Despite frequently being referred to as a "system", before the nineteenth century the organization of what are now retrospectively called millets in the Ottoman Empire was not at all systematic.
During this era, the status of these groups, their relation to the central government, and their self-governance, were codified into constitutions, elevating the power of the laity at the expense of clergy.
[6] Other authors interpret the millet system as one form of non-territorial autonomy and consider it as such a potentially universal solution to the modern issues of ethnic and religious diversity.
[7] 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.
"[8] The term millet, which originates from the Arabic milla, had three basic meanings in Ottoman Turkish: religion, religious community and nation.
[11] 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.
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.
The Jewish community, in particular, prospered under Ottoman rule, and its ranks were swelled with the arrival of Jews who were expelled from Spain.
[21] 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 the fact that the religious hierarchy was dominated by the Greeks.
[22] The Ecumenical Patriarch 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.
[33] 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 the laws among the Jews in the Ottoman Empire and often sat on the Sultan's divan.
[35] 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.
[38] After the Fall of Constantinople, the only Latin Catholic group in the Sultan's domain were the Genoese who lived in the Byzantine capital.
[39] Over the next decades, Turkish armies pushed into the Balkans, overrunning the Catholic populations of Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, and Hungary.
The Tanzimat reforms aimed to encourage Ottomanism among the subject nations and stop the rise of secessionist nationalist movements.
In 1856, during 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.
[47] These two reforms, which were theoretically perfect examples of social change by law, caused serious stress on the Ottoman political and administrative structure.
Russia and Britain competed for 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.
[49] Tension began among the Catholic and Orthodox monks in Palestine with France channeling resources to increase its influence in the region from 1840.
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 the temple because of the "candlestick wars", eliminating the change of keys.
[49] Successive Ottoman governments had issued edicts granting primacy of access to different Christian groups which vied for control of Jerusalem's holy sites.
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 the millet system created a strain of thought (a new form of personal identification) which made nationality synonymous with religion under the Ottoman flag.
Patriarch Nerses Varjabedyan expressed his position on Ottoman Armenians to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury on 13 April 1878.
[51]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 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.
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 was signed, known as the Politis–Kalfov Protocol, recognizing the "Greek Slavophones" as Bulgarians and guaranteeing their protection.