The devşirme — the word means 'collection' or 'levy' — was a periodic system by which Ottoman officials took boys from Christian families, primarily in the Balkans and Anatolia, for imperial service. The boys were predominantly from rural communities; Orthodox Christian families were the main source, with Armenians and Jews generally exempted. Officials selected boys roughly between the ages of eight and eighteen, with emphasis on physical health, intelligence, and apparent ability. Upon selection, the boys were converted to Islam, separated from their families, and entered into Ottoman state service. This was not a choice. Families could not refuse — though some tried, and some parents reportedly offered bribes to have their sons included, knowing that the palace school offered a pathway that village life did not. Both responses were real, and neither cancels the other. The devşirme was a forced system that operated for centuries; the opportunities it created did not change the fact that it began with children taken from their homes.

The Enderun School — the name comes from 'Enderûn,' the 'Inner Service' of the palace — occupied the third courtyard of Topkapı, the most restricted and ceremonially significant space in the Ottoman imperial compound. The courtyard was surrounded by the Imperial Treasury, the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle, and the Palace School buildings themselves. Within the school, students moved through seven halls or grades, each with twelve teachers. They wore uniforms that indicated their level of achievement. The physical environment was rich by any standard of the era: a library, a mosque, music conservatories, dormitories, baths. The boys who reached the palace school had already passed through preparatory schools outside the palace walls; only the strongest candidates entered the inner tier of the Enderun system.

The Enderun curriculum was comprehensive in ways that would have been recognizable as humanist in Renaissance Europe. Students studied Islamic sciences alongside Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. They received instruction in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and geography. History, law, palace protocol, and administrative practice were taught alongside vocational arts — calligraphy, painting, music. Physical training, including weapons and close combat, ran alongside the academic coursework. A graduate was expected to speak and write at least three languages fluently, to have mastered a craft or art, to understand current scientific thinking, and to be able to command troops in the field. The sultan needed people who could run an empire, and the Enderun was the machine for producing them. It was also, for the boys inside it, simply their world — the only world most of them would know for years.

The graduation ceremony at the Enderun School was called çıkma — literally 'exiting.' The word itself captures something of the experience: the graduates were those who had exited. They left palace service to enter functional state roles, transferring out every two to seven years, or following the accession of a new sultan. Assignment depended on merit. Graduates who excelled were placed in government or scholarly positions; those who did not advance were assigned to the military. The school's merit system was specific: carefully graded rewards and corresponding punishments structured advancement at every stage. Some graduates rose to extraordinary heights. Ibrahim Pasha, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, and others who governed the empire at its most powerful came through this system. Their careers were real achievements. They were also built on a foundation they did not choose.

The Enderun School operated within Topkapı for centuries, from the era of Mehmet II — who formalized and expanded the institution his father Murat II had established — through to the late Ottoman period. The school was formally closed in the 19th century as the empire modernized its administrative and military structures. Today the third courtyard of Topkapı Palace is open to visitors as part of the museum complex that occupies the palace. The Enderun Library still stands — a quiet, elegant building in the courtyard — and visitors walk past the spaces where boys from the Balkans and Anatolia once studied, competed for advancement, and grew up inside the walls of the most powerful court in the eastern Mediterranean world. The stones remember the institution. What they cannot hold is the texture of those individual lives — the boys who left villages and families and became, in the palace school's telling, something the empire needed them to be.