Voynuks (sometimes called voynugans or voynegans) were members of the privileged Ottoman military social class established in the 1370s or the 1380s. Voynuks were tax-exempt non-Muslim, usually Slavic, and also non-Slavic Vlach Ottoman subjects from the Balkans, particularly from the regions of southern Serbia, Macedonia, Thessaly, Bulgaria and Albania and much less in Bosnia and around the Danube–Sava region. Voynuks belonged to the Sanjak of Voynuk which was not a territorial unit like other sanjaks but a separate organisational unit of the Ottoman Empire.
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Voynuks (sometimes called voynugans or voynegans) were members of the privileged Ottoman military social class established in the 1370s or the 1380s. Voynuks were tax-exempt non-Muslim, usually Slavic, and also non-Slavic Vlach Ottoman subjects from the Balkans, particularly from the regions of southern Serbia, Macedonia, Thessaly, Bulgaria and Albania and much less in Bosnia and around the Danube–Sava region. Voynuks belonged to the Sanjak of Voynuk which was not a territorial unit like other sanjaks but a separate organisational unit of the Ottoman Empire.
== Establishment == The term 'voynuk' is derived from 'voynik' which in South Slavic languages means "soldier." This category of citizens existed in medieval Serbia. They were originally members of the existing Balkan nobility who joined Ottomans in the 14th century and were allowed to retain their estates because Ottomans regularly incorporated pre-Ottoman military groups, including voynuks, in their own system in the early period of the Ottoman expansion in order to accomplish their new conquests more easily. The social class of voynuks was established in the 1370s or 1380s. Southern Serbia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria were main areas of Voynuk groups with some smaller groups in Bosnia and the Danube-Sava area.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).