Cossack Kharakternyky and Janissary-Bektashis: A Frontier Model of the Sacralization of Warriorhood in the Steppe Borderlands of the 16th–18th Centuries

Abstract

The study aims to overcome the fragmentation of national historiographies by integrating Ukrainian and Ottoman sources and applying an interdisciplinary theoretical approach. It proposes an interpretation of the frontier as a productive space in which sacred violence is constituted as a mechanism of social legitimation, while religious practices function as instruments for integrating the individual experience of war into collective symbolic orders. Purpose: To identify the structural mechanisms of the sacralization of warriorhood in the Zaporizhian and Ottoman contexts and to substantiate the frontier as a key space for the generation of sacralized violence. Methods: An integrated comparative approach is employed, combining historical and source-critical analysis (Ukrainian and Ottoman chronicles, annals, and documents), socio-philosophical interpretation (categories of charismatic legitimacy and the anthropology of violence), as well as elements of frontier studies and theories of sacred violence. The study applies an interdisciplinary synthesis drawing on cultural anthropology and historical sociology. Results: It is demonstrated that the Zaporizhian Cossacks and the Janissary corps function as structurally analogous models in which military organization is intertwined with a religious-symbolic system of legitimation. The study shows that kharakternyky and Bektashi mysticism perform a mediating function between the individual experience of violence and collective cosmological narratives. The concept of the “frontier sacralization of violence” is substantiated, encompassing three interrelated levels: institutional (military discipline), symbolic (religion), and spatial (frontier context). It is argued that the sacred is not a residual phenomenon but a functional element of military systems. Conclusions: The sacralization of warriorhood in the steppe borderlands of the 16th–18th centuries emerges as a dynamic process formed at the intersection of social structures of power and religious-symbolic systems. The frontier appears not as a periphery but as a productive environment for generating new forms of identity and the legitimation of violence. The proposed model of frontier oscillatory sacralization enables a reconceptualization of the relationship between institutional rationality and the mystical legitimation of warriorhood and may be applied to a broader range of early modern military formations.