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18th century Bulgaria, a woman has to save her boy from being taken by the ottoman army for the blood tax. Devshirme, devsirme, usually translated as "child levy" or "blood tax" was the Ottoman Empire practice of recruiting soldiers and bureaucrats from among the children of their Balkan Christian subjects.Ottoman soldiers would take Christian boys, ages 8 to 20, away from their parents in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and removing them to Istanbul. The boys were then force-converted to Islam with the primary objective of selecting and training the ablest children and teenagers for the military or civil service of the empire, notably into the Janissaries.