History of the Eastern Orthodox Church under the Ottoman Empire

Orthodoxy, however, was very strong in Russia which had recently acquired an autocephalous status; and thus Moscow called itself the Third Rome, as the cultural heir of Constantinople.

As a result of the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, and the Fall of Constantinople, the entire Orthodox communion of the Balkans and the Near East became suddenly isolated from the West.

It is, in part, due to this geographical and intellectual confinement that the voice of Eastern Orthodoxy was not heard during the Reformation in sixteenth century Europe.

The patriarch, as the highest ranking hierarch, was thus invested with civil and religious authority and made ethnarch, head of the entire Christian Orthodox population.

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.

Its name was derived from the Byzantine (Roman) subjects of the Ottoman Empire, but all Orthodox Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Vlachs and Serbs, as well as Georgians and Arabs were considered part of the same millet in spite of their differences in ethnicity and language.

[3] This community became 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.

This is evident from a Sultan's Firman from 1680 which lists the ethnic groups in the Balkan lands of the Empire as follows: Greeks (Rum), Albanians (Arnaut), Serbs (Sirf), Vlachs (Eflak) and the Bulgarians (Bulgar).

The Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji from 1774, allowed Russia to intervene on 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 the establishment of its own schools, churches, hospitals and other facilities.

It spread among the urban population of Vlach, Slavic and Albanian origin and it started to view itself increasingly as Greek.

The Bulgarian Exarchate recognized by the Ottomans in 1870 was only a link in a series of events following the unilateral declaration of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Greece in 1833 and of Romania in 1865.

As result, intense ethnic and national rivalries among the Balkan peoples emerged at the eve of the 20th century in Macedonia.

That was followed by series of conflicts among Greeks (Grecomans), Serbs (Serbomans), Bulgarians (Bulgarophiles) and Vlachs (Rumanophiles) into the region.

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.

Devshirmeh was the system of the collection of young men from conquered Christian lands by the Ottoman sultans as a form of regular taxation in order to build a loyal slave army, formerly largely composed of war captives, and the class of (military) administrators called the "Janissaries", or other servants such as tellak in hamams.