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168-459: In the Ottoman Empire , a millet ( Turkish: [millet] ; Ottoman Turkish : ملت ) was an independent court of law pertaining to "personal law" under which a confessional community (a group abiding by the laws of Muslim sharia , Christian canon law , or Jewish halakha ) was allowed to rule itself under its own laws. Despite frequently being referred to as a " system ", before

336-650: A Christian administration is demanded in Turkish Armenia, as in Lebanon. Today a version of religion-based legal pluralism resembling the millet system still persists in varying forms in some post-Ottoman countries like Iraq , Syria , Jordan , Lebanon , Israel , the Palestinian Authority , Egypt , and Greece (for religious minorities), which observe the principle of separate personal courts and/or laws for every recognized religious community and reserved seats in

504-542: A Muslim fell under their sharia -based law. Later, the perception of the millet concept was altered in the 19th century by the rise of nationalism within the Ottoman Empire. Although the Ottoman administration of non-Muslim subjects was not uniform until the 19th century and varied according to region and group, it is possible to identify some common patterns for earlier epochs. Christian and Jewish communities were granted

672-622: A calamitous end in 1683 when Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha led a huge army to attempt a second Ottoman siege of Vienna in the Great Turkish War of 1683–1699. The final assault being fatally delayed, the Ottoman forces were swept away by allied Habsburg, German, and Polish forces spearheaded by the Polish king John III Sobieski at the Battle of Vienna . The alliance of the Holy League pressed home

840-427: A consequence of the separation by Church affiliation, as was required by 19th century Ottoman law. Syriac Catholics The Syriac Catholic community was recognized as its own millet in 1829. Chaldeans The Chaldean Catholic community was recognized as its own millet in 1844. Syriac Orthodox The Syriac Orthodox community in the Ottoman Empire was for long not recognized as its own millet , but part of

1008-574: A constitutional monarchy. However, following the disastrous Balkan Wars , the CUP became increasingly radicalized and nationalistic, leading a coup d'état in 1913 that established a one-party regime. The CUP allied with the German Empire hoping to escape from the diplomatic isolation that had contributed to its recent territorial losses; it thus joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers . While

1176-494: A coup, but he did see the need for military mobilization. In 1883, a German military mission under General Baron Colmar von der Goltz arrived to train the Ottoman Army, leading to the so-called "Goltz generation" of German-trained officers, who played a notable role in the politics of the empire's last years. From 1894 to 1896, between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians living throughout the empire were killed in what became known as

1344-466: A court of appeal. Only Greeks of Constantinople were given suffridge to be elected and to vote for the laymen. This election was in two degrees: voters first voted for electors which formed an electoral college, when then chose the lay counselors. No provincial assemblies were established; bishops could govern without needing to consult the Greek Orthodox public. The 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War dealt

1512-734: A decisive blow to Ottoman power in the Balkan Peninsula. The Albanians' fear that the lands they inhabited would be partitioned among neighbouring Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece fueled the rise of Albanian nationalism and the League of Prizren was founded. Intense ethnic and national rivalries among the Balkan peoples emerged at the eve of the 20th century in Macedonia, known as the Macedonian Struggle . The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 restored

1680-491: A fairly modern conscripted army , banking system reforms, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the replacement of religious law with secular law, and guilds with modern factories. The Ottoman Ministry of Post was established in Istanbul in 1840. American inventor Samuel Morse received an Ottoman patent for the telegraph in 1847, issued by Sultan Abdülmecid , who personally tested the invention. The reformist period peaked with

1848-545: A figure that vastly exceeded the number of Muslim children in school at the time, who were further hindered by the amount of time spent learning Arabic and Islamic theology. Author Norman Stone suggests that the Arabic alphabet, in which Turkish was written until 1928 , was ill-suited to reflect the sounds of Turkish (which is a Turkic as opposed to Semitic language), which imposed further difficulty on Turkish children. In turn, Christians' higher educational levels allowed them to play

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2016-549: A future state included all Balkan Orthodox Christians. This Megali Idea intended to revive the Eastern Roman Empire through a large Greek state. This ideology spread among the urban population of Aromanian, Slavic and Albanian origin and which started to view themselves increasingly as Greek. On the other hand, the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms in the middle of the 19th century were aimed to encourage Ottomanism among

2184-526: A large degree of autonomy. Tax collection, education, legal and religious affairs of these communities were administered by their own leaders. This enabled the Ottomans to rule over diverse peoples with "a minimum of resistance". The Jewish community, in particular, prospered under Ottoman rule, and its ranks were swelled with the arrival of Jews who were expelled from Spain. At the same time, non-Muslims were subject to several forms of discrimination and excluded from

2352-503: A larger role in the economy, with the rise in prominence of groups such as the Sursock family indicative of this. In 1911, of the 654 wholesale companies in Istanbul, 528 were owned by ethnic Greeks. In many cases, Christians and Jews gained protection from European consuls and citizenship, meaning they were protected from Ottoman law and not subject to the same economic regulations as their Muslim counterparts. The Crimean War (1853–1856)

2520-613: A major center for its trade, contributing to its continued prosperity throughout the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century. Under Ivan IV (1533–1584), the Tsardom of Russia expanded into the Volga and Caspian regions at the expense of the Tatar khanates. In 1571, the Crimean khan Devlet I Giray , commanded by the Ottomans, burned Moscow . The next year, the invasion was repeated but repelled at

2688-592: A person's private business in which the state should not interfere. However, all such proposals have been defeated. Greece recognizes only a Muslim minority, and no ethnic or national minorities, such as Turks , Pomaks , or Bulgarians . This is the result of several international treaties as the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations of 1923 and of the Treaty of Lausanne of 1924, when

2856-757: A protector at the Porte in the person of the French ambassador. In this way the Roman Catholic millet was established at the start of the Tanzimat reforms. In a 1910 book William Ainger Wigram used the term melet in application to the Persian Sasanian Empire , arguing that the situation there was similar to the Ottoman millet system and no other term was readily available to describe it. Some other authors have also adopted this usage. The early Christians there formed

3024-457: A sense of Turkish nationalism. In this period, the Ottoman Empire spent only small amounts of public funds on education; for example, in 1860–1861 only 0.2% of the total budget was invested in education. As the Ottoman state attempted to modernize its infrastructure and army in response to outside threats, it opened itself up to a different kind of threat: that of creditors. As the historian Eugene Rogan has written, "the single greatest threat to

3192-508: A shift from religious identity towards national identity. As a result of this, a type of hegemony emerged in which all groups that were under this millet had to conform to the norms imposed by the leader of the millet , who was appointed by the Sultan. This had a cultural, political, linguistic, and religious effect on all of these groups. Only later did separate Catholic millets emerge. Non-Armenians from churches which were theologically linked to

3360-575: A still-vibrant hub of Orthodoxy. Greek success in the Ottoman Empire can be traced to the Greek tradition of education and commerce exemplified in the Phanariotes . The wealth of the extensive merchant class provided the material basis for the intellectual revival that was the prominent feature of Greek life in the decades leading to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Not coincidentally, on

3528-550: A system based on the Ottoman millet , in which personal status is based on a person's belonging to a religious community. The state of Israel – on the basis of laws inherited from Ottoman times and retained both under British rule and by independent Israel – reserves the right to recognise some communities but not others. Thus, Orthodox Judaism is officially recognised in Israel, while Reform Rabbis and Conservative Rabbis are not recognised and cannot perform marriages. Israel recognised

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3696-454: A victory over the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571), off southwestern Greece; Catholic forces killed over 30,000 Turks and destroyed 200 of their ships. It was a startling, if mostly symbolic, blow to the image of Ottoman invincibility, an image which the victory of the Knights of Malta over the Ottoman invaders in the 1565 siege of Malta had recently set about eroding. The battle

3864-618: Is attested in Ottoman administrative documents into the 19th century. Benjamin Braude has argued that before the Tanzimat reforms, the word millet in the sense of religious community denoted the Muslim religious community or the Christians outside of the Ottoman Empire. This view is supported by Donald Quataert . In contrast, Michael Ursinus writes that the word was used to refer to non-Muslim subjects of

4032-575: Is closely linked to Islamic rules on the treatment of non−Muslim minorities living under Islamic dominion ( dhimmi ). The Ottoman term specifically refers to the separate legal courts pertaining to personal law under which minorities were allowed to rule themselves (in cases not involving any Muslim) with fairly little interference from the Ottoman government . People were bound to their millets by their religious affiliations (or their confessional communities ), rather than their ethnic origins, according to

4200-460: The Rum Millet ( millet-i Rûm ) or the " Roman nation ", and enjoyed a certain autonomy. It was named after Roman ("Byzantine") subjects of the Ottoman Empire, but Orthodox Greeks , Bulgarians , Albanians , Georgians , Arabs , Aromanians , Megleno-Romanians , Romanians , and Serbs were all considered part of the same millet despite their differences in ethnicity and language and despite

4368-530: The 1856 Imperial Reform Edict , which was fiercely resisted by the gerontes . Eventually the Porte had to send the gerontes to their dioceses, and a constitutional committee produced a series of laws between 1860 and 1862 to govern the Greek millet. Taken together, unlike the Armenian National Constitution , the basic laws for the Greeks did not produce a national assembly, and clerical control of

4536-618: The Anatolian Beyliks . One of these, in the region of Bithynia on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire, was led by the Turkish tribal leader Osman I ( d. 1323/4), a figure of obscure origins from whom the name Ottoman is derived. Osman's early followers consisted of Turkish tribal groups and Byzantine renegades, with many but not all converts to Islam. Osman extended control of his principality by conquering Byzantine towns along

4704-727: The Armenian millet under the Armenian Patriarch. This meant that the Syriac Orthodox were subject to the hegemony of the Armenians linguistically, culturally, politically, and religiously. During the Tanzimat reforms (1839–78), the Syriac Orthodox were granted independent status with the recognition of their own millet in 1873. Under the millet system the Jews were organized as a community on

4872-564: The Balkans by the mid-14th century, transforming their petty kingdom into a transcontinental empire. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II , which marked the Ottomans' emergence as a major regional power. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566), the empire reached the peak of its power, prosperity, and political development. By

5040-458: The Battle of Molodi . The Ottoman Empire continued to invade Eastern Europe in a series of slave raids , and remained a significant power in Eastern Europe until the end of the 17th century. The Ottomans decided to conquer Venetian Cyprus and on 22 July 1570, Nicosia was besieged; 50,000 Christians died, and 180,000 were enslaved. On 15 September 1570, the Ottoman cavalry appeared before

5208-702: The Bosporus Strait made it difficult to conquer. In 1402, the Byzantines were temporarily relieved when the Turco-Mongol leader Timur , founder of the Timurid Empire , invaded Ottoman Anatolia from the east. In the Battle of Ankara in 1402, Timur defeated Ottoman forces and took Sultan Bayezid I as prisoner, throwing the empire into disorder. The ensuing civil war lasted from 1402 to 1413 as Bayezid's sons fought over succession. It ended when Mehmed I emerged as

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5376-633: The British Foreign Secretary , Lord Salisbury on 13 April 1878. It is no longer possible for the Armenians and the Turks to live together. Only a Christian administration can provide the equality, justice and the freedom of conscience. A Christian administration should replace the Muslim administration. Armenia (Eastern Anatolia) and Kilikya, are the regions where the Christian administration should be founded... The Turkish Armenians want this... That is,

5544-594: The Bulgarian Tsardom of Vidin in 1396, regarded as the last large-scale crusade of the Middle Ages , failed to stop the advance of the victorious Ottomans. As the Turks expanded into the Balkans, the conquest of Constantinople became a crucial objective. The Ottomans had already wrested control of nearly all former Byzantine lands surrounding the city, but the strong defense of Constantinople's strategic position on

5712-583: The Cape of Good Hope in 1488 initiated a series of Ottoman-Portuguese naval wars in the Indian Ocean throughout the 16th century. Despite the growing European presence in the Indian Ocean, Ottoman trade with the east continued to flourish. Cairo, in particular, benefitted from the rise of Yemeni coffee as a popular consumer commodity. As coffeehouses appeared in cities and towns across the empire, Cairo developed into

5880-892: The Church of the East (later known as the Nestorian Church after the Nestorian schism ). The Church of the East's leader, the Catholicos or Patriarch of the East , was responsible to the Persian king for the Christians within the Empire. This system of maintaining the Christians as a protected religious community continued after the Islamic conquest of the Sassanids, and the community of Nestorian Christians flourished and

6048-485: The Constitution of the Ottoman Empire and brought in multi-party politics with a two-stage electoral system ( electoral law ) under the Ottoman parliament . The constitution offered hope by freeing the empire's citizens to modernise the state's institutions, rejuvenate its strength, and enable it to hold its own against outside powers. Its guarantee of liberties promised to dissolve inter-communal tensions and transform

6216-471: The Druze and Baháʼí as separate communities, which the Ottomans and British had not – due mainly to political considerations. Also, the state of Israel reserves the right to determine to which community a person belongs, and officially register him or her accordingly – even when the person concerned objects to being part of a religious community (e.g., staunch atheists of Jewish origin are registered as members of

6384-539: The Foreign Ministry , as if they represented foreign nations, but after 1878 it was through the Justice Ministry . Historian Johann Strauss wrote that the term "seems to be so essential for the understanding of the Ottoman system and especially the status of non-Muslims". Other authors interpret the millet system as one form of non-territorial autonomy and consider it as such a potentially universal solution to

6552-573: The French Revolution had extended to the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. Each millet became increasingly independent with the establishment of its own schools, churches, hospitals and other facilities. These activities effectively moved the Christian population outside the framework of the Ottoman political system. The Ottoman millet system (citizenship) began to degrade with increasing identification of religious creed with ethnic nationality. The interaction of ideas of French revolution with

6720-760: The Great Northern War of 1700–1721). Charles XII persuaded the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed III to declare war on Russia, which resulted in an Ottoman victory in the Pruth River Campaign of 1710–1711, in Moldavia. After the Austro-Turkish War , the Treaty of Passarowitz confirmed the loss of the Banat, Serbia, and "Little Walachia" (Oltenia) to Austria. The Treaty also revealed that the Ottoman Empire

6888-534: The Greek revolt (1821–1829) that ultimately ended with the formal independence of Greece in 1830. It was a costly enterprise for Muhammad Ali, who had lost his fleet at the Battle of Navarino in 1827. Thus began the first Egyptian–Ottoman War (1831–1833) , during which the French-trained army of Muhammad Ali, under the command of his son Ibrahim Pasha , defeated the Ottoman Army as it marched into Anatolia , reaching

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7056-476: The Greeks declared war on the Sultan. A rebellion that originated in Moldavia as a diversion was followed by the main revolution in the Peloponnese , which, along with the northern part of the Gulf of Corinth , became the first parts of the Ottoman Empire to achieve independence (in 1829). In 1830, the French invaded the Deylik of Algiers . The campaign that took 21 days, resulted in over 5,000 Algerian military casualties, and about 2,600 French ones. Before

7224-469: The Habsburg and Russian empires. The Ottomans consequently suffered severe military defeats in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, culminating in the loss of both territory and global prestige . This prompted a comprehensive process of reform and modernization known as the Tanzimat ; over the course of the 19th century, the Ottoman state became vastly more powerful and organized internally, despite suffering further territorial losses, especially in

7392-399: The Hamidian massacres . In 1897 the population was 19   million, of whom 14   million (74%) were Muslim. An additional 20   million lived in provinces that remained under the sultan's nominal suzerainty but were entirely outside his actual power. One by one the Porte lost nominal authority. They included Egypt, Tunisia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Lebanon. As

7560-434: The Iberian Union . The Ottomans were holders of the Caliph title, meaning they were the leaders of Muslims worldwide. The Iberians were leaders of the Christian crusaders, and so the two fought in a worldwide conflict. There were zones of operations in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean , where Iberians circumnavigated Africa to reach India and, on their way, wage war upon the Ottomans and their local Muslim allies. Likewise,

7728-489: The Köprülü era (1656–1703), effective control of the Empire was exercised by a sequence of grand viziers from the Köprülü family. The Köprülü Vizierate saw renewed military success with authority restored in Transylvania, the conquest of Crete completed in 1669, and expansion into Polish southern Ukraine , with the strongholds of Khotyn , and Kamianets-Podilskyi and the territory of Podolia ceding to Ottoman control in 1676. This period of renewed assertiveness came to

7896-451: The Oriental Crisis of 1840 . Muhammad Ali had close relations with France , and the prospect of him becoming the Sultan of Egypt was widely viewed as putting the entire Levant into the French sphere of influence. As the Sublime Porte had proved itself incapable of defeating Muhammad Ali, the British Empire and Austrian Empire provided military assistance, and the second Egyptian–Ottoman War (1839–1841) ended with Ottoman victory and

8064-419: The Ottoman Empire in 1453, all Orthodox Christians were treated as a lower class of people . The Rum millet was instituted by Sultan Mehmet II who set himself to reorganise the state as the conscious heir of the East Roman Empire , adding Caesar of Rome to his list of official titles. The Orthodox congregation was included in a specific ethno-religious community under Graeco-Byzantine domination. Its name

8232-442: The Parliament , which had been suspended by the Sultan in 1878. However, the process of supplanting the monarchic institutions was unsuccessful and the European periphery of the Empire continued to splinter under the pressures of local revolts. Subsequently, with the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and the First World War (1914–1918) the Ottoman Empire lost most of its possessions, except for those in Asia Minor . During these wars and

8400-472: The Sakarya River . A Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Bapheus in 1302 contributed to Osman's rise. It is not well understood how the early Ottomans came to dominate their neighbors, due to the lack of sources surviving. The Ghaza thesis popular during the 20th century credited their success to rallying religious warriors to fight for them in the name of Islam , but it is no longer generally accepted. No other hypothesis has attracted broad acceptance. In

8568-477: The Spanish garrison of Castelnuovo on the Adriatic coast ; the successful siege cost the Ottomans 8,000 casualties, but Venice agreed to terms in 1540, surrendering most of its empire in the Aegean and the Morea . France and the Ottoman Empire, united by mutual opposition to Habsburg rule, became allies. The French conquests of Nice (1543) and Corsica (1553) occurred as a joint venture between French king Francis I and Suleiman, and were commanded by

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8736-454: The Treaty of Nasuh Pasha , which ceded the entire Caucasus, except westernmost Georgia, back into the possession of Safavid Iran . The treaty ending the Cretan War cost Venice much of Dalmatia , its Aegean island possessions, and Crete . (Losses from the war totalled 30,985 Venetian soldiers and 118,754 Turkish soldiers.) During his brief majority reign, Murad IV (1623–1640) reasserted central authority and recaptured Iraq (1639) from

8904-497: The Turkish Empire , was an imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe , West Asia , and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe , between the early 16th and early 18th centuries. The empire emerged from a beylik , or principality , founded in northwestern Anatolia in c.  1299 by the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I . His successors conquered much of Anatolia and expanded into

9072-421: The millet concept (excepting the Armenian case, until the modern era). The millets had a great deal of power – they set their own laws and collected and distributed their own taxes. All that was required was loyalty to the Empire. When a member of one millet committed a crime against a member of another, the law of the injured party applied, but the ruling Islamic majority being paramount, any dispute involving

9240-406: The millet system created a strain of thought (a new form of personal identification) which made nationality synonymous with religion under the Ottoman flag. It was impossible to hold the system or prevent Clash of Civilizations when the Armenian national liberation movement expressed itself within the Armenian church. Patriarch Nerses Varjabedyan expressed his position on Ottoman Armenians to

9408-453: The " Regulation of the Armenian Nation " (Turkish: Nizâmnâme−i Millet−i Ermeniyân ): a constitution for the Armenian Orthodox Gregorian nation ( millet ) of that time. This document was drawn up by Armenian intelligentsia, which sought to curb the powers of the Armenian Patriarch and nobility. It created an Armenian National Assembly. These two reforms, which were theoretically perfect examples of social change by law, caused serious stress on

9576-426: The 1856 Imperial Reform edict, the Armenian Protestant Millet was the first millet to have a constitution sanctioned by the government, which was based on the principle of representative and lay control. Debate for a constitution among the Gregorian Armenians would be influenced by the Protestant Armenians'. The Armenian Gregorian Millet received a constitution on March 29, 1863, after several years of tensions within

9744-454: The 19th century, the millets had a great deal of power – they set their own laws and collected and distributed their own taxes. The Tanzimat reforms aimed to encourage Ottomanism among the subject nations and stop the rise of secessionist nationalist movements. within the Ottoman Empire. The reforms tried to integrate non-Muslims and non-Turks more thoroughly into the Ottoman society with new laws and regulations, but failed. In 1856, during

9912-406: The Arabic name ʿUthmān ( عثمان ). In Ottoman Turkish , the empire was referred to as Devlet-i ʿAlīye-yi ʿO s mānīye ( دولت عليه عثمانیه ), lit.   ' Sublime Ottoman State ' , or simply Devlet-i ʿO s mānīye ( دولت عثمانيه‎ ), lit.   ' Ottoman State ' . The Turkish word for "Ottoman" ( Osmanlı ) originally referred to the tribal followers of Osman in

10080-407: The Armenian Church (by virtue of being non-Chalcedonians ) were under the authority of the Armenian Patriarchate, although they maintained a separate hierarchy with their own Patriarchs; these groups included the Syriac Orthodox and the Copts . Armenian Catholics and Armenian Protestants in 1850 (with British backing) separated from the Armenian Gregorian Millet to become their own millets. After

10248-453: The Armenian community between Loussavorial and Khavarials and with the Porte . Assyrian or Eastern Syriacs Assyrians are referred to as 'Asuri' in the Turkish vernacular. Assyrians split by Christian sect were thus treated as separate ethnic groups for the Ottoman government. The Church of the East largely identifies as Assyrian, but the liturgical language is called Syriac, hence multiple 'millets' for Syriac speaking Assyrians arose as

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10416-409: The Armenians; the Eastern Orthodox perceived American Protestants, who had over 100 missionaries established in Anatolia by World War I , as weakening their own teaching. These religious activities, subsidized by the governments of western nations, were not devoid of political goals, such in the case of candlestick wars of 1847, which eventually led in 1854 to the Crimean War . Tension began among

10584-486: The Balkan Peninsula during the Congress of Berlin , and in return, Britain assumed the administration of Cyprus in 1878. Britain later sent troops to Egypt in 1882 to put down the Urabi Revolt (Sultan Abdul Hamid II was too paranoid to mobilize his own army, fearing this would result in a coup d'état), effectively gaining control in both territories. Abdul Hamid II was so fearful of a coup that he did not allow his army to conduct war games, lest this serve as cover for

10752-445: The Balkans . Osman's son, Orhan , captured the northwestern Anatolian city of Bursa in 1326, making it the new capital and supplanting Byzantine control in the region. The important port of Thessaloniki was captured from the Venetians in 1387 and sacked. The Ottoman victory in Kosovo in 1389 effectively marked the end of Serbian power in the region, paving the way for Ottoman expansion into Europe. The Battle of Nicopolis for

10920-404: The Balkans, overrunning the Catholic populations of Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, and Hungary. The Melkite Catholics gained their autonomy as a religious community in 1848 by Sultan Abdulmecid . Bruce Masters claims that Melkite Catholics insisted that they had a millet of their own, that would grant them "sense of distinctiveness". In the Orient, the 16th century saw the Maronites of Lebanon,

11088-402: The Balkans, where a number of new states emerged. Beginning in the late 19th century, various Ottoman intellectuals sought to further liberalize society and politics along European lines, culminating in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which established the Second Constitutional Era and introduced competitive multi-party elections under

11256-411: The Bilu, a group of young Russian Jews who were pioneers in the Zionist movement, proposed negotiating with the Sultan to allow a millet like settlement which would allow them greater independence in Palestine. After the Fall of Constantinople , the only Latin Catholic group in the Sultan's domain were the Genoese who lived in the Byzantine capital. Over the next decades, Turkish armies pushed into

11424-441: The Catholic and Orthodox monks in Palestine with France channeling resources to increase its influence in the region from 1840. Repairs to shrines were important for the sects as they were linked to the possession of keys to the shrines. Notes were given by the protectorates, including the French, to the Ottoman capital about the governor; he was condemned as he had to defend the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by placing soldiers inside

11592-446: The Conqueror , reorganized both state and military, and on 29 May 1453 conquered Constantinople , ending the Byzantine Empire. Mehmed allowed the Eastern Orthodox Church to maintain its autonomy and land in exchange for accepting Ottoman authority. Due to tension between the states of western Europe and the later Byzantine Empire, most of the Orthodox population accepted Ottoman rule, as preferable to Venetian rule. Albanian resistance

11760-444: The Constitution, called the Kanûn-u Esâsî . The empire's First Constitutional era was short-lived. The parliament survived for only two years before the sultan suspended it. The empire's Christian population, owing to their higher educational levels, started to pull ahead of the Muslim majority, leading to much resentment. In 1861, there were 571 primary and 94 secondary schools for Ottoman Christians, with 140,000 pupils in total,

11928-482: The French invasion the total population of Algeria was most likely between 3,000,000 and 5,000,000. By 1873, the population of Algeria (excluding several hundred thousand newly arrived French settlers) had decreased to 2,172,000. In 1831, Muhammad Ali of Egypt revolted against Sultan Mahmud II due to the latter's refusal to grant him the governorships of Greater Syria and Crete , which the Sultan had promised him in exchange for sending military assistance to put down

12096-729: The Greek Orthodox Millet . Until the 19th century, there was a single Armenian millet which served all ethnic Armenians irrespective of whether they belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church , the Armenian Catholic Church , or the Armenian Protestant Church (which was formed in the 19th century). Besides a religious role, this millet also played a political and cultural role. Namely, it bundled together all Armenian and some other groups, showcasing

12264-764: The Iberians passed through newly-Christianized Latin America and had sent expeditions that traversed the Pacific to Christianize the formerly Muslim Philippines and use it as a base to attack the Muslims in the Far East . In this case, the Ottomans sent armies to aid its easternmost vassal and territory, the Sultanate of Aceh in Southeast Asia. During the 1600s, the world conflict between

12432-803: The Islamic clergy successfully objected under the grounds of theodicy . In 1754 the artillery school was reopened on a semi-secret basis. In 1726, Ibrahim Muteferrika convinced the Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasha , the Grand Mufti , and the clergy on the efficiency of the printing press, and Muteferrika was later granted by Sultan Ahmed III permission to publish non-religious books (despite opposition from some calligraphers and religious leaders). Muteferrika's press published its first book in 1729 and, by 1743, issued 17 works in 23 volumes, each having between 500 and 1,000 copies. In North Africa, Spain conquered Oran from

12600-523: The Janissary revolted . Selim's efforts cost him his throne and his life, but were resolved in spectacular and bloody fashion by his successor, the dynamic Mahmud II , who eliminated the Janissary corps in 1826. The Serbian revolution (1804–1815) marked the beginning of an era of national awakening in the Balkans during the Eastern Question . In 1811, the fundamentalist Wahhabis of Arabia, led by

12768-513: The Jewish religious community, a practice derived ultimately from the fact that the millet ultimately designated a person's ethnicity more than a person's beliefs). Israeli secularists such as Shulamit Aloni and Uri Avnery often protested and called for abolition of this Ottoman remnant, and its replacement by a system modeled on that of the United States where religious affiliation is considered

12936-678: The Latins of Palestine, and most of the Greek islands, which once held Latin Catholic communities, come under Turkish rule. Papal response to the loss of these communities was initially a call to the crusade, but the response from the European Catholic monarchs was weak: French interest, moreover, lay in an alliance with the Turks against the Habsburgs . Furthermore, the Catholics of the Ottoman world received

13104-515: The Magnificent (1520–1566) captured Belgrade in 1521, conquered the southern and central parts of the Kingdom of Hungary as part of the Ottoman–Hungarian Wars , and, after his historic victory in the Battle of Mohács in 1526, he established Ottoman rule in the territory of present-day Hungary and other Central European territories. He then laid siege to Vienna in 1529, but failed to take

13272-527: The Ottoman Caliphate and Iberian Union was a stalemate since both were at similar population , technology and economic levels. Nevertheless, the success of the Ottoman political and military establishment was compared to the Roman Empire , despite the difference in size, by the likes of contemporary Italian scholar Francesco Sansovino and French political philosopher Jean Bodin . In the second half of

13440-606: The Ottoman Empire do not define the Muslims as being in a millet . The Ottoman Turkish version of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 uses the word " millet ", as do the Arabic and Persian versions; despite this, at the time the usage of the Arabic word " milla " was declining in favour of the word " ummah ". The Armenian, Greek, and Jewish residents did not use the word " millet " and instead described themselves as "nations" ( French : nation , Armenian: ազգ (azg), Greek: Έθνος (ethnos), and Ladino: nasyon ). The lack of use of

13608-496: The Ottoman Empire even before that time. The term was used inconsistently prior to the 19th century. The systematic use of millet as designation for non-Muslim Ottoman communities dates from the reign of Sultan Mahmud II ( r.  1808–1839 ) in the early 19th century, when official documentation came to reiterate that non-Muslim subjects were organized into three officially sanctioned millets : Greek Orthodox , Armenian , and Jewish . The bureaucrats of this era asserted that

13776-631: The Ottoman Empire gradually shrank, 7–9   million Muslims from its former territories in the Caucasus, Crimea , Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands migrated to Anatolia and Eastern Thrace . After the Empire lost the First Balkan War (1912–1913), it lost all its Balkan territories except East Thrace (European Turkey). This resulted in around 400,000 Muslims fleeing with the retreating Ottoman armies (with many dying from cholera brought by

13944-406: The Ottoman Empire was once thought to have entered a period of decline after the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, modern academic consensus posits that the empire continued to maintain a flexible and strong economy, society and military into much of the 18th century. However, during a long period of peace from 1740 to 1768, the Ottoman military system fell behind those of its chief European rivals,

14112-420: The Ottoman Empire. Norman Stillman explains that the prosperity of medieval Jews was closely tied to that of their Muslim governors. Stillman notes that during the time between the 9th and 13th centuries when Jewish culture blossomed, "medieval Islamic civilization was at its apogee". Given their rampant persecution in medieval Europe, many Jews looked favorably upon millet . In the late 19th century such groups as

14280-557: The Ottoman admirals Hayreddin Barbarossa and Dragut . France supported the Ottomans with an artillery unit during the 1543 Ottoman conquest of Esztergom in northern Hungary. After further advances by the Turks, the Habsburg ruler Ferdinand officially recognized Ottoman ascendancy in Hungary in 1547. Suleiman died of natural causes during the siege of Szigetvár in 1566. Following his death,

14448-532: The Ottoman economy, and used its position to ensure that European capital continued to penetrate the empire, often to the detriment of local Ottoman interests. The Ottoman bashi-bazouks suppressed the Bulgarian uprising of 1876, massacring up to 100,000 people in the process. The Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) ended with a decisive victory for Russia. As a result, Ottoman holdings in Europe declined sharply: Bulgaria

14616-545: The Ottoman political and administrative structure. The Ottoman System lost important domestic powers under the Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire . Many foreigners resident in the Empire were not subject to its laws, but rather those of their homelands. In addition, European powers became formal Protectors of certain groups in the empire: Russia of Eastern Orthodox groups, France of Roman Catholics, and Great Britain of Jews and other groups. Russia and Britain competed for

14784-682: The Ottoman ruling elite. Armenians formed three millets under the Ottoman rule. A wide array of other groups such as Catholics , Karaites , and Samaritans was also represented. The large number of Circassians in the Ottoman Empire was mainly due to the Crimean War . During the war and following years, many Circassians fled the conquest of their homeland by Russia . Circassians in the Ottoman Empire, despite being Muslim, mainly kept to themselves and maintained their separate identity, even having their own courts, in which they would tolerate no outside influence. The Orthodox Christians were included in

14952-547: The Ottomans were said to be declining, although this has been rejected by many scholars. By the end of Suleiman's reign, the Empire spanned approximately 877,888 sq mi (2,273,720 km ), extending over three continents. The Empire became a dominant naval force, controlling much of the Mediterranean Sea . The Empire was now a major part of European politics. The Ottomans became involved in multi-continental religious wars when Spain and Portugal were united under

15120-632: The Russian Empire (2 November 1914) and its allies France (5 November 1914) and the British Empire (5 November 1914) declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Also on 5 November 1914, the British government changed the status of the Khedivate of Egypt and Cyprus , which were de jure Ottoman territories prior to the war, to British protectorates . Greek Millet After the fall of Constantinople to

15288-644: The Russian intervention, Sultan Mahmud II could have faced the risk of being overthrown and Muhammad Ali could have even become the new Sultan. These events marked the beginning of a recurring pattern where the Sublime Porte needed the help of foreign powers to protect itself. In 1839, the Sublime Porte attempted to take back what it lost to the de facto autonomous, but de jure still Ottoman Eyalet of Egypt , but its forces were initially defeated, which led to

15456-546: The Russians. After this treaty the Ottoman Empire was able to enjoy a generation of peace in Europe, as Austria and Russia were forced to deal with the rise of Prussia . Educational and technological reforms came about, including the establishment of higher education institutions such as the Istanbul Technical University . In 1734 an artillery school was established to impart Western-style artillery methods, but

15624-617: The Safavids. The resulting Treaty of Zuhab of that same year decisively divided the Caucasus and adjacent regions between the two neighbouring empires as it had already been defined in the 1555 Peace of Amasya. The Sultanate of Women (1533–1656) was a period in which the mothers of young sultans exercised power on behalf of their sons. The most prominent women of this period were Kösem Sultan and her daughter-in-law Turhan Hatice , whose political rivalry culminated in Kösem's murder in 1651. During

15792-429: The Sultan. During the 19th century rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire , as a result of the Tanzimat reforms (1839–76), the term was used for legally protected ethno-linguistic minority groups , similar to the way other countries use the word nation . During this era, the status of these groups, their relation to the central government, and their self-governance, were codified into constitutions , elevating

15960-509: The Tanzimat era, Sultan Abdulmejid I enacted the Hatt-ı Hümayun (modern Turkish Islahat Fermânı ; "Firman of the Reforms"), which proclaimed freedom of religion and civil equality of all religious communities. It further granted the authorities in each millet greater privileges and self-governing powers, but also required oaths of allegiance to the Sultan. In March 1863, the Sultan enacted

16128-517: The Tanzimat era, a similar program was carried out within the Ottoman millets. Unlike the Armenian millets, the reform in the Greek millet was slower. Most Ottoman Greek intelligentsia were more interested in the Megali Idea than millet reform. Conservatism was also a powerful movement lest reform precipitate Bulgarian demands for their own autocephalous church. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople

16296-508: The Turks, but was again defeated at the Second Battle of Kosovo in 1448. According to modern historiography, there is a direct connection between the rapid Ottoman military advance and the consequences of the Black Death from the mid-fourteenth century onwards. Byzantine territories, where the initial Ottoman conquests were carried out, were exhausted demographically and militarily due to

16464-524: The advantage of the defeat at Vienna, culminating in the Treaty of Karlowitz (26 January 1699), which ended the Great Turkish War. The Ottomans surrendered control of significant territories, many permanently. Mustafa II (1695–1703) led the counterattack of 1695–1696 against the Habsburgs in Hungary, but was undone at the disastrous defeat at Zenta (in modern Serbia), 11 September 1697. Aside from

16632-564: The al-Saud family, revolted against the Ottomans. Unable to defeat the Wahhabi rebels, the Sublime Porte had Muhammad Ali Pasha of Kavala , the vali (governor) of the Eyalet of Egypt , tasked with retaking Arabia, which ended with the destruction of the Emirate of Diriyah in 1818. The suzerainty of Serbia as a hereditary monarchy under its own dynasty was acknowledged de jure in 1830. In 1821,

16800-485: The autonomous Deylik of Algiers . The Bey of Oran received an army from Algiers, but it failed to recapture Oran ; the siege caused the deaths of 1,500 Spaniards, and even more Algerians. The Spanish also massacred many Muslim soldiers. In 1792, Spain abandoned Oran, selling it to the Deylik of Algiers. In 1768 Russian-backed Ukrainian Haidamakas , pursuing Polish confederates, entered Balta , an Ottoman-controlled town on

16968-532: The basis of religion, alongside the other millets ( e.g. Eastern Orthodox millet , Armenian millet , etc.). They were the most geographically spread group within the empire. Ottoman Jews enjoyed privileges similar to Christians in the Ottoman Empire. In the framework of the millet they had a considerable amount of administrative autonomy and were represented by the Hakham Bashi ( Turkish : Hahambaşı حاخامباشی), who held broad powers to enact, judge, and enforce

17136-433: The bishops themselves had their own council. At the bottom of the hierarchy sat the village, which every St. George's Day would elect the village elders and kocabaşıs , or local ethnarchs. Kocabaşı s would administer the finances of institutions, collect taxes, carry out minor cases of justice, and in the 19th century, collect the bedl-i askeri . The Patriarch was traditionally elected by an assembly including members of

17304-434: The bishops. The ultimate decision on the election was made by the clerical members, and the Porte reserved the right to strike candidates they deemed inappropriate. The Patriarch administered his flock with a 12 bishop synod and a 4 bishop 8 layman mixed council, which could be combined so that some questions could give ecclesiastics large majorities. The mixed council supervised finances, schools, hospitals, and functioned as

17472-579: The border of Bessarabia in Ukraine, massacred its citizens, and burned the town to the ground. This action provoked the Ottoman Empire into the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 . The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774 ended the war and provided freedom of worship for the Christian citizens of the Ottoman-controlled provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia. By the late 18th century, after a number of defeats in

17640-708: The bulk of the Slavic-speaking population in Greece left for Bulgaria. Today, the word " millet " means "nation" or "people" in Turkish, e.g. Türk milleti ("Turkish nation"), İngiliz milleti ("English nation"), etc. It also retains its use as a religious and ethnic classification; it can also be used as a slang to classify people belonging to a particular group (not necessarily religious or ethnic), such as dolmuş çu milleti ("minivan taxi drivers people") or kadın milleti ("women folk"). Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire ( / ˈ ɒ t ə m ə n / ), also called

17808-400: The central government and to keep their power in check. Many clerics in the millet system pushed back against these reforms as they believed it was meant to weaken the millets and the power these clerics had built for themselves. These millets , refusing to give up any autonomy, slowed down the attempted reforms and their impact on the equality of religious communities. Before the turn of

17976-637: The century after Osman I, Ottoman rule had begun to extend over Anatolia and the Balkans . The earliest conflicts began during the Byzantine–Ottoman wars , waged in Anatolia in the late 13th century before entering Europe in the mid-14th century, followed by the Bulgarian–Ottoman wars and the Serbian–Ottoman wars in the mid-14th century. Much of this period was characterised by Ottoman expansion into

18144-448: The city of Kütahya within 320 km (200 mi) of the capital, Constantinople. In desperation, Sultan Mahmud II appealed to the empire's traditional arch-rival Russia for help, asking Emperor Nicholas I to send an expeditionary force to assist him. In return for signing the Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi , the Russians sent the expeditionary force which deterred Ibrahim Pasha from marching any further towards Constantinople. Under

18312-611: The city. In 1532, he made another attack on Vienna, but was repulsed in the siege of Güns . Transylvania , Wallachia and, intermittently, Moldavia , became tributary principalities of the Empire. In the east, the Ottoman Turks took Baghdad from the Persians in 1535, gaining control of Mesopotamia and naval access to the Persian Gulf . In 1555, the Caucasus became partitioned for

18480-660: The civil strife, Austria-Hungary officially annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. The last of the Ottoman censuses was performed in 1914 . Despite military reforms which reconstituted the Ottoman Modern Army , the Empire lost its North African territories and the Dodecanese in the Italo-Turkish War (1911) and almost all of its European territories in the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). The Empire faced continuous unrest in

18648-424: The common people than their ethnic origins. This community became a basic form of social organization and source of identity for all the ethnic groups inside it and most people began to identify themselves simply as "Christians". However, under Ottoman rule ethnonyms never disappeared, which indicates that some form of ethnic identification was preserved. This is evident from a Sultan's Firman from 1680 which lists

18816-630: The eastern and southern frontiers by defeating Shah Ismail of Safavid Iran , in the Battle of Chaldiran . Selim I established Ottoman rule in Egypt by defeating and annexing the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and created a naval presence on the Red Sea . After this Ottoman expansion, competition began between the Portuguese Empire and the Ottomans to become the dominant power in the region. Suleiman

18984-467: The eighteenth century. Subsequently, the millet system was justified through numerous foundation myths linking it back to the time of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1451–81), although it is now understood that no such system existed in the fifteenth century. Heads of millets, or milletbaşı ( Ethnarch ), usually had absolute secular and ecclesiastical power over their communities, being answerable only to

19152-514: The empire into a more harmonious place. Instead, this period became the story of the twilight struggle of the Empire. Members of Young Turks movement who had once gone underground now established their parties. Among them " Committee of Union and Progress ", and " Freedom and Accord Party " were major parties. On the other end of the spectrum were ethnic parties, which included Poale Zion , Al-Fatat , and Armenian national movement organised under Armenian Revolutionary Federation . Profiting from

19320-624: The empire was able to largely hold its own during the conflict, it struggled with internal dissent, especially the Arab Revolt . During this period, the Ottoman government engaged in genocide against Armenians , Assyrians , and Greeks . In the aftermath of World War I , the victorious Allied Powers occupied and partitioned the Ottoman Empire, which lost its southern territories to the United Kingdom and France . The successful Turkish War of Independence , led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk against

19488-531: The end of the Caucasian Wars , 90% of the Circassians were ethnically cleansed and exiled from their homelands in the Caucasus, fleeing to the Ottoman Empire, resulting in the settlement of 500,000 to 700,000 Circassians in the Ottoman Empire. Crimean Tatar refugees in the late 19th century played an especially notable role in seeking to modernise Ottoman education and in first promoting both Pan-Turkism and

19656-467: The end of the seventeenth century, and instead the word increasingly became associated with the Greek population of the empire, a meaning that it still bears in Turkey today. In Western Europe, the names Ottoman Empire, Turkish Empire and Turkey were often used interchangeably, with Turkey being increasingly favoured both in formal and informal situations. This dichotomy was officially ended in 1920–1923, when

19824-454: The establishment of its own schools, churches, hospitals and other facilities. These activities effectively moved the Christian population outside the framework of the Ottoman political system. During Ottoman rule, those in the millet were provided with certain protections and privileges, and were treated with preference over Catholic Christians. In some areas such as Crete, both Muslims and Orthodox Christians were permitted to attempt to convert

19992-658: The ethnic groups in the Balkan lands of the Empire as follows: Greeks (Rum), Albanians (Arnaut), Serbs (Sirf), "Vlachs" (Eflak, referring to Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, and Romanians) and the Bulgarians (Bulgar). Christian Armenians who belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church were not included as they were given a separate millet. Christians were guaranteed some limited freedoms, but they were not considered equal to Muslims , and their religious practices would have to defer to those of Muslims, in addition to various other legal limitations. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople

20160-620: The eve of 1821, the three most important centres of Greek learning were situated in Chios , Smyrna and Aivali , all three major centres of Greek commerce. Greek success was also favoured by Greek domination in the leadership of the Eastern Orthodox church. In the early 19th century, the Greek Orthodox intellectuals tried to reconceptualize the Rum millet. They argued for a new ethnic "Romaic" national identity and new Byzantine state, but their visions of

20328-491: The fact that the religious hierarchy was dominated by the Greeks. Nevertheless, ethnonyms never disappeared and some form of ethnic identity was preserved as evident from a Sultan's Firman from 1680, that lists the ethnic groups in the Balkans as follows: Greeks ( Rum ), Albanians ( Arnaut ), Serbs ( Sirf ), "Vlachs" ( Eflak , referring to the Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians), and Bulgarians (Bulgar). The Ecumenical Patriarch

20496-480: The first time between the Safavids and the Ottomans, a status quo that remained until the end of the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774) . By this partitioning as signed in the Peace of Amasya , Western Armenia , western Kurdistan , and Western Georgia fell into Ottoman hands, while southern Dagestan , Eastern Armenia , Eastern Georgia , and Azerbaijan remained Persian. In 1539, a 60,000-strong Ottoman army besieged

20664-456: The fourteenth century. The word subsequently came to be used to refer to the empire's military-administrative elite. In contrast, the term "Turk" ( Türk ) was used to refer to the Anatolian peasant and tribal population and was seen as a disparaging term when applied to urban, educated individuals. In the early modern period , an educated, urban-dwelling Turkish speaker who was not a member of

20832-622: The independence of the Middle East" in the 19th century "was not the armies of Europe but its banks". The Ottoman state, which had begun taking on debt with the Crimean War, was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1875. By 1881, the Ottoman Empire agreed to have its debt controlled by the Ottoman Public Debt Administration , a council of European men with presidency alternating between France and Britain. The body controlled swaths of

21000-507: The last Venetian stronghold in Cyprus, Famagusta. The Venetian defenders held out for 11 months against a force that at its peak numbered 200,000 men with 145 cannons; 163,000 cannonballs struck the walls of Famagusta before it fell to the Ottomans in August 1571. The Siege of Famagusta claimed 50,000 Ottoman casualties. Meanwhile, the Holy League consisting of mostly Spanish and Venetian fleets won

21168-491: The late 16th and early 17th centuries. With the Empire's population reaching 30 million people by 1600, the shortage of land placed further pressure on the government. In spite of these problems, the Ottoman state remained strong, and its army did not collapse or suffer crushing defeats. The only exceptions were campaigns against the Safavid dynasty of Persia, where many of the Ottoman eastern provinces were lost, some permanently. This 1603–1618 war eventually resulted in

21336-435: The laws among the Jews in the Ottoman Empire and often sat on the Sultan's divan . The Jewish millet received a constitution in 1865. The Jews, like the other millet communities of the Ottoman Empire, were still considered "People of the book" and protected by the Sharia Law of Islam. However, while the Jews were not viewed in the eyes of the law as equals of Muslims, they were still treated relatively well at points during

21504-405: The local Catholic population. This bias towards the Orthodox worked to secure the loyalty of those within the millet . It worked to make newly conquered citizens focus less on internal divisions and more on the conflict between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Further encouragement of Orthodox artisans who made ecclesiastical silverware, robes, and chalices made Constantinople, although under Ottoman rule,

21672-423: The loss of the Banat and the temporary loss of Belgrade (1717–1739), the Ottoman border on the Danube and Sava remained stable during the eighteenth century. Russian expansion , however, presented a large and growing threat. Accordingly, King Charles XII of Sweden was welcomed as an ally in the Ottoman Empire following his defeat by the Russians at the Battle of Poltava of 1709 in central Ukraine (part of

21840-459: The military-administrative class typically referred to themselves neither as an Osmanlı nor as a Türk , but rather as a Rūmī ( رومى ), or "Roman", meaning an inhabitant of the territory of the former Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and Anatolia. The term Rūmī was also used to refer to Turkish speakers by the other Muslim peoples of the empire and beyond. As applied to Ottoman Turkish speakers, this term began to fall out of use at

22008-405: The millet stayed strong. Only an organ designed for the patriarch's election was established which ostensibly gave the laity a large majority: 1 banker, 5 merchants, 10 artisans, 4 professional men, 8 public officials, members of a new mixed council, and 28 representatives of provincial bishoprics. But the laity were only allowed to consult and suggest other candidates from a list of three prepared by

22176-504: The millet system was a tradition dating back to the reign of Sultan Mehmed I ( r.  1413–1421 ). Many historians have accepted this claim and assumed that a millet system of this form existed since early Ottoman times. Recent scholarship has cast doubt on this idea, showing that it was rather a later political innovation, which was introduced in the rhetorical garb of an ancient tradition. The Ottoman state used religion rather than ethnicity to define each millet , and people who study

22344-465: The modern issues of ethnic and religious diversity. According to Taner Akçam , the Ottoman state was "... based on the principle of heterogeneity and difference rather than homogeneity and sameness, [which] functioned in an opposite way to modern nation-states." The term millet , which originates from the Arabic milla , had three basic meanings in Ottoman Turkish: religion, religious community and nation. The first sense derives from Quranic usage and

22512-439: The need for greater numbers of Ottoman infantry equipped with firearms, resulting in a relaxation of recruitment policy. This contributed to problems of indiscipline and outright rebelliousness within the corps, which were never fully solved. Irregular sharpshooters ( Sekban ) were also recruited, and on demobilisation turned to brigandage in the Celali rebellions (1590–1610), which engendered widespread anarchy in Anatolia in

22680-421: The new conditions of the seventeenth century and remain powerful, both militarily and economically. Historians of the mid-twentieth century once characterised this period as one of stagnation and decline, but this view is now rejected by the majority of academics. The discovery of new maritime trade routes by Western European states allowed them to avoid the Ottoman trade monopoly. The Portuguese discovery of

22848-404: The newly established Ankara -based Turkish government chose Turkey as the sole official name. At present, most scholarly historians avoid the terms "Turkey", "Turks", and "Turkish" when referring to the Ottomans, due to the empire's multinational character. As the Rum Sultanate declined in the 13th century, Anatolia was divided into a patchwork of independent Turkish principalities known as

23016-419: The nineteenth century the organization of what are now retrospectively called millets in the Ottoman Empire was not at all systematic. Rather, non-Muslims were simply given a significant degree of autonomy within their own community, without an overarching structure for the millet as a whole. The notion of distinct millets corresponding to different religious communities within the empire would not emerge until

23184-408: The occupying Allies, led to the emergence of the Republic of Turkey in the Anatolian heartland and the abolition of the Ottoman monarchy in 1922, formally ending the Ottoman Empire. The word Ottoman is a historical anglicisation of the name of Osman I , the founder of the Empire and of the ruling House of Osman (also known as the Ottoman dynasty). Osman's name in turn was the Turkish form of

23352-429: The old millet categories were used for the exchange between Greece and Turkey of the Greek Orthodox population in Turkey and Moslems in Greece. The categories were also used to establish the protection of the two remaining recognized minorities, the "Muslims of Western Thrace" (Turks, Pomaks, and Roms) and the "Greek Orthodox of Istanbul". In 1924, upon the League of Nations ' demand, a bilateral Bulgarian-Greek agreement

23520-419: The parliament. Some legal systems which developed outside the Ottoman Empire, such as those in India , Iran , Pakistan , and Bangladesh , display similar characteristics. In Egypt for instance, the application of family law – including marriage, divorce, alimony , child custody, inheritance, and burial – is based on an individual's religious beliefs. In the practice of family law, the State recognizes only

23688-406: The plague, which facilitated Ottoman expansion. In addition, slave hunting was the main economic driving force behind Ottoman conquest. Some 21st-century authors re-periodize conquest of the Balkans into the akıncı phase , which spanned 8 to 13 decades, characterized by continuous slave hunting and destruction, followed by administrative integration into the Empire. The son of Murad II, Mehmed

23856-438: The power of the laity at the expense of clergy. The word millet comes from the Arabic word millah (ملة) and literally means "nation". Abdulaziz Sachedina regards the millet system as an example of pre-modern religious pluralism , as the state recognized multiple different religious groups in exchange for some control over religious identification and the enforcement of orthodoxy. Notably, Ethnarchs principally conversed with

24024-411: The restoration of Ottoman suzerainty over Egypt Eyalet and the Levant . By the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire was called the " sick man of Europe ". Three suzerain states – the Principality of Serbia , Wallachia and Moldavia – moved towards de jure independence during the 1860s and 1870s. During the Tanzimat period (1839–1876), the government's series of constitutional reforms led to

24192-502: The secessionist subject nations and stop the nationalist movements within the Empire, but failed to succeed. With the rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire , the Rum millet began to degrade as new millets established themselves. The Bulgarian Exarchate recognized by the Ottomans in 1870 was the answer to the unilateral declaration of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Greece in 1833 and of Romania 's in 1865. The Serbian Orthodox Church also became autocephalous in 1879. During

24360-413: The side of Ottoman Eastern Orthodox subjects, and most of the Porte's political tools of pressure became ineffective. At that time the Rum millet had a great deal of power—it set its own laws and collected and distributed its own taxes. The rise of nationalism in Europe under the influence of the French Revolution had extended to the Ottoman Empire and the Rum millet became increasingly independent with

24528-467: The sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire came under increasing strain from inflation and the rapidly rising costs of warfare that were impacting both Europe and the Middle East. These pressures led to a series of crises around the year 1600, placing great strain upon the Ottoman system of government. The empire underwent a series of transformations of its political and military institutions in response to these challenges, enabling it to successfully adapt to

24696-427: The soldiers), and 400,000 non-Muslims fled territory still under Ottoman rule. Justin McCarthy estimates that from 1821 to 1922, 5.5   million Muslims died in southeastern Europe, with the expulsion of 5   million. The defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1908—1922) began with the Second Constitutional Era , a moment of hope and promise established with the Young Turk Revolution . It restored

24864-443: The start of the 17th century, the Ottomans presided over 32 provinces and numerous vassal states , which over time were either absorbed into the Empire or granted various degrees of autonomy. With its capital at Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul ) and control over a significant portion of the Mediterranean Basin , the Ottoman Empire was at the centre of interactions between the Middle East and Europe for six centuries. While

25032-562: The sultan and restored Ottoman power. The Balkan territories lost by the Ottomans after 1402, including Thessaloniki, Macedonia, and Kosovo, were later recovered by Murad II between the 1430s and 1450s. On 10 November 1444, Murad repelled the Crusade of Varna by defeating the Hungarian, Polish, and Wallachian armies under Władysław III of Poland and John Hunyadi at the Battle of Varna , although Albanians under Skanderbeg continued to resist. Four years later, John Hunyadi prepared another army of Hungarian and Wallachian forces to attack

25200-426: The synod, various Greek notables, and trade guild members. After the 18th century however, this power was informally in the hands of five metropolitans known as gerontes which themselves were suspicious of any reform that could take away their power. While the Armenians quickly and organically moved to draw up a constitution based on the French constitution, the Porte had to pressure the Greek millet for reform after

25368-408: The temple because of the "candlestick wars", eliminating the change of keys. Successive Ottoman governments had issued edicts granting primacy of access to different Christian groups which vied for control of Jerusalem's holy sites. Under the original design, the multi-faced structure of the millet system was unified under the House of Osman . The rise of nationalism in Europe under the influence of

25536-403: The terms of the Convention of Kütahya , signed on 5 May 1833, Muhammad Ali agreed to abandon his campaign against the Sultan, in exchange for which he was made the vali (governor) of the vilayets (provinces) of Crete , Aleppo , Tripoli , Damascus and Sidon (the latter four comprising modern Syria and Lebanon ), and given the right to collect taxes in Adana . Had it not been for

25704-406: The three " heavenly religions ": Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Muslim families are subject to the Personal Status Law , which draws on Sharia . Christian families are subject to canon law , and Jewish families are subject to Jewish law . In cases of family law disputes involving a marriage between a Christian woman and a Muslim man, the courts apply the Personal Status Law. Israel, too, keeps

25872-417: The tutelage of the Ecumenical Patriarch, were taken over by the Greek Phanariots during the 18th century, in 1766 and 1767 respectively. By the 19th century the Orthodox Christian millet was dominated by Greeks, which were worried of Bulgarian and Romanian autocephalism. Over the course of 1860–1862, a series of laws were produced by a constitutional committee which, taken together, make up the Basic Laws of

26040-466: The wars with Russia, some people in the Ottoman Empire began to conclude that the reforms of Peter the Great had given the Russians an edge, and the Ottomans would have to keep up with Western technology in order to avoid further defeats. Selim III (1789–1807) made the first major attempts to modernise the army , but his reforms were hampered by the religious leadership and the Janissary corps. Jealous of their privileges and firmly opposed to change,

26208-485: The word " millet " among the Christian and Jewish minorities reflected in versions of the Ottoman Constitution in their respective languages: The French version of the Ottoman Constitution used the word " communauté " in the place of " millet ", and so the others used words modeled after or based on the French: հասարակութիւն ( hasarakut'iwn ) in Armenian, общност/община ( obstina ) in Bulgarian, κοινότης ( koinotēs ) in Greek, and komunita in Judaeo-Spanish. The millet system

26376-410: The years leading up to World War I , including the 31 March Incident and two further coups in 1912 and 1913 . The Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers and was ultimately defeated. The Ottoman participation in the war began with the combined German-Ottoman surprise attack on the Black Sea coast of the Russian Empire on 29 October 1914. Following the attack,

26544-400: Was a major obstacle to Ottoman expansion on the Italian peninsula. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman Empire entered a period of expansion . The Empire prospered under the rule of a line of committed and effective Sultans . It flourished economically due to its control of the major overland trade routes between Europe and Asia. Sultan Selim I (1512–1520) dramatically expanded

26712-452: Was able to send missionaries far past the Empire's borders, reaching as far as China and India . In 1839 and 1856, reforms were attempted with the goal of creating equality between the religious communities of the Ottoman Empire. In the course of these reforms, new millets emerged, notably for Eastern Catholic and Protestant Christian communities. The heads of each millet and clerics in them were also to have their internal rule reviewed by

26880-420: Was derived from the former Eastern Roman (a.k.a. Byzantine ) subjects of the Ottoman Empire, but all Orthodox Greeks , Bulgarians , Albanians , Aromanians , Megleno-Romanians , Romanians and Serbs , as well as Georgians and Arab Melkites , were all considered part of the same millet in spite of their differences in ethnicity and language. Belonging to this Orthodox commonwealth became more important to

27048-414: Was established as an independent principality inside the Ottoman Empire; Romania achieved full independence; and Serbia and Montenegro finally gained complete independence, but with smaller territories. In 1878, Austria-Hungary unilaterally occupied the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Novi Pazar . British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli advocated restoring the Ottoman territories on

27216-484: Was far more damaging to the Ottoman navy in sapping experienced manpower than the loss of ships, which were rapidly replaced. The Ottoman navy recovered quickly, persuading Venice to sign a peace treaty in 1573, allowing the Ottomans to expand and consolidate their position in North Africa. By contrast, the Habsburg frontier had settled somewhat, a stalemate caused by a stiffening of the Habsburg defenses. The Long Turkish War against Habsburg Austria (1593–1606) created

27384-409: Was on the defensive and unlikely to present any further aggression in Europe. The Austro-Russian–Turkish War (1735–1739), which was ended by the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739, resulted in the Ottoman recovery of northern Bosnia , Habsburg Serbia (including Belgrade), Oltenia and the southern parts of the Banat of Temeswar ; but the Empire lost the port of Azov , north of the Crimean Peninsula, to

27552-423: Was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining Ottoman Empire. The financial burden of the war led the Ottoman state to issue foreign loans amounting to 5   million pounds sterling on 4 August 1854. The war caused an exodus of the Crimean Tatars , about 200,000 of whom moved to the Ottoman Empire in continuing waves of emigration. Toward

27720-437: Was recognized as the highest religious and political leader ( millet-bashi , or ethnarch ) of all Eastern Orthodox subjects of the Sultan, though in certain periods some major powers, such as Russia (under the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca ), or Britain claimed the rights of protection over the Ottoman Empire's Orthodox subjects. The Serbian Patriarchate of Peć and the Archbishopric of Ohrid , autonomous Orthodox Churches under

27888-418: Was recognized as the highest religious and political leader, or ethnarch , of all Orthodox subjects. The Serbian Patriarchate of Peć and the Bulgarian Archbishopric of Ohrid , which were autonomous Eastern Orthodox Churches under the tutelage of the Ecumenical Patriarch, were taken over by the Greek Phanariotes during the 18th century. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca , from 1774, allowed Russia to intervene on

28056-417: Was signed, known as the Politis–Kalfov Protocol , recognizing the " Greek Slavophones " as Bulgarians and guaranteeing their protection. On 2 February 1925, the Greek parliament, claiming pressure from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia , which threatened to renounce the Greek–Serbian Alliance of 1913 , refused to ratify the agreement; the refusal lasted until 10 June 1925. Under the 1927 Mollov-Kafantaris Agreement ,

28224-438: Was traditionally the most powerful non-Muslim in the Ottoman Empire. Though there were multiple ecclesiastical hierarchies, the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem (and the autocephalous church of Cyprus) were much less and powerful. The Sultan conferred the Patriarch of Constantinople supreme civil authority over all Greek Orthodox people in the Empire. The Patriarch had a synod of bishops, which helped elect him, while

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