Janissaries

The Janissaries are portrayed in the Old Woman’s account as a military force whose refusal to surrender at a besieged fort leads to starvation, desperate violence, and annihilation. Their episode is brief but sharply staged: a military oath survives even as the conditions sustaining it collapse, while women held with the garrison bear the consequences of the siege alongside its soldiers.

Identity and Setting

The account identifies the Janissaries as soldiers serving under an Aga, a commander who had been ordered to the defence of Azov, then under Russian siege. The text does not describe their broader organization or military customs. It presents a specific group of twenty Janissaries, stationed with the Aga’s seraglio in a small fort on the Sea of Azov. Two eunuchs and twenty soldiers guarded the fort, placing the Janissaries within a compact garrison rather than depicting an army operating in the open.

Their arrival there follows the Old Woman’s chain of enslavement and sale. By the time she comes into the Aga’s possession, she has been transferred repeatedly between merchants and cities; the Aga takes his entire seraglio with him when military orders send him to Azov. The women are therefore present because they belong to the commander’s household, not because they have chosen to take part in the campaign. The passage brings the garrison’s military purpose and the captive women’s imposed presence together in the same confined space.

The Siege and the Oath

The Old Woman describes a conflict in which Turkish forces initially kill large numbers of Russians, but the Russians later retaliate. Azov is destroyed by fire, and its inhabitants are killed without distinction of sex or age. The small fort is left as the remaining position, and the attackers try to force its defenders out by cutting off their supplies. The siege thus changes the Janissaries’ circumstances from active resistance to a struggle against hunger.

The twenty soldiers have sworn never to surrender. That oath is the account’s clearest statement of their collective resolve, but it offers no way out of the crisis. As famine becomes extreme, the Janissaries kill and eat the two eunuchs rather than break their pledge. Their decision makes the vow appear both powerful and tragically inadequate: they continue to resist capture, yet the terms of resistance drive them toward violence within the fort. The narrative presents this as a consequence of the siege, not as a reasoned or sustainable solution.

The Women and the Imam

After the eunuchs have been consumed, the soldiers decide that the women, too, will be subjected to their desperate search for food. A pious and humane Imam intervenes, urging them not to kill the women outright and proposing that they instead inflict a grave injury on each of them. The soldiers accept his recommendation. The Old Woman says that the women undergo the procedure and nearly die; the account makes clear that the Imam’s intervention does not spare them from violence, but changes its form in the hope that the garrison can continue to survive.

This episode complicates any simple contrast between humane counsel and cruel action. The Imam speaks to limit immediate killing, yet his advice treats the women’s bodies as a resource available to the starving soldiers. The Janissaries agree to his proposal, and the women bear the physical cost of keeping the garrison alive. The account does not present them as participants in the soldiers’ oath or military decisions: they are captives whose exposure to danger is determined by the choices of armed men around them.

Defeat and Narrative Significance

Soon after the soldiers finish their meal, Russian forces arrive in flat-bottomed boats. No Janissary escapes. The brief turn from desperate survival to complete defeat closes the episode without a rescue or negotiated surrender. The French surgeon who subsequently cares for the women is part of the aftermath, not a source of deliverance for the garrison; the soldiers’ fate is already sealed when the Russians enter the fort.

The Janissaries’ episode forms one link in the Old Woman’s account of repeated transfers, captivity, and war. Its sequence is stark: the Aga’s orders bring his household to the besieged position; the garrison’s vow prevents surrender; famine produces increasingly desperate acts; and the arrival of the Russians ends the soldiers’ resistance. The account does not expand into a general portrait of the Janissary institution. Instead, it shows this particular group at the limit of military endurance, where discipline and survival collide and civilians held with the force suffer the consequences. The fort becomes a concentrated example of the book’s recurrent exposure of war’s claims to order: an oath can dictate the soldiers’ conduct, but it cannot protect them or those confined alongside them from the violence and deprivation of the siege.