The Patriarchate and the Porte

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 Orthodox subject as dhimmi — the jizya poll-tax and the devshirme child-levy. All of it stated factually with Ottomanist scholarship, and the “tolerance versus persecution” debate named on all sides, without polemic and with Muslims treated as persons.

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

The Berat and the Price of the Throne

The patriarch’s authority was not a Byzantine inheritance but an Ottoman grant, defined and delimited by a berat — a warrant issued by the Sultan setting out the office-holder’s privileges, jurisdiction, and obligations (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press, 1968, ch. 9; Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan, Oxford University Press, 2015, ch. 3). The grant was renewable and revocable, and it came at a price. From an early date the confirmation of a patriarch was accompanied by a peşkeş — a “gift,” in practice a substantial payment to the treasury — and over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this ripened into an open market in the throne, with rival candidates and their backers outbidding one another for the Porte’s confirmation (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, ch. 9; Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan, on the fiscal mechanics).

The consequences were grave and are not concealed in Orthodox self-assessment. The turnover of the patriarchal throne in some periods was dizzying — patriarchs deposed and restored, sometimes several times, at the pressure of factions and the demand for fresh payments — and the debts contracted to secure the office were passed down and pressed upon the whole Church (Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, ch. 9). This is the “corruption” side of the captivity; the older Greek historiography lamented it, and the revisionists have reframed it, arguing that the pattern is exactly what one expects when an ecclesiastical office is integrated into an Ottoman fiscal system of appointment for revenue (Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan, 2015, chs. 3–4). Either way, the martyrs stand in sharp relief against it: a Church whose summit was entangled in the marketplace of the Porte was, at its base, still producing men and women who would give their lives rather than utter the profession of another faith (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, SVS Press, 2000).

The Dhimmi Condition

The ordinary Orthodox Christian lived as a dhimmi — a “protected” non-Muslim subject of the Islamic state, tolerated in the practice of his religion in exchange for submission and a distinct fiscal and legal status (İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, on the dhimmi status; Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, ch. 8). The status carried real protections — of life, worship within limits, and communal self-governance — and real disabilities. Church-building and repair were restricted; Christian testimony against a Muslim was not received on equal terms in the sharia courts; distinctions of dress and comportment were, at various times and places, enforced; and above all the Christian paid taxes the Muslim did not.

The chief of these was the jizya (in Ottoman usage often cizye), the poll-tax levied on adult non-Muslim men as the fiscal mark of their protected subjection (İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire, 1973). It is essential to state this factually and without either minimizing or inflating it: the jizya was a real, recurring burden and a real, recurring reminder of subordinate status, and it was also a defined and (in principle) regulated tax, not an arbitrary depredation. Modern scholarship debates how heavy it was in practice and how it interacted with the many other levies of a pre-modern empire (Greene, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768, Edinburgh University Press, 2015, on the fiscal and social condition of the Ottoman Greeks). What is not in dispute is that the jizya was one of the forces that made conversion to Islam socially and economically advantageous — a pressure that stands in the background of the neomartyrs’ story, since it was precisely those who had yielded to such pressure and then repented who form one of the three classic paths to martyrdom (Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, Stanford University Press, 2011; see The Word and the Three Paths).

The Devshirme

The most notorious of the Ottoman institutions bearing on Christian subjects was the devshirme (Ottoman devşirme, “collection”) — the periodic levy of Christian boys, chiefly from the Balkan provinces, who were taken from their families, converted to Islam, and trained for the Sultan’s service, the ablest rising into the elite corps of the Janissaries and into high offices of state (İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire, 1973; Vryonis, “Isidore Glabas and the Turkish Devshirme,” Speculum 31, 1956, on a contemporary Byzantine reaction). Here again the discipline of §4.1 is exacting: the institution must be stated for what it was — a compulsory levy of children, entailing forced conversion, felt by the Christian communities as a grievous loss and lamented in their own sources — and it must not be turned into anti-Muslim caricature.

Scholarship has complicated the older picture in two directions worth naming. On the one hand, the devshirme was, from the family’s side, a real bereavement, resisted and mourned, and the sermons of Byzantine and later Greek churchmen record the grief with which it was met (Vryonis, “Isidore Glabas,” 1956; Papoulia, Ursprung und Wesen der “Knabenlese” im osmanischen Reich, Oldenbourg, 1963). On the other, because the levied boys could rise to the summit of Ottoman power — grand viziers were drawn from their number — some families are recorded, in later periods, as seeking rather than evading the levy, and the institution’s incidence varied greatly by time and region and had ceased in its classic form by the later seventeenth century (İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire, 1973; Greene, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 2015). The relevance to the neomartyrs is direct: the devshirme is one of the mechanisms by which a Christian became, willy-nilly, a Muslim in the eyes of the law — and some of the martyrs are precisely men who, having been taken and Islamized, later returned to the faith of their childhood and confessed it openly, incurring the apostasy penalty (Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ, 2000).

Tolerance or Persecution?

All of this converges on the historiographical question that governs the whole field and that this collection treats in full in Section 08: was the Ottoman order for its Christian subjects one of relative tolerance or one of persecution? The honest answer, and the one the sources support, is that the dichotomy is too crude. The older Greek national narrative emphasized the Tourkokratia (“Turkish yoke”) as an unbroken oppression, of which the neomartyrs were the crowning proof; a strand of mid-twentieth-century scholarship, reacting against that, emphasized Ottoman convivencia and the genuine protections of the dhimmi order; and the current mainstream occupies a middle ground, insisting that toleration and subordination were not opposites but the two sides of a single legal condition — a Christian could live and worship, and could not evangelize, apostatize from Islam, or stand equal before the law (Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Princeton University Press, 2000; Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, 2011; and the full treatment in The National Narrative and the Ottomanist Revision).

For the purpose of understanding the neomartyrs, the middle reading is the most illuminating, because it locates the killing exactly where the sources locate it: not in a general campaign of extermination, but at the sharp boundary of the two faiths, where the protected order turned lethal — over apostasy from Islam, over the accusation of it, and over the open confession of Christ before Muslim authority (Russell, “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire,” IJSCC 18, 2018). The Church’s memory holds both truths without collapsing either: that Muslims of Damascus and elsewhere sheltered Christians at the risk of their own lives (as the repository records in St. Joseph of Damascus), and that the same legal order made the return of an apostate, or the confession of a convert, a matter of the executioner. The neomartyrs died within that order, and the collection reports it as it was.

References

Greene, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. (The middle reading of Ottoman coexistence.)
Greene, Molly. The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768: The Ottoman Empire. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. (The fiscal and social condition of the Ottoman Greeks; the devshirme’s incidence.)
İnalcık, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973. (The dhimmi status, the jizya, the devshirme and Janissaries.)
Krstić, Tijana. Contested Conversions to Islam. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Papademetriou, Tom. Render unto the Sultan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. (The berat, the peşkeş, and the fiscal integration of the patriarchate.)
Papoulia, Basilike D. Ursprung und Wesen der “Knabenlese” im osmanischen Reich. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1963. (The devshirme.)
Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
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. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000.
Vryonis, Speros, Jr. “Isidore Glabas and the Turkish Devshirme.” Speculum 31, no. 3 (1956): 433–443.