Archival sources have been disdained in recent decades, but they provide insight into topics not covered and people left undescribed in narrative sources. Ottoman state servants such as Janissaries and timar-holders appear in narrative sources as undifferentiated groups, and scholarship has generally followed the same path, although we know that is inaccurate. Consequently, sudden shifts in their behavior, such as when the Janissaries started interfering in politics, remain somewhat inexplicable. Narrative sources, and particularly advice works, a genre that flourished during the period 1580-1650, are often accepted at face value with no control or critique. Archival sources, however, allow us to disaggregate groups in Ottoman society with the purpose of identifying internal differences and tensions within such groups and changes in their aims and aspirations. Court registers, for example, are used with great success to research women, slaves, and other groups that appear infrequently in narrative sources. This paper explores some archival sources that tell us about the recruitment of men for state service. Writers of advice literature attributed problems with groups of state servants, especially the military groups, to their nontraditional recruitment patterns. For military groups, archival sources allow us to analyze their recruitment processes in great detail. Registers of timar holdings (icmal defterleri) list all timar-holders in a particular area; their names, their patronymics, and their titles reveal their social origins. Salary registers of Janissaries list the names of all individuals receiving Janissary salaries, with either their place of origin or a patronymic or pseudo-patronymic. I categorize the information on origins in these registers to distinguish traditional from nontraditional recruitment sources. Simple arithmetical methods are used to determine the proportion of timar-holders or Janissaries falling into each category. These percentages are tracked from approximately 1550 to 1650 (depending on document survival) to reveal changes in recruitment and group composition over time. Comparison between the advice literature’s statements and the quantitative and qualitative data obtained from the archival documents permits a critique of the advice literature as well as stereotypes in the scholarship, and encourages an exploration of the changing social and political history of the Ottoman military forces. What this paper reveals is that even the most unpromising archival documents, such as lists of names and salaries, can be of service in discovering information about, and explaining the behavior of, groups not mentioned or insufficiently discussed in the narrative sources