Spahi

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A mounted soldier who served in the cavalry forces of the Ottoman Empire or other North African powers
2. A horseman employed as a cavalry fighter in Ottoman military organizations or similar Middle Eastern and North African armies
3. A cavalry warrior who fought on horseback for Ottoman rulers or other regional commanders in North Africa and the Levant

Etymology: Spahi was a cavalryman in the Ottoman army, and the word's Persian ancestor meant simply "horseman" or "soldier." In Classical Persian, "sipāhī" was built from "sipāh," meaning "army," so the core idea was a man belonging to a military force rather than any particular kind of rider. The Ottomans adopted the term as "sipahi" for the mounted troops who held land in return for military service, and the word travelled into European languages through this channel. French took it up as "spahi," and it was from French that English borrowed it, applying it to the light cavalry units that the French raised from indigenous North African soldiers in the colonial era. The word is a doublet of "sepoy," which came into English from the same Persian root but through a different route, via Portuguese and Urdu-speaking India, and came to name Indian infantrymen serving the British. The two words thus share an ancestor while naming soldiers from opposite ends of the Muslim world's military history.

Synonyms: cavalryman, horseman, mounted soldier