The Fall and the Millet

The settlement within which the neomartyrs lived and died: Mehmed II’s incorporation of the Orthodox Church into his empire after 1453, the installation of Gennadios II Scholarios as Ecumenical Patriarch, and the organization of the Orthodox Christians as the Rum millet under the patriarch as ethnarch. The classic account is stated, and then set against the revisionist scholarship that regards the tidy “millet system,” projected back to 1453, as a later anachronism.

Tradition: Greek / Balkan Orthodox (Pan-Orthodox in scope)

1453 and the Conqueror’s Choice

When Mehmed II took Constantinople on 29 May 1453, the thousand-year Christian empire of the East came to an end, and with it the political order that had framed Orthodox life since Constantine. Yet the Sultan chose not to destroy the Church but to incorporate it into his administration. In 1454 he installed Gennadios II Scholarios — the learned monk, former delegate to the Council of Ferrara–Florence, and, after his return, the leading anti-unionist voice in the City — as Ecumenical Patriarch, and recognized him as the head of the empire’s Orthodox Christians (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press, 1968, ch. 9; Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan, Oxford University Press, 2015, ch. 1). The choice 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.

That a Christian patriarch of a fallen Christian empire should become an office-holder within the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) is the paradox from which the whole Ottoman history of the Church proceeds, and from which the neomartyrs’ witness takes its meaning. The martyrs did not die in a persecution mounted by an atheist state bent on the disappearance of religion — the situation of the later New Martyrs of Russia — but within a legal order that granted the Church a protected, second-class place and killed chiefly at the boundary where a subject crossed, or was thought to have crossed, between the two faiths (Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, Stanford University Press, 2011, on that boundary as the site of the neomartyr phenomenon).

The Rum Millet and the Patriarch as Ethnarch

In the classic account, the Ottoman state organized its non-Muslim subjects into millets — religiously defined communities granted a measure of internal self-governance under their own religious heads. The Orthodox Christians constituted the Rum millet (“Roman nation,” from Rūm, the Ottoman term for the Eastern Romans of Byzantium), and the Patriarch of Constantinople was recognized as its head (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, chs. 9–10). This made the patriarch far more than a churchman. He became the ethnarch — the civil and legal head of the whole Orthodox population, answerable 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 the ecclesiastical courts.

Because the Rum millet was defined by religion rather than by language or nation, the (Greek-led) Constantinopolitan hierarchy’s authority extended over Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Albanians, and Arabs alike — a fact of enormous later consequence, since it placed one hierarchy over many peoples who would, in the nineteenth century, seek their own national churches (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, ch. 10; see The National Narrative and the Ottomanist Revision). It is why the neomartyrs are a pan-Orthodox company and not a Greek one only: the same acta that record a Peloponnesian gardener record a Bulgarian silversmith and a Serbian youth, all subjects of the one Rum millet (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, SVS Press, 2000, on the pan-Orthodox range; see The Slavic and Balkan Neomartyrs).

The Revisionist Challenge

The account above is the one the older literature — and much devotional writing — takes for granted. Recent Ottomanist scholarship has substantially qualified it, and honesty requires that the qualification be stated at the outset rather than buried.

The point of departure is Benjamin Braude’s argument that the “millet system,” understood as a coherent, empire-wide set of institutions established by Mehmed II in 1453 and governing non-Muslims uniformly thereafter, is a later construction projected backward. Braude showed that the “foundation myths” of a grand charter granted to Gennadios rest on no contemporary documentation, that the term millet was not applied systematically to the non-Muslim communities until the reforming nineteenth century, and that the early-Ottoman reality was more improvised, more local, and more fluid than the tidy model suggests (Braude, “Foundation Myths of the Millet System,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Braude and Lewis, Holmes & Meier, 1982). [Disputed: the coherence and antiquity of the “millet system.” (a) The classic view — a structured, empire-wide system of communal autonomy under the patriarch, dating from 1454 (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, 1968; and the older Greek historiography). (b) The revisionist view — that the systematic “millet system” is an anachronism read back from the nineteenth century, and that early-Ottoman arrangements were ad hoc, fiscal, and local (Braude, 1982; Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan, 2015; Konortas, on the Ottoman terminology for the patriarchate). This collection reports both and adjudicates neither; see the full treatment in The National Narrative and the Ottomanist Revision.]

Tom Papademetriou has pressed the point further for the early centuries, arguing from Ottoman fiscal documents that the patriarchate’s standing was, in its first Ottoman generations, less a matter of a grand ecclesial charter than of the Church’s integration into the empire’s tax-farming apparatus: the patriarch and bishops held their offices in a manner analogous to Ottoman fiscal appointees, responsible above all for the revenues owed upward (Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan, 2015, esp. chs. 2–4). On this reading the “protection” the Church enjoyed and the “corruption” that afflicted it — the buying and selling of the throne treated in the companion file — are two faces of one fiscal reality, not a benign settlement later gone wrong.

None of this diminishes the neomartyrs; it sharpens the frame. Whether the Church’s place is described as a chartered millet or as a fiscal integration, the salient fact for the martyrs is the same: the Orthodox were a tolerated, taxed, subordinate community whose members lived, married, and worshipped freely within their own quarter, but for whom the passage from Christianity to Islam was socially rewarded and legally protected, and the passage from Islam to Christianity was, under the prevailing law, a capital crime (Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, 2011; Russell, “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire,” IJSCC 18, 2018; see The Apostasy Law and the Count).

The Bargain and the Cross

Orthodox writers of the period, and after, have read the whole arrangement theologically as well as politically. Steven Runciman titled his great study The Great Church in Captivity, and the phrase captures the paradox from within: the Church was genuinely captive — subordinated to an Islamic state, its throne bought and sold, its people second-class subjects — and yet it endured for four centuries, preserved the faith, produced the Philokalia, and educated the peoples who would build the modern Orthodox nations (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, conclusion). The neomartyrs are the sharpest expression of that endurance: where the bargain protected the Church’s ordinary life, it was precisely at the bargain’s edge — at conversion, apostasy, and confession — that the Cross was taken up in blood. The witness of the martyr and the survival of the community are, in the Orthodox reading, two movements of a single history, and the sections that follow treat both: the martyrs who died, and the mission and the hidden faith by which a people was kept (see Cosmas of Aetolia: The Preservation of a People).

References

Braude, Benjamin. “Foundation Myths of the Millet System.” In Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, vol. 1, 69–88. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982. (The anachronism argument.)
Krstić, Tijana. Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. (The conversion boundary as the site of the neomartyr phenomenon.)
Papademetriou, Tom. Render unto the Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. (The fiscal integration of the patriarchate; the revisionist account.)
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. (Gennadios; the Rum millet; the classic account.)
Russell, Norman. “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 18, nos. 2–3 (2018): 148–162.
Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period, 1437–1860. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The pan-Orthodox range of the neomartyrs.)