Sipahi

Sipahi were professional cavalrymen deployed by the Seljuks, and later by the Ottoman Empire. Sipahi units included the land grant-holding (timar) provincial timarli sipahi, which constituted most of the army, and the salaried regular kapikulu sipahi, or palace troops. However, the irregular light cavalry ("raiders") were not considered to be . The sipahi formed their own distinctive social classes and were rivals to the Janissaries, the élite infantry corps of the Sultans. A variant of the term "sipahi" was also applied by colonial authorities to several cavalry units serving in the French and Italian colonial armies during the 19th and 20th centuries (see ). Name The word is derived from , meaning "soldier". The term is also transliterated as and ; rendered in other languages as: in Albanian and Romanian, sepuh (սեպուհ) in Armenian, in Greek, or in Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian (Cyrillic: , ): in Bengali [sipāhī] "sepoy" (সিপাহী). The Portuguese version is also sipaio (with variants like sipai, cipaio and cipai), but in Spanish it was adapted as cipayo. The word sepoy is derived from the same Persian word . In Maldivian, the army's soldiers are referred to as {ސިފައިން} "sifain". Description