Auspicious

Auspicious (pronounced aw-spish-uhs)

(1) Promising success; propitious; opportune; favorable.

(2) Favored by fortune; prosperous; fortunate (rare).

1590s: From the Latin auspicium (divination by observing the flight of birds), the construct being auspex (augur) (genitive auspicis) + -ous (the suffix used to form adjectives from nouns, to denote possession or presence of a quality in any degree, commonly in abundance.  It's from the Middle English -ous, borrowed from Old French -ous and -eux, from Latin -ōsus (full, full of); Doublet of -ose).  The usual modern rendering of the Latin auspicium is “augury” which reflects the influence of French on the adoption of Latin forms in English.  Auspicious has long been understood to mean “of good omen” and, although it’s still sometimes used to mean “fortunate”, this probably indicates a misunderstanding.  The related forms are the adverb auspiciously and the noun auspiciousness.  Unfortunately, most may be more familiar with the companion adjective inauspicious (ill-omened, unlucky, unfavorable), dating from the 1590s, from the Latin inauspicatus (without auspices; with bad auspices) which briefly enjoyed a place in seventeenth century English as inauspicate.

The Auspicious Incident

Janissary soldiers in the red and white colors dating from the pre-firearms era.

The Auspicious Incident (in the Turkish Vaka-i Hayriye (fortunate event) and spoken of in the Balkans as Vaka-i Şerriyye (unfortunate incident)) was the forced disbandment of the Janissary corps by the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II on 15 June 1826.  Formed during the fourteenth century, the Janissaries (in Ottoman Turkish يڭيچرى‎ (yeñiçeri) (new soldier)) were an elite formation, essentially the Sultan's private army and, remarkably for such blood-soaked soil, the first standing army in the region since antiquity.  Although, as a military unit, the Janissaries were for centuries indispensable to sultans, the character of the corps changed over the years with the creation of bureaucratic and mercantile structures, both run by civilians and thus creating an independent power-base.  It was the kind of mission-creep not dissimilar to the evolution of the Sturmabteilung (the Storm Troopers (SA) or brownshirts) in the Third Reich or the Praetorian Guard in Ancient Rome and like both of them, the Janissaries came to be seen a threat to the leader rather than a protective guard.

Depiction of Janissaries during the slave era.

Curiously, the origin of the Janissaries was in a group of slaves, bound for their lives personally to the sultan after being captured as children and forcibly converted from Christianity. Despite this unpromising beginning, the Janissaries gained a reputation for bravery and loyally and were a critically important military component in many of the Ottoman’s most celebrated battles, most famously the fall of Constantinople in 1453.  The battle-readiness however was affected as a gradual decline in the standards of recruitment and training diminished both their effectiveness and loyalty to the sultan; by the early nineteenth century the Janissaries were effectively an armed political party focused on extending their economic interests and controlling the empire by implied military threat which sometimes was expressed in the several coups in which they were implicated, their oath of loyalty which once had been to a sultan personally instead arbitrarily re-interpreted as being to the throne which left them free to overthrow any tiresome sultan and replace him with one more compliant.  From being the king’s protectors, they had become the king-makers.

Depiction of Janissary soldiers in the age when battlefield skirmishes were decided by the "blade of the sword and the splutter of musketry".

The character of the formation had certainly changed but Ottoman law had not been amended to reflect what had happened.  As slaves the Janissaries had no money and were thus untaxed but after the rules began to allow those with an established income to become Janissaries, these recruits brought their businesses and profits with them, thus becoming part of an elite military force yet still exempt from tax, an imbalance which sparked jealously and resentment throughout the empire.  Sultans and their advisors had long been aware of the problem and the threat posed but attempts at reform had always been resisted.

Mahmud II.

When Mahmud II (Mahmud-u s̠ānī (محمود ثانى in Ottoman Turkish) 1785-1839; Sultan of the Ottoman Empire 1808-1839) became sultan in 1808 he was under no illusions, having watched several of his predecessors lose their thrones and lives in Janissary-led coups but he had to be both cautious and furtive for whatever decline in military effectiveness might have afflicted the Janissaries, their intelligence operation had infiltrated much of the state.  Instead of direct conflict, Mahmud choose gradualism, imposing minor reforms which annoyed the Janissaries who resisted things like changes to their uniform which had been suggested as part of a military modernization.  In the face of their opposition to this and other minor matters, the sultan relented, inducing in the Janissaries a complainant assumption that their immunity from change would continue.  Quietly however, Mahmud was forming a modern, Western-style army and when ready, he issued a fatwa which detailed his intended military re-structure, marginalizing the Janissary.  This prompted, as the devious sultan had intended, a Janissary rebellion, the disaffected troops taking to the streets, planning another act of sultanicide.  At this point was executed a brutally efficient plan was using the Sipahi, a cavalry division with a pedigree more ancient even than the Janissaries and with which they shared a bitter rivalry.  Striking without warning, the Sipahi took advantage of their greater mobility to drive the Janissaries back to their barracks which, secretly, Mahmud II had surrounded with artillery imported from Europe disguised as farm machinery.  In a ferocious siege, the barracks were subject to a barrage of such intensity that in the ensuing blaze, over 4,400 Janissaries were incinerated before the survivors scattered, many subsequently exiled while the last were put to death by decapitation in the Thessaloniki fort which Turks came to call the Tower of Blood.  As a reward, the Sipahi formed the core of a new elite force called the Victorious Soldiers of Muhammad and the sultan continued his programme of military modernization.  

The bloody business came to be known to the Turks as the auspicious incident because it lent the Ottoman army (and therefore the empire) a Turkish rather than multi-national character and the structures endured until the empire was dissolved in 1922 (formally in 1924).  In other parts of the caliphate, the events came to be called the unfortunate incident because the consequential centralization of authority in Constantinople dissipated what had been a hard fought for regional autonomy.