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Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks on May 29, 1453. The Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologus, was last seen fighting alongside his troops on the battlements. His death gave rise to the widely disseminated legend that the emperor had turned to marble but would one day return to liberate his people. By 1453 the Byzantine Empire had become but a pathetic shadow of its former glories. The fall of this symbolic bastion of Christendom in the struggle against Islam may have sent shock waves through Western Christendom, but the conquest was accepted with resignation by many of the inhabitants of the city. As they saw it, their plight was a consequence of the sinfulness of the Byzantine Empire. For many people, Ottoman rule and the maintenance of the integrity of the Orthodox faith were preferable to accepting the pretensions of the papacy, which was the price Western Christendom had sought to exact in return for military assistance to ward off the Turkish threat.
The millet system
With the conquest of the territories that had constituted the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman sultans were faced with the problem of governing large non-Muslim populations. Christians and Jews, as “People of the Book,” were afforded a considerable degree of toleration. Indeed, it was to the Ottoman Empire rather than Christian Europe that many Spanish Jews migrated following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. The Ottomans confronted the problem of the governance of these large heterodox and polyglot populations by establishing millets. These were organized on the basis of religious confession rather than ethnic origin. The ruling millet within the empire was made up of the Muslims. Next in importance was the Orthodox Christian Rūm millet, which was often called the “Greek millet.” Although its head, the ecumenical patriarch, was invariably of Greek origin, the term Greek millet was something of a misnomer, for it included not only Greeks but also Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, Aromani, and substantial Arab populations who, as Orthodox Christians, were also members of the Rūm millet. With the rise of nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, the non-Greek members of the Greek millet became increasingly resentful of the Greek stranglehold on the higher reaches of the hierarchy of the Orthodox church, through which the millet was administered. There were also Armenian, Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Protestant millets.
The powers of the ecumenical patriarch were extensive, although there is uncertainty as to the precise nature of the privileges granted by Sultan Mehmed II to the man whom he elevated to the highest office in the church. This was Gennadios II Scholarios, a known opponent of those who, in the last years of the Byzantine Empire, had advocated union with the Western church. Patriarchal authority was considerable and extended to civil as well as to strictly religious matters. In many respects, it was greater than that enjoyed by the patriarchs in Byzantine times. The privilege of a considerable degree of autonomy in directing the affairs of the millet carried with it the responsibility of ensuring that its members were unshaken in their loyalty to the Ottoman Porte. At the outbreak of the War of Greek Independence in 1821, the patriarch Grigorios V was executed in reprisal, despite the fact that he had vigorously condemned the insurgents, whose efforts to create an independent Greek state he saw as a threat to his power. In the West his execution was seen as an act of mindless barbarity. In the eyes of the Ottomans, however, Grigorios had failed to carry out his fundamental obligation to ensure that the adherents to the Orthodox faith remained loyal to the sultan.
Disadvantages for non-Muslims
In keeping with Islamic tradition, members of the Greek millet enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy in conducting their religious affairs. They were, however, at a disadvantage in a number of ways in comparison with members of the ruling Muslim millet. A Christian was not allowed to bear arms and was disbarred from military service (although the latter disability was in many ways a privilege) in exchange for paying a special tax, the haradj. In a court of law, a Muslim’s word was always accepted over that of a Christian, although disputes between Christians were generally settled in courts under the control of their own millet. A Christian could not marry a Muslim woman, and there was a strict prohibition against renouncing Islam. Those Christians who had embraced Islam and then reverted back to Christianity were, until well into the 19th century, punished by death. Those “neomartyrs,” however, helped sustain the faith of the Orthodox populations during the centuries of Ottoman rule.
The most serious disability to which Christians were subject, until the practice died out toward the end of the 17th century, was the Janissary levy (paidomazoma). Christian families in the Balkans were required, at irregular intervals, to deliver to the Ottoman authorities a given proportion of their most intelligent and handsome male children to serve, after being forcibly converted to Islam, as elite troops or civil servants. Inevitably, the levy was much feared, but those who were conscripted frequently rose to high office and were sometimes able to help their relatives or their native villages. There is evidence that some Muslim families sought to pass off their children as Christian in the hope that they would be included in the levy and would thus be able to better their prospects. Under such pressures there were numerous instances of Christian conversion to Islam on both an individual and a mass basis; such conversions were particularly prevalent in the 17th century. The conversions were often only nominal, however, and these crypto-Christians secretly practiced the rituals of their former faith.