The Great Church in Captivity (1453–19th Century)

The history of the Orthodox Church under Ottoman rule: the millet system that made the Patriarch of Constantinople the civil head (ethnarch) of all Orthodox Christians in the empire, the corrupting and protective entanglement of the Phanariot elite, the witness of the neomartyrs, the spiritual renewal of the Kollyvades movement and the birth of the Philokalia, and the wave of autocephaly unleashed by Greek independence. Its anchor source is Sir Steven Runciman’s The Great Church in Captivity. This file is history.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Conqueror and the Patriarch

When Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453, he chose not to abolish the Orthodox Church but to incorporate it into his administration. In 1454 he installed Gennadios II Scholarios — the learned anti-unionist monk and former delegate to Florence — as Ecumenical Patriarch, and granted him recognition as head of the empire’s Orthodox Christians. The new patriarch was given a berat (warrant) defining his privileges, and the Church received guarantees (real if precarious) of its religious life, its courts, and its property (S. Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968, ch. 9).

The arrangement was pragmatic on both sides: the Sultan acquired a ready-made structure through which to govern, tax, and hold responsible a large subject population, and the Church acquired a recognized, if subordinate, legal standing within an Islamic state. The Christian patriarch of a Christian empire had become the millet-başı of a religious nation within the Dar al-Islam.

The Rum Millet and the Patriarch as Ethnarch

The Ottoman state organized its non-Muslim subjects into millets — religiously defined communities granted internal self-governance under their own religious leaders. The Orthodox Christians constituted the Rum millet (“Roman nation,” from Rūm, the Ottoman term for the Eastern Romans / Byzantines), and the Patriarch of Constantinople was its head.

This made the patriarch far more than a churchman. He became the ethnarch — the civil and legal head of the entire Orthodox population of the empire, responsible to the Sultan for their loyalty and their taxes, and empowered to govern their internal affairs: marriage, inheritance, family law, education, and the administration of justice among Christians through ecclesiastical courts. The Rum millet was defined by religion, not language or ethnicity, so the patriarch’s authority extended over Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Albanians, and Arabs alike — a fact of enormous later consequence, since it placed the (Greek-led) Constantinopolitan hierarchy over Slavic and other peoples who would, in the nineteenth century, seek their own national churches (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, chs. 9–10).

The bargain was deeply ambiguous. It preserved the Church and gave it unprecedented civil authority; but it also bound the Church to a foreign and Islamic state, exposed the patriarchal throne to simoniacal bidding and frequent depositions, and made the hierarchy an instrument of imperial control. Patriarchs were appointed and removed at the Porte’s pleasure, often after the payment of crippling sums (the peşkeş); the turnover of the throne in some periods was dizzying.

The Phanariots

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leadership of the Rum millet’s lay elite had concentrated in a class of wealthy and educated Greek families clustered around the patriarchate in the Phanar (Fener) district of Constantinople — the Phanariots. Drawing on commercial fortunes, multilingual education, and proximity to both the patriarchate and the Ottoman government, the Phanariots came to occupy key offices in the Ottoman state: the Grand Dragoman (chief interpreter, effectively a foreign-affairs official) and, from the early eighteenth century, the governorships (hospodars) of the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, ch. 11).

The Phanariots’ role was double-edged. They protected and funded the Church, sustained Greek learning, and gave Orthodox Christians influence at the heart of the empire; yet their dominance also “Hellenized” the patriarchate’s administration and intensified Greek control over Slavic and other Orthodox peoples, sowing resentments that the nationalist nineteenth century would reap.

The Neomartyrs

The most luminous Orthodox witness of the Ottoman centuries was that of the neomartyrs (neomartyres) — Christians put to death for their faith under Ottoman (or other Muslim) rule. Many were Christians who had apostatized to Islam (whether by force, by deception, or in a moment of weakness) and then publicly returned to Christ, an act that carried the death penalty under the prevailing interpretation of Islamic law; others were Christians accused of blaspheming Islam or of “luring” Muslims to Christianity. Their numbers and stories were gathered to strengthen the faith of an oppressed people.

The great collection is the Neon Martyrologion (“New Martyrology”), compiled by St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and first published in 1799, which assembled the lives of neomartyrs of the Turkish period (cf. Nikodemos the Hagiorite, Neon Martyrologion; and the Synaxaristes tradition). Named examples include:

St. Cosmas of Aetolia (Kosmas Aitolos, c. 1714–1779), the great itinerant preacher and educator of the Greek lands, who founded hundreds of schools before he was hanged in Albania in 1779 on charges of conspiracy. He is venerated as Equal-to-the-Apostles and is among the most beloved figures of the era (OrthodoxWiki, “Cosmas of Aetolia”; cf. Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity).
St. George of Ioannina (†1838), a young stable-hand martyred at Ioannina, one of the latest of the neomartyrs.
St. Constantine of Hydra and a great number of others, individually commemorated in the Synaxaria.

A common Synaxis of the Holy New Martyrs under the Turkish Yoke is kept on the Third Sunday after Pentecost. The Church reports these martyrdoms as its own tradition attests them, naming the source rather than asserting independently documented forensic detail; the hagiographical character of the accounts is part of their history, not a defect (cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Kollyvades Movement and the Philokalia

The later eighteenth century brought a remarkable spiritual and intellectual renewal, the Kollyvades movement, born on Mount Athos. Its name (from kollyva, the boiled wheat offered for the departed) derives from a dispute over whether memorial services could properly be held on Sundays — a seemingly small liturgical question that opened onto a much larger program of return to the patristic and liturgical sources, frequent Holy Communion, and the recovery of the hesychast tradition of inner prayer.

Its leading figures were St. Macarius (Makarios) of Corinth (1731–1805), St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749–1809), and St. Athanasios of Paros (c. 1722–1813). Their greatest monument is the Philokalia (“love of the beautiful/good”), an anthology of patristic texts on prayer and the spiritual life spanning the fourth to fifteenth centuries. St. Macarius assembled the materials and entrusted them to St. Nikodemos for editing; the collection was published in Venice in 1782 (Archim. Nikodemos Skrettas, “On St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and the Kollyvades Fathers,” OrthoChristian.com; cf. OrthodoxWiki, “Nikodemos the Hagiorite”).

The Philokalia‘s influence proved immense and lasting. Translated into Church Slavonic by St. Paisius Velichkovsky (the Dobrotolubiye, 1793) and later into Russian by St. Theophan the Recluse, it became a wellspring of the nineteenth-century revival of the Jesus Prayer and of eldership (starchestvo) in the Slavic lands; through works like The Way of a Pilgrim it reached a worldwide readership in the twentieth century. The Kollyvades thus connect the dark Ottoman centuries to the great spiritual renewals that followed (cf. The Jesus Prayer). St. Nikodemos’s wider labors — his edition of the canons (The Rudder / Pedalion), his liturgical and ascetical writings — likewise shaped modern Orthodox practice.

Greek Independence and the Autocephaly Wave

The Ottoman settlement began to unravel with the rise of nationalism. The Greek War of Independence (1821–1829) had a terrible cost for the Church: in reprisal for the uprising, the Ottomans hanged Patriarch Gregory V at the gate of the patriarchate on Pascha (Easter) 1821, an act that made him a national martyr and a symbol of the entanglement of Church and nation in the Ottoman order (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, conclusion).

When an independent Kingdom of Greece emerged (its independence secured by the Great Powers and the Treaty of Constantinople, 1832), the new state found it intolerable for its national Church to remain under a patriarch resident in the Ottoman capital. In 1833, the Bavarian regency governing for the young King Otto unilaterally declared the Church of Greece autocephalous — a politically driven act, canonically irregular, that the Ecumenical Patriarchate at first refused to recognize. Only with the Patriarchal Tomos of 29 June 1850 did Constantinople grant canonical autocephaly to the Church of Greece, regularizing the situation on its own terms (Tomos of 1850; cf. “Autocephaly or Subjugation to the State? The Church of Greece after the Revolution,” orthodoxhistory.org).

The Greek precedent set the pattern for the century that followed. As each Balkan Orthodox people won political independence from the Ottomans, its national Church sought ecclesiastical independence from the Greek-led patriarchate — Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria (whose unilateral move provoked the 1872 condemnation of “phyletism,” ecclesial nationalism), and others. The modern map of autocephalous national churches was largely drawn in this period, as the single Rum millet fractured along national lines. That story is carried forward in the autocephalous-churches subsection; this file marks only its origin in the collapse of the Ottoman order. The temptation of phyletism that the autocephaly wave introduced remains a live issue in contemporary disputes (cf. Ukraine, autocephaly, and the 2018 schism).

Assessing the Captivity

Runciman titled his great study The Great Church in Captivity, and the phrase captures the period’s paradox. The Church was genuinely captive — subordinated to an Islamic state, its throne bought and sold, its people second-class subjects, its members sometimes martyred and sometimes pressed toward apostasy. Yet it endured for four centuries, preserved the faith, produced saints and the Philokalia, and educated the peoples who would build the modern Orthodox nations. The captivity was a humiliation and, in its own way, a school of the Cross (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, conclusion).

References

Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St. Neon Martyrologion (New Martyrology). 1st ed. Venice, 1799.
Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St., and St. Macarius of Corinth, comps. The Philokalia. Venice, 1782. English trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–.
Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
Skrettas, Archimandrite Nikodemos. “On St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and the Kollyvades Fathers.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/80945.html).
Tomos dated 29 June 1850 (Patriarchal and Synodal Tomos granting autocephaly to the Church of Greece). Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period, 1437–1860. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000.