1. Introduction
The term “millet system” is of relatively late origin and was articulated in Western Europe to denote the special mode of social-political organization in the Ottoman Empire. However, the “system” itself had already begun to disintegrate by the time of its nomination.

“Millet”, here, designates a non-Muslim community, defined primarily by its religion, and not by “ethnicity”, as the word is now understood, living in the Ottoman Empire under the guidance of its religious leader. Ottoman subjects who belonged to these “millet”s were free to exercise their religion and follow their own traditions in their education, marriage, method of sharing inheritance and other areas of domestic life. They were free to practice all this under the condition that they would be absolutely loyal to the state. Again, concerning their legal disagreements, they would be under the tutelage of their religious authority unless the problem arose between a Muslim and a non-Muslim, in which circumstance the case would be taken to the kadi, the Muslim judge.

2. The beginning of the “millet system”

The general agreement about the beginning of the “millet system” is that it started after the conquest of Constantinople when Mehmed the Conqueror came to an agreement on these lines with the new Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Gennadio Scholarios, appointed to this post by the Sultan himself soon after the event. The new Patriarch thought that co-existence with Muslims was the lesser evil, as the Catholics were sure to root out Orthodoxy. Mehmed then invited the Armenian bishop in Bursa to ordain him with a similar authority as the occupier of the new seat of the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul.

However, this quite tolerant attitude towards the non-Muslim subjects of the state is much older than Mehmed II and goes back as early as the 1290’s when the Ottoman state was in a process of foundation. But then, precedents can be uncovered in Roman practice as well as Islamic tradition. This was the practical solution for diversity, which in those times was primarily devotional, in the formation of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-linguistic political entity. The basic idea is quite simple: in an age when there is no need, and subsequently no concept of “assimilation”, a complex social order which was based on some kind of difference, could be run by an agreement between the central state and the elites of the subject populations. The most suitable criteria in the formation of these elites was, before all else, religion.

Mehmed inherited this mentality and further systematized it at a moment he felt ready to proclaim himself as the successor of the Roman Emperor after the conquest of the imperial city.

3. The "millet system" in the 17th and 18th century

These systems can prosper and flourish as long as the prosperity is general. This was how things stood in the Ottoman State for a long time- until the beginning of the eighteenth century, perhaps. The seventeenth century was quite chaotic especially in Anatolia and this must have affected the non-Muslim peasant communities quite severely. In the second half of the seventeenth century, finally free from the bloody Thirty Years War, the Europeans once more were able to turn their eyes to the East and there they saw an Ottoman Empire, much weakened, mainly by remaining outside the scope of change in Europe- isolated from world trade, quite hopeless as a sea-power, but also unable to follow the military innovations in Europe, in either the production technology of armed weapons or the new military strategies. From then on, military defeat got to be the order of the day for the Ottomans and throughout the nineteenth century, the Ottoman State was able to survive mainly because in “the European Concert”, nobody was willing to observe any other as the new owner of the Ottoman lands that were still huge. Social cohesion, even in much more homogeneous societies, is extremely difficult to preserve under such adverse internal and external conditions. The peace of the old “millet system” evaporated away.

A rather disgusting event may be mentioned at this point as an example to illustrate how such relations can deteriorate. İbrahim Paşa, grand vizier from 1718 to 1730, is known in Ottoman history as one of the earliest westernizers. He was the one to start the first printing press in Turkish, and hired the French Comte de Bonnevale to start reform in the Army (always a priority) and the initiator of several other innovations; these innovations drew a lot of conservative reaction on them and the process came to an abrupt halt in 1730 when a rebellion broke out in Istanbul, with the rebels chanting slogans about a return to the sharia. İbrahim Paşa fell victim to this rebellion along with his small coterie of “reformers”.

However, during his office, three Jews were executed for baking bread with the blood of several Muslim children –an accusation common enough in certain Christian countries but the first of its kind in the Ottoman Empire. Later on, one can see this event develop into a pattern, where the “westernizer” carries out a certain action in order to appease reactions that inevitably expressed themselves in a religious vein.

The Turks in the Ottoman Empire were mainly the peasants and the farmers, and also the soldiers, but not as extensively as they are believed to be either in Turkey or abroad. During the first few centuries of the Empire, in the semi-feudal timar system , the holders of fiefs were obliged to join the Army in wartime with the necessary number of fighters in return for their holding of the land. However, as early as the sixteenth century, this cavalry force was getting outdated and the “Kapıkulu Army”, the Ottoman Guard, recruited from Christian peasant families, with their firearms, bore the brunt of war.

The Ottoman Palace, averse to capital accumulation just as it was to possible competition coming from feudal autonomy, preferred to see its non-Muslim subjects carry on the more significant economic activity. One could see Armenian merchants in Budapest as well as Lvov and a Greek (perhaps from Alexandria) trading in Baghdad. Cities had mixed populations, with different living quarters, that were not to be defined as ghettoes in any technical sense. On the European continent, Turks (or Muslims, such as Bosniak, in Bosnia) were more commonly seen as the feudal class (in the Ottoman sense of “feudal”) while the peasantry was predominantly the native population –Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, etc. In Anatolia, Turkish-Muslim peasants were much more numerous. Consequently, in a world where “economy” began to mean more and more, non-Muslim subjects, otherwise devoid of any privileges, began to make use of their career that used to be considered quite menial in the heyday of the Empire. There were, of course, Muslims involved in trade, but they were not as successful as the Christians –the Greeks, for instance, more or less monopolized maritime trade.

4. The "millet system" in the 19th century

In the nineteenth century, following the Industrial Revolution, trade between the Ottomans and the Western world graually became quite uneven, the Ottomans obliged to buy manufactured goods and able to export mainly raw material or agricultural products in return. Being Christian helped the Ottoman non-Muslim minorities in building commercial networks. For example, French missionaries had spent a lot of effort to convert Armenians to Catholicism. In the first half of the nineteenth century, after a lot of pressure, the Armenian Catholics were recognized by the State as a millet separate from other Armenians. The members of this community were also much more prosperous compared to the average Gregorian Armenian.

There were additional political problems aggravating the problems among the various components of Ottoman society. For various “powers” of the time, the nineteenth century, “persecution of the Christian minorities” gradually turned into an instrument for intervening in Ottoman affairs, for inciting wars which invariably ended in defeat and loss of land for the decaying Empire. The Russians declared themselves the “protectors of the Orthodox” in Ottoman lands. The French followed suit by imposing a status as protectors of the Catholics for themselves. Persecution there certainly was, in many cases emanating from the state, but relations between the Muslim elements of society were no longer peaceful either. There are certain expressions which have survived to our day from the nineteenth century Ottoman jargon. “To stuff one’s bell with hay”, for instance, means to render someone helpless and obviously originates from forcefully silencing the bells of some Christian church. Such language hardly harbingers good relations between the concerned parties. But, at the same time, the interventions of the “powers” were more inspired by real-politics than philanthropy and they hardly helped to improve the situation.

The relations between the non-Muslim communities were also far from idyllic. One significant symptom of the state of affairs is clear in the words of the Greek Patriarch commenting on the Gülhane Decree of 1839, which turned “subjects” of the Sultan into free and equal “citizens” (on paper): “What a good job you have done”, said the Patriarch, “Now we shall be equal with all those Jews and Armenians.”

Beginning with Greece in the 1820’s, the compact nationalities of the Balkans strove for, and eventually acquired, their independence from the Ottoman rule: Serbs, Romanians, Bulgarians, and finally, Albanians. At the end of World War I, the Arabs also formed their nation-states. But what remained from the Ottoman Empire as the Republic of Turkey still had a population that was far from ideal from the poit of view of an ethnic purist. This meant that now, strife which would be more ethnic than religious, would continue –and it did.

5. The end of the "millet system"

Multi-ethnic empires thrived for centuries in this part of the world, not only in the Ottoman lands but in the Austrian and Russian Empires as well. The “nation-state” of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was to be built on an entirely different logic and set of principles. Because of this drastic transformation from one type of social organization into another, the nationalities here are: 1) dissatisfied with their national borders as they are, which means that the hard-core nationalists in each country have their own version of a “greater ...”; 2) usually on bad terms with their next-door neighbours but perhaps friendlier towards those with whom they had no common frontiers; 3) suspicious of the “minority” sharing the same ethnicity as the neighbour who is seen as the “fifth column”. There are many problems to be solved in all these areas, and problems may be severer in some of these countries than they are in others.