The National Narrative and the Ottomanist Revision

The both-sides flagship (METHODOLOGY §4.2): the older Greek national narrative of the “Turkish yoke,” in which the neomartyrs are the crowning proof of four centuries of unbroken oppression; the revisionist Ottomanist picture (Braude, Papademetriou, Greene, Krstić), which stresses pragmatic accommodation, the dhimmi protections, and the anachronism of nationalist categories; and the middle readings now dominant. The proponents are named and the historiography is not adjudicated — while, per §4.1, the reality and sanctity of the martyrs are held apart from the historical dispute.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (an historiographical question, §4.2)

Two Framings and What Is at Stake

How the neomartyrs are read depends heavily on how the Ottoman order itself is read, and on that question the scholarship has swung considerably over the last half-century. Two framings anchor the debate, with a range of middle positions between them. It is essential to state at the outset what is, and what is not, at issue. The historiography of the Ottoman order — how tolerant or oppressive it was, how systematic its institutions, how the martyrdoms should be contextualized — is a genuinely contested question of historical fact and interpretation, and falls squarely under the both-sides rule (METHODOLOGY §4.2). The reality and sanctity of the martyrs — that these men and women died confessing Christ and are honored by the Church as saints — is not what the historians dispute, and is not a both-sides question (§4.1). Keeping these two apart is the whole discipline of this file: one can revise the history of the millet without unmaking a single martyr.

The Greek National Narrative

The older and, in popular Orthodox memory, still dominant framing is the Greek national narrative of the Tourkokratia — the “Turkish yoke.” In this reading, the four centuries after 1453 were a long night of oppression endured by an enslaved Christian nation, during which the Church was the ark of the people’s identity, the schools “hidden” (the kryfó scholió of legend), and the faith preserved against relentless pressure to convert. The neomartyrs, together with figures like St. Cosmas of Aetolia and the hanged Patriarch Gregory V, are, in this narrative, the crowning proof of the oppression and the supreme heroes of a fused religious-national resistance (the framing of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek national historiography and of much ecclesiastical and popular memory; discussed critically in Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, Stanford University Press, 2011, and in “The Donation of Mehmet: The Myth of Orthodoxy under the Ottoman Empire,” orthodoxhistory.org, 2025). This narrative has real strengths — the oppression and the martyrdoms were real — and real weaknesses: it tends to project a modern national consciousness back onto pre-national centuries, to read every conversion as coerced and every ambiguity as hidden faith, and to flatten a complex history into a single story of victimhood and resistance.

The Ottomanist Revision

Against this, a generation of Ottomanist scholarship has pressed a thorough revision. Its several strands share a method — reading the Ottoman documentary record on its own terms rather than through later national lenses — and reach a common emphasis on pragmatic accommodation and on the anachronism of the older categories.

Benjamin Braude argued that the tidy “millet system,” projected back to 1453, is a later construction with no contemporary documentary foundation; early-Ottoman arrangements for non-Muslims were improvised, local, and fluid (Braude, “Foundation Myths of the Millet System,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Braude and Lewis, Holmes & Meier, 1982; see The Fall and the Millet).
Tom Papademetriou showed that the early patriarchate’s standing was bound up with the empire’s fiscal apparatus — the Church integrated as a tax-gathering institution — rather than resting on a grand ecclesial charter, reframing both its “protection” and its “corruption” as facets of that fiscal reality (Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan, Oxford University Press, 2015).
Molly Greene has stressed the genuine, if unequal, coexistence of Christians and Muslims in the early modern Ottoman Mediterranean, resisting both a rosy convivencia and the lachrymose national narrative (Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Princeton University Press, 2000; The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768, Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
Tijana Krstić has recast the martyrdoms themselves as part of an early-modern confessionalization — the hardening of religious identities on both sides through the circulation of conversion- and martyr-narratives — locating the neomartyr texts within a shared Ottoman religious dynamic rather than a simple tale of persecution (Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, 2011; see The Genre and What Survives).

The revision’s strength is its documentary rigor and its refusal of anachronism; its risk, from within the Church’s memory, is that in dissolving the national narrative it can seem to dissolve the oppression too — to make the dhimmi order sound so accommodating that the martyrs become inexplicable, or mere artifacts of “narrative.” The best of the revisionists do not make that error; they relocate the martyrdoms rather than deny them.

The Middle Readings

The position now dominant in serious scholarship, and the one most illuminating for the neomartyrs, is a middle reading that refuses both the lachrymose national narrative and an over-rosy coexistence. On this view, toleration and subordination were not opposites but the two sides of a single legal condition: the dhimmi Christian could live and worship, run his community, and prosper — and could not evangelize, apostatize from Islam, or stand equal before the law, and paid for his protection in taxes and disabilities (Greene, A Shared World, 2000; Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, 2011). This is exactly the reading that makes the neomartyrs intelligible, because it locates the killing 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, accusation, and open confession (Russell, “Christian identity, sharia law and voluntary martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire,” IJSCC 18, 2018; see The Apostasy Law and the Count). The middle reading thus dissolves the false choice: one need not claim four centuries of unbroken slaughter to honor the martyrs, and one need not deny the martyrs to acknowledge that Christians and Muslims mostly lived side by side.

[Disputed: the character of the Ottoman order for its Christian subjects, and the framing of the neomartyrs within it. (a) The Greek national narrative — the Tourkokratia as unbroken oppression, the neomartyrs as its crowning proof and as national-religious heroes (the nineteenth–twentieth-century Greek historiography and popular memory). (b) The Ottomanist revision — pragmatic accommodation, the dhimmi protections, the anachronism of the “millet system” and of nationalist categories (Braude, 1982; Papademetriou, 2015; Greene, 2000, 2015; Krstić, 2011). (c) The middle readings — toleration and subordination as two sides of one legal condition, with the martyrdoms located at the conversion-boundary (Greene; Russell, 2018). This collection reports all three and adjudicates none. Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, the historiographical dispute is held apart from the reality and sanctity of the martyrs, which are not in question.]

Assessing from Within the Church, Without Polemic

The repository’s standpoint (§4.1) is academic from within the Orthodox Church, and that standpoint has a specific bearing here. It does not license the national narrative: the Church’s memory of her martyrs does not require, and is not served by, an inflated tale of ceaseless slaughter or a projection of modern nationalism onto the past — indeed Orthodox scholars themselves have named and criticized “the myth of Orthodoxy under the Ottoman Empire” (“The Donation of Mehmet,” orthodoxhistory.org, 2025). Nor does the standpoint require anti-Muslim polemic; the collection states the Ottoman legal realities factually, honors the Muslims who protected Christians and the Muslims who became Christians and died for it (see The Word and the Three Paths), and treats every person in the story with dignity. What the standpoint does affirm is the one thing the historians do not dispute: that the neomartyrs were real, that they died confessing Christ, and that the Church rightly venerates them as saints. On the contested history the collection is genuinely both-sides; on the sanctity of the martyrs it stands, soberly and without triumph, with the Church.

References

Braude, Benjamin. “Foundation Myths of the Millet System.” In Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, vol. 1, 69–88. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982.
Greene, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; and The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Krstić, Tijana. Contested Conversions to Islam. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
“The Donation of Mehmet: The Myth of Orthodoxy under the Ottoman Empire.” orthodoxhistory.org, 2025. (An Orthodox-scholarly critique of the national narrative; used to locate the debate, not as terminal authority.)
Papademetriou, Tom. Render unto the Sultan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
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.