The baltacı or baltadji (plural baltacılar, "axemen") corps was a class of palace guards in the Ottoman Empire from the 15th to the early 19th centuries.
The baltacı or baltadji (plural baltacılar, "axemen") corps was a class of palace guards in the Ottoman Empire from the 15th to the early 19th centuries.
==History== Also known by the equivalent Persian title tabardar, the baltadji corps dates to the early days of the Ottoman Empire: recruited from the devshirme, they served as sappers and pioneers of the Ottoman army. Already in the early 15th century, however, a number were posted as guards in the Sultan's palace at Edirne. After the Fall of Constantinople and the establishment of various palaces in the new capital, separate companies of baltadjis were created for service in each palace: the Old Palace or Eski Saray, the New Palace or Topkapi Palace, the Galata Palace, and the Palace of Ibrahim Pasha.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).