From its origins in the fourteenth century, the empire’s ruling Osman dynasty had drawn its legitimacy from the ideal of a continuous holy war to extend the frontiers of Islam. But the Ottomans were pragmatists, not religious fundamentalists, and in their Christian lands, the richest and most populous in the empire, they tempered their ideological animosity towards the infidels with a practical approach to their exploitation for imperial interests. They levied extra taxes on the non-Muslims, looked down on them as inferior ‘beasts’ (rayah), and treated them unequally in various humiliating ways (in Damascus, for example, Christians were forbidden to ride animals of any kind).7 But they let them keep their religion, did not generally persecute or try to convert them, and, through the millet system of religious segregation, which gave Church leaders powers within their separate, faith-based ‘nations’ or millets, they even allowed non-Muslims a certain measure of autonomy.
The millet system had developed as a means for the Osman dynasty to use religious élites as the intermediaries in newly conquered territories. As long as they submitted to Ottoman authority, ecclesiastical leaders were allowed to exercise a limited control over education, public order and justice, tax collection, charity and Church affairs, subject to the approval of the Sultan’s Muslim officials (even for such matters, for example, as the repair of a church roof). In this sense, the millet system not only served to reinforce the ethnic and religious hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire – with the Muslims at the top and all the other millets (Orthodox, Gregorian Armenian, Catholic and Jewish) below them – which encouraged Muslim prejudice against the Christians and the Jews; it also encouraged these minorities to express their grievances and organize their struggle against Muslim rule through their national Churches, which was a major source of instability in the empire.
Nowhere was this more apparent than among the Orthodox, the largest Christian millet with 10 million of the Sultan’s subjects. The patriarch in Constantinople was the highest Orthodox authority in the Ottoman Empire. He spoke for the other Orthodox patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. In a wide range of secular affairs he was the real ruler of the ‘Greeks’ (meaning all those who observed the Orthodox rite, including Slavs, Albanians, Moldavians and Wallachians) and represented their interests against both the Muslims and the Catholics. The patriarchate was controlled by the Phanariots, a powerful caste of Greek (and Hellenized Romanian and Albanian) merchant families originally from the Phanar district of Constantinople (from which they derived their name). Since the beginning of the eighteenth century the Phanariots had provided the Ottoman government with the majority of its dragomans (foreign secretaries and interpreters), purchased many other senior posts, assumed control of the Orthodox Church in Moldavia and Wallachia, where they were the main provincial governors (hospodars), and used their domination of the patriarchate to promote their Greek imperial ideals. The Phanariots saw themselves as the heirs of the Byzantine Empire and dreamed of restoring it with Russian help. But they were hostile to the influence of the Russian Church, which had promoted the Bulgarian clergy as a Slavic rival to Greek control of the patriarchate, and they were afraid of Russia’s own ambitions in Ottoman Europe.
During the first quarter of the nineteenth century the other national Churches (Bulgarian and Serb) gradually assumed an equal importance to the Greek-dominated patriarchy in Constantinople. Greek domination of Orthodox affairs, including education and the courts, was unacceptable to many Slavs, who looked increasingly to their own Churches for their national identity and leadership against the Turks. Nationalism was a potent force among the different groups of Balkan Christians – Serbs, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Wallachians and Greeks – who united on the basis of their language, culture and religion to break free from Ottoman control. The Serbs were the first to win their liberation, by means of Russian-sponsored uprisings between 1804 and 1817, leading to the Turkish recognition of Serb autonomy and eventually to the establishment of a principality of Serbia with its own constitution and a parliament headed by the Obrenovi dynasty. But such was the weakness of the Ottoman Empire that its collapse in the rest of the Balkans appeared to be only a question of time.
Long before the Tsar described the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’, on the eve of the Crimean War, the idea that it was about to crumble had become a commonplace. ‘Turkey cannot stand, she is falling of herself,’ the Prince of Serbia told the British consul in Belgrade in 1838; ‘the revolt of her misgoverned provinces will destroy her.’8
