The Roman of the Janissaries, by 'Issâ Meyer, Collection Islâm d'Europe

Second revised and corrected edition

From the shores of the Mediterranean to those of the Danube or the Volga, millions of Europeans have embraced Islam throughout history and made an immense contribution to Muslim civilization in all its aspects; and what better example than that of the Janissaries to illustrate it!

For two centuries, these sons of Christians in the service of the Ottoman sultans were the elite unit of what was then the first army in the world and flew from victory to victory, to the point that their peers and their enemies held them for a time. invincible. Beneath the walls of Constantinople, they slaughter the legendary Eastern Roman Empire at the tip of their scimitars. The world holds its breath at the prowess of these turbaned legionnaires. Ten kingdoms crumble under their feet, ten others submit without firing a shot. Praetorian guard of the sultan to the iron discipline and terror of the crusaders, the war is for them an art of living, and of dying. Fighters and defenders of a faith they adopted with the ardor of a convert, their heroism is proverbial, their sense of honor flawless, their devotion pushed to the limit of fanaticism.

But the epic of the Janissaries is not just a story of battles. In Christian Europe, they could only have hoped for a life of serfdom and drudgery. In Muslim Europe, where birth no longer counts, the House of Osman made them grand viziers, kings of Egypt , protectors of India and the Maghreb, admirals and masters of the Mediterranean, governors, conquerors and builders of an empire that spanned three continents, glorious standard-bearers of its arms and of all of Islam .

First opus of a series on the Muslims of Europe, the novel of the janissaries is also that of the most European of the Islamic empires, the Ottoman sultanate. Here is the story of the fabulous destinies of these king-making slaves, fierce grumblers trudging from the Nile to the Danube and from the Caucasus to the Alps, insolent breakers of kingdoms, sons of fishermen or peasants raised to the highest offices of the greatest empire in the world then known. …