The Ottoman Empire was perhaps the most bureaucratic of the premodern Middle Eastern states. It rested on an elaborate hierarchy of officials working through regular business meetings and extensive record keeping. Until the seventeenth century it resorted to the practice (known as the devshirme) of levying Christian children from the subject populations to fill positions in the palace, administration, and the Janissary infantry corps. The young recruits, legally considered slaves of the sultan, were given a rigorous education, converted to Islam and then employed in official positions in Istanbul and the provinces. This system of recruitment, which built on a centuries-old practice of Middle Eastern statecraft, was designed to provide the sultan with skilled administrators and soldiers loyal only to him.