![]() As Murad I conquered more and more of southeastern Europe, those forces became mainly Christian, and, as they came to dominate the Ottoman army, the older Turkmen cavalry forces were maintained along the frontiers as irregular shock troops, called akıncis, who were compensated only by booty. Although the new force included some Turkmens who were content to accept salaries in place of booty, most of its men were Christian soldiers from the Balkans who were not required to convert to Islam as long as they obeyed their Ottoman commanders. Those mercenaries organized as infantry were called yayas those organized as cavalry, müsellems. To replace the nomads, Orhan organized a separate standing army of hired mercenaries paid by salary rather than booty or by timar estates. In addition, once he had established his state, he had found it difficult to maintain order with such an army because the nomads still preferred to maintain themselves by looting, in the lands of their commander as well as in those of the enemy. Those nomadic troops had predominated through Orhan’s reign, until he saw that such undisciplined cavalrymen were of limited use in besieging and taking large cities. It was that type of mukâṭaʿa that developed into the Ottoman form of fief, the timar, which was the basis of Ottoman military and administrative organization as the European portions of the empire were conquered from the vassals in the 15th century and placed under direct Ottoman administration. Those revenue holdings were formalized as mukâṭaʿas, held by tribal leaders and ghazi commanders who used their revenues to feed, supply, and arm their followers. Armed with bows and arrows and spears, those nomadic cavalrymen had lived mostly on booty, although those assigned as ghazis to border areas or sent to conquer and raid Christian lands also had been given more permanent revenues in the form of taxes levied on the lands they garrisoned. ![]() The first Ottoman army had been composed entirely of Turkmen nomads, who had remained largely under the command of the religious orders that had converted most of them to Islam.
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