00:00Did you know the Ottoman Empire built its greatest army out of stolen children?
00:04And that army eventually destroyed the empire from the inside?
00:07It was called Dev Shurmi.
00:09Every few years, Ottoman officials would ride into Christian villages and take the strongest boys.
00:15Young, maybe 8 or 10 years old.
00:17Taken from their families forever.
00:19These boys were converted to Islam, trained for years, and forged into the Yoniserys.
00:24The Sultan's elite soldiers.
00:26They had no family ties, no clan loyalty.
00:28Nothing but the empire.
00:30That was the whole point.
00:31And it worked.
00:32For centuries, the Janissaries were nearly unstoppable on the battlefield.
00:37But something shifted.
00:38By the 1600s, they had grown too powerful to control.
00:42They burned their own barracks to demand higher pay.
00:45They deposed sultans they didn't like.
00:47They murdered ones who pushed back.
00:49The very thing that made them so loyal, being cut off from everything except the sultan,
00:54eventually made them answer to no one at all.
00:57The perfect weapon had become the perfect threat.
