Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DEFINING AND DEFENDING BELIEVERS t 197
were all equal before the Islamic law, granted the same privileges
and subject to the same restrictions. In 1453, the same year that he
took Constantinople from its last Eastern Christian defenders, the
Ottoman sultan Mehmed II organized his “flock” (reaya), that is,
the 90 percent of his subjects who were not part of the Ottoman
ruling institution. The flock was divided horizontally according to
profession and occupation, but Mehmed introduced a new vertical
distinction by millet, or religious community. In theory, the Muslims
of the flock constituted a millet along with the others, but in
reality the millet organization applied only to the Jews, the Armenians,
and Orthodox Christians.
Or so they were called. The Orthodox millet was headed by the
newly appointed Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople,
George Scholarios, known as Gennadius II, a monk strongly opposed
to all plans for reunion with the Roman Church. His millet
jurisdiction included not only the Greek Christians but the
Churches of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia, whose liturgical language
was not Greek but Slavonic. The members of these latter
Churches all spoke Serbo-Croatian as their vernacular, and all of
them were at the time of the Ottoman conquest well on their way
to becoming jurisdictionally independent (autocephalous) Christian
Churches. Likewise, the Armenian patriarch in Constantinople
presided over the fortunes not only of his own Church but of
the bundled Monophysite Churches in the Ottoman lands, notably
the Copts of Egypt and the Jacobites of Syria and Iraq. The Jewish
millet was presided over by the chief rabbi of Istanbul and included
both Sephardic and the less numerous and influential Ashkenazi
Jews of the empire.
The sultan dealt with his non-Muslim subjects through the
heads of the millets, who naturally favored their own proper constituents.
In the Balkans this led to increased estrangement between
the Slavic Churches and the Greek Orthodox Church under
whose jurisdiction they were now placed. For their part, the three
millets became in effect Ottoman institutions, organs of administration
in the sprawling bureaucracy of the empire.