The Church Under the Ottomans
The frame for the whole collection: the condition of the Orthodox Church after 1453, within which the neomartyrs bore their witness. This section describes the Rum millet and the Patriarch of Constantinople as its ethnarch, and the precarious life of the patriarchate at the Ottoman Porte — with the devshirme, the jizya, and the “tolerance versus persecution” question stated factually and from all sides.
Tradition: Greek / Balkan Orthodox (Pan-Orthodox in scope)
Overview
The neomartyrs cannot be understood apart from the world that produced them, and that world is more contested in modern scholarship than the older devotional literature allowed. Two files set the frame.
The first, The Fall and the Millet, narrates the settlement of 1453–1454 — Mehmed II’s decision not to abolish the Church but to incorporate it, the installation of Gennadios II Scholarios as Ecumenical Patriarch, and the organization of the Orthodox as the Rum millet under the patriarch as their civil head (ethnarch). It states the classic account and immediately flags that the very term “millet system,” read back to 1453, is now disputed.
The second, The Patriarchate and the Porte, treats the ambiguous bargain from the inside: the berat that defined the patriarch’s privileges, the peşkeş and the simoniacal turnover of the throne, and the legal condition of the Christian subject (dhimmi) — the jizya poll-tax and the devshirme child-levy — stated factually with Ottomanist scholarship, and the “tolerance versus persecution” debate named on all sides without polemic.
Contents
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-fall-and-the-millet.md | 1453; Gennadios II Scholarios; the Rum millet; the Patriarch as ethnarch; and the revisionist challenge to the “millet system” as an anachronism |
| the-patriarchate-and-the-porte.md | The berat, the peşkeş, and the turnover of the throne; the dhimmi condition, the jizya, and the devshirme stated factually; the tolerance-versus-persecution debate |
See Also
- Who the Neomartyrs Are — the category that this world produced
- Historiography and Assessment — where the debates named here are treated in full
- The Great Church in Captivity (the Ottoman Period) — the repository’s anchor account of the period
References
- Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
- Braude, Benjamin, and Bernard Lewis, eds. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982.
- Papademetriou, Tom. Render unto the Sultan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.