Janissary Handguns?

With the 500 year anniversary of the Battle of Mohács looming what better time to add some more firepower to my collection of early 16th century janissaries. In a previous post, which you can read here: https://camisado1500s.blogspot.com/2020/05/early-16th-century-janissaries.html, I discussed some of the issues encountered whilst trying to represent how these famed infantry may have looked in the early 16th century. When it comes to their gunpowder weapons it seems there are further issues as the janissaries in the early 16th century carried two different types of hand held firearm. Before we get to the figures I thought it would be interesting to have a look at how handguns were key to the Janissary corps in this period.

The Hungarian defeat at Mohács has always fascinated me and in my search for more information on the battle I recently read "The Battle of Mohács, 1526" which is an interdisciplinary study of the battle and the battlefield edited by Norbert Pap. Roughly speaking a third of the book did not really interest me, especially the section that deals with the overall landscape of the battlefield, a third was interesting but did not relate directly to the kind of thing we focus on as wargamers, whilst a third was packed full of fascinating details on the composition of the armies and the accounts of the battle. I would not recommend buying a copy as it is published by Brill and as such very expensive but if you can get a library copy I would highly recommend it. What also provided lots of useful information was "On the Verge of a New Era. The Armies of Europe at the Time of the Battle of Mohács" which can be downloaded for free from here: https://www.academia.edu/91840792/On_the_Verge_of_a_New_Era_The_Armies_of_Europe_at_the_Time_of_the_Battle_of_Moh%C3%A1cs.
Most of the information that follows has come from these two books.

Janissary Handguns

By the 1526 campaign that ended with the defeat of the Hungarian army at Mohács the Janissary corps of the Ottoman army had fully adopted firearms as part of their arsenal and were skilled in their use. The defeat of the Safavid's at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514 was largely due to the Ottoman artillery and their deployment of thousands of janissaries armed with gunpowder weapons. As the Ottoman household troops, or Kapikulu Corps, were extremely well organised surviving records provide a wealth of information as to how many gunpowder weapons were taken on particular campaigns. Pál Fodor in his chapter "The Military Organization and army of the Ottoman Empire (1500–1530)" from "On the Verge of a New Era. The Armies of Europe at the Time of the Battle of Mohács" states that for the 1522 siege of Rhodes the Janissaries took "1,000 long-barrelled handguns (with 1,000 stands and 150,000 balls), 4,500 short barrelled handguns (with 4,800,000 balls), powder horns for 2,160 short-barrelled and 1,008 long-barrelled handguns". For Mohács in 1526 the household took "4,000 handguns (only 1,000 of good quality), 60 long-barrelled handguns, 3,000,000 balls for handguns, 4,000 powder horns, 105.8 tonnes of gunpowder for cannons, 7.7 tonnes of gunpowder for matchlock guns, 30,000 field cannonballs". Clearly the Janissaries used a variety of firearms with the majority being smaller handguns whilst also using heavier long barrelled guns, some of which required stands to be fired from, probably to fit onto warwagons or to snipe at the walls during sieges. 

From the inventories listed above it is clear that the handguns used by the Janissary corps were standardised in some way. Norbert Pap, Pál Fodor, and Máté Kitanic's chapter on Ottoman Turkish Handguns in "The Battle of Mohács, 1526" explains that a central gunsmith's workshop was established by Bayezid II at the beginning of the 16th century with the help of western European craftsmen. Until the mid-16th century this workshop was at the Ottoman palace in Istanbul when it was then moved to a dedicated gun workshop that had its own harbour. The workshop supplied all of the Janissary corps guns, including those who garrisoned various fortresses throughout the empire. The two types of infantry guns were the shorter handgun or harci tüfek which had a barrel somewhere between 88-92cm long and the longer handgun or has tüfek which had a barrel 110-115cm long. The chapter on Ottoman Turkish Handguns states "According to the usual tactics, the task of the cavalry was to lure the enemy in front of the artillery and the janissaries in the centre by executing very precise manoeuvres. The field guns fired first, followed by the janissaries firing volleys, with the larger longer-barrelled handguns in the front rank, and then, as the enemy came closer, the smaller, shorter-barrelled guns from the rear ranks". There was also the larger metris tüfeği with a barrel around 130-160cm in length which could be used from warwagons or field positions. Unfortunately it seems very few of these handguns from the first half of the sixteenth century have survived with most of those now in Istanbul dating from the later 16th century through to the 18th century.

Whilst the records of the Kapikulu corps give us a very clear indication of the Ottoman commitment to gunpowder surviving accounts of the Battle of Mohács, both Christian and Muslim, give a similar indication of the importance they played in the battle. English translations of these accounts can be found in the chapter on Ottoman Turkish Handguns referred to above. Knowing they were heavily outnumbered by the Ottoman army the Hungarians attempted to attack the Sultan's force before it was fully deployed. Despite the unexpected nature of the Hungarian attack the Ottoman's still managed to execute their tactic of luring the Christian heavy cavalry into the range of their guns which wrought havoc on the heavily armoured horsemen. 

The contemporary Ottoman chronicler Kemalpaşazâde wrote: "The wicked king who appeared on the battlefield, clad from head to foot in steel, with the devilish and evil-natured wretches with him, whose rising dust clouds covered east and west and with the world conquering banner of the clear-minded pasha in his sights, he rushed straight to the centre of the invincible army, and, ignoring the shower of cannonballs and gun bullets, he charged with his cavalry, which poured like a torrent, unafraid. His whole mass rushed at once upon the janissaries... When he came close to the gun carriages, the handgunners, emitting a cloud of smoke, threw their bullets skywards as if it were hailing, and thus withered the flowers of the evil enemy's life...The shower of bullets, falling like hail on the enemy, against which neither helmet, nor armour, nor shield could serve as protection, tore the leaves and fruit from the tree of the evildoer's useless life; their fearful masses were scattered like a scattering of stubble, and the grain of their perishable life was let loose to the winds of destruction".

The campaign diary of 1526,which records the day to day events leading up to the battle stated: "The evildoer king and the rest of his desperate army attacked the felicitous ruler and the Anatolian army. Three or four times in all the Janissary corps, with gun fire, stopped, beat and drove back the despicable infidels. At last, by the grace of God the most high and the Prophet, and with the help of the hidden saints, the people of Islam, aroused and rallying their strength, turned back the wicked, and when they had no strength to attack again, they cut them down like dogs. It was a battle and slaughter so fierce that it cannot be described".

A slightly later account by Celâlzâde Mustafa Çelebi, the Tabakātü’l-Memâlik, from the late 1550s or early 1560s implies how well trained the janissary handgunners were, firing their guns in disciplined volleys which the charging Hungarians had to evade. This the Hungarians did successfully only to then be attacked from behind once they had ridden around the gun carriages: "Now the Muslims fired the zarbuzans (light or medium Ottoman guns), and the gunners fired their handguns row by row, filling the air with smoke and shaking the earth with thunder. The cries of the Muslims "Allahu Akbar!" and "Allah, Allah!" reached the highest sky, and the infidels, who were destined for hellfire, made the world noisy with their wonderful shouts. As soon as the damned infidels reached this place, they saw the gun carriages and the matchlockmen stood before them like a fort that could not be breached; they therefore, out of necessity, evaded the gun carriages, and at the sixth sub-provinces troops on the left of the pasha's sancak, near which the line of carriages ended, they rushed the Rumelian troops, the army retreating on two sides to give way to the miserable infidels. As soon as they had penetrated into the space between the battle line and the camp baggage, the warriors of faith took the miserable infidels from two sides in the back, and a very hard fight ensued".

İbrahim Peçevi's 17th century account of the battle tells a similar tale of how one of the Hungarian commanders, Pál Tomori, archbishop of Kalocsa, attempted to penetrate the Ottoman warwagons and guns "This damned infidel put a few thousand of the accursed enemy in line, and they were arrayed and came like a herd of swine, all wounded by arrows. There was no obstacle before them; heedless of the chained cannonballs of the zarbzens (light or medium Ottoman guns) standing before the battle-lines of the grand vizier, of his own soldiers fallen by gun bullets, and of the cadavers of the horses, he cut in front of the zarbzens, and at the end, perhaps where the ranks of the infantry were, he found at last a gap and a breach, through which he penetrated, and cut the army of Islam in two and separated them...". Peçevi's account also describes the difficulty the Hungarian King, Louis II, had in trying to break the lines of janissaries "From this side, the evildoer king himself attacked the Anatolian army with his troops but the latter relied on the battle line of janissaries. The janissary ghazis poured down upon them with their guns, and the followers and selected soldiers of the accursed fell into the dust of destruction at that place".

Christian sources from the Hungarian army paint an equally harrowing picture of the heavy cavalry's destruction in the face of the Ottoman firepower. The scholar and chronicler István Brodarics, who was present at the battle and managed to escape wrote "A true account of the battle of the Hungarians with the Turks at Mohács" in which he describes the Hungarian attack which pushed back the Ottoman cavalry, the sipahis, and how they were lured in front of the Ottoman guns "When the signal of battle was given, those who were in the front ranks bravely charged the enemy, firing all our guns, but to the slight detriment of the enemy. The battle was much fiercer than our numbers would indicate; more of the enemy fell than of our own, until at length, fighting with terrible violence, the enemy began to retreat, either to be worn down by our charge, or to draw us before the guns. And already András Báthori is flying to the king, that the enemy is turning back , that victory is ours, that it is our turn to advance, and that we should support our own men who are pursuing the routed enemy". 

Brodarics continues to describe how, when the king advanced the Ottomans opened fire with their guns causing some of the Hungarian cavalry to flee "So we ran through the trenches and bushes, but when we reached the place where the battle had been fought a little while before, you could see the bodies of many of our men lying strewn across the field, and of still more of the enemy, and some of them half dead and barely panting. Meanwhile, while our men were confronting the enemy and bravely taking up the fight, and the king's column was at the same time galloping forward as fast as armoured men can gallop, the right wing began to sway, and from this wing many were running, frightened, I think by the cannons which the enemy then began to fire for the first time, and this running and the thick impact of the cannon-balls, which were now flying round our heads, who were standing by the king's side, filled everyone with no little fear". The devastating impact of the guns of the heavy cavalry was reported in a letter from a Czech noble which stated "When the knights in armour arrived, the Turks fired with handguns a few more shots at them: they fired straight into the king's men, causing great damage".

Whilst these accounts illustrate how effective the Ottoman cannons and handguns were against the Hungarian cavalry it seems they played and equally decisive role in the destruction of the infantry once the cavalry had fled. It is sobering to think that as far as we know none of the infantry in the Hungarian army survived the battle. As the surviving cavalry attempted to escape a core of Czech and landsknecht infantry formed a square from which they effectively held off the surrounding Ottoman horsemen. This stalemate was resolved when the janissary handgunners were redeployed to fire into the square thus breaking the infantry who were then slaughtered. A couple of weeks after the battle, on 15 September 1526, the Venetian diplomate Agostino da Mula wrote "Although six or eight thousand Bohemians and landsknechts retreated in a square, and were not broken by the Turkish cavalry, a good banderium of handgunners attacked them and they were killed instantly, as were the others".

Early 16th century janissary handgunners.

28mm Janissary handgunners.

Early 16th century janissaries with handguns.

So from the above it is clear that the janissaries made very effective use of two types of handgun, three if you include the larger metris tüfeği which seemed to be something akin to the hook- or wall-guns that western European armies used from fixed positions. The question is how do we show these in 28mm? A few manufacturers make janissaries with firearms for the 17th century but I feel these always look out of place in an early 16th century army. The other issue is that while we have the approximate lengths of the two standardised infantry handguns that were used it is unclear exactly what they looked like.

Based on the above I decided to mix some old Essex Miniatures handgunners that carry quite short handguns with janissary figures from The Assault Group who I have armed with 28mm handguns and calivers also from The Assault Group. I had previously painted up a unit of twelve janissaries like this and whilst I wasn't keen on doing this again I couldn't think of an alternative. The Assault Group figures have all had the plumes from their caps, known as the "ak börk", removed as I feel this makes them more suitable for the battlefield instead of the parade ground. It would have been great to have had some teams using the larger metris tüfeği guns from stands but at present no manufacturers make anything that is really suitable. I suppose some of the warwagons, as shown below, have larger guns in them and for now these will have to stand in for the heavier guns.

So are these figures accurate? Probably not but at least they are clearly armed with shorter handguns which don't look like muskets. I would have liked to have more clearly demarcated between the two types of infantry handgun, the "harci tüfek" and the "has tüfek" and perhaps in the future if I find a suitable handgun miniature for the slightly longer "has tüfek" I will add some janissaries armed with these to the collection. The majority of the firearms were the shorter barrelled handguns and it is these that I have tried to represent with the figures available.

In the three photos above you can see the new miniatures in their uniformed blocks of twelve whilst the photos below show the new figures with the janissary archers, warwagons and Ottoman lighter guns or "zarbuzans/zarbzens" as the sources call them. Now I need to think of a way to attempt to do justice to the Battle of Mohács on the tabletop!

"Three or four times in all the Janissary corps, with gun fire, stopped, beat and drove back the despicable infidels"

"When the knights in armour arrived, the Turks fired with handguns a few more shots at them: they fired straight into the king's men, causing great damage"

28mm Ottoman janissaries and warwagons.

"Now the Muslims fired the zarbuzans, and the gunners fired their handguns row by row, filling the air with smoke and shaking the earth with thunder.

"As soon as the damned infidels reached this place, they saw the gun carriages and the matchlockmen stood before them like a fort that could not be breached"

The janissary handgunners and archers ready to rain arrows and shot on the enemy.

The fortified position of the Janissary corps.