Orthodoxy under Turkish Rule
In 1453 Constantinople fell to the army of the Turkish Sultan Muhammad II. By 1460 Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece were parts of the Ottoman Empire, and the Romanian provinces soon came under Turkish suzerainty, although they were never incorporated into the Empire.
With the exception of Russia, the whole of the Orthodox world was to remain under the Muslim Turkish yoke until the nineteenth century.The Turks in theory allowed the Church considerable freedom. In practice the Sultan possessed absolute power, and Christians were often treated as cattle. As the Turkish Empire grew weaker and more corrupt, so the treatment of Christians grew worse. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were particularly difficult times for the Orthodox in the Empire. Financial oppression, persecution and frequent killings reduced the Christian population to misery, and not a few Christians apostatised and became Muslims.
The Turks regarded Christianity as the religion of the Greeks, and the Patriarch of Constantinople as the head of the Greek milet, or nation, as well as their spiritual leader, and so as responsible for their civil administration. Completely dependent on the sultans, patriarchs were frequently deposed and replaced by the civil power. In 1821 Gregory V was hanged at the gate of the Patriarchate in Istanbul on Easter Day for his support of the Greek revolt against Turkish rule. The position of Christians actually grew worse when in 1856 they were given equal rights with Muslims within the Empire, which deprived them of the possibility of outside protection.
During the Turkish period education, both general and theological, declined. From the sixteenth century Western influences, both Catholic and Protestant, made serious inroads into the Orthodox tradition. The Confession of Cyril Lukaris, Patriarch of Constantinople, published in 1629, had a decidedly Protestant character.
Persistent efforts were made by Rome to persuade the Orthodox to recognise the Papacy, and through their provision of schools Catholic missionaries exercised considerable influence on the Greeks. But in spite of the political and economic oppression to which the Orthodox were subjected, in spite of the decay of education and the pressure exerted by Western Churches, and in spite of the narrowing effects of nationalism within the Church, the inner life of Orthodoxy was not quite extinguished. The publication in 1782 in Venice of the Philocalia is evidence of the continuing vitality of the Orthodox spiritual tradition. A collection of ascetical and mystical writings from the fourth century to the fifteenth, made by St Macarius and St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain (as Mount Athos was called), it was translated from Greek into Slavonic in 1793 by Paissy Velichkovsky, a monk of Russian origin living at the monastery of Neamt in Moldavia, and has become one of the most valued books in modern Orthodoxy and in other churches.The Turkish period saw the final stage in the process by which Orthodoxy became, in the Greek mind, inextricably linked with Hellenism. After the Crusades Orthodoxy became Eastern and Greek, in opposition to the Latin West. Increasingly Hellenism, which for the early Church Fathers meant paganism, came to be regarded as the source of the Greek national tradition. The fall of the Byzantine Empire only served to reinforce the significance of Hellenism, whose symbolic embodiment became the Ecumenical Patriarch. The Patriarch inherited, in part, the role of the Emperor, and used, as all Orthodox bishops came to do, some of the imperial insignia: thesakkos (the emperor’s formal robe), the mitre, and the double-headed eagle. Increasingly, under Turkish rule, the Patriarchate of Constantinople tried to impose Greek culture on the Slav and Romanian Churches. From 1397 Greek clergy were sent to Bulgaria. The last trace of Serbian ecclesiastical independence vanished in 1775 with the suppression of the Patriarchate of Pec.
The Arabic-speaking Orthodox churches in the Middle East came under the authority of Constantinople, which appointed Greek patriarchs to Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Orthodoxy, having first become Eastern, under the Turks also became national. The non-Greek Orthodox were forced into an anti-Greek attitude in order to preserve their own national traditions. When the Turkish Empire began to decay finally in the nineteenth century, national liberation movements led to the establishment of independent Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian and Romanian states, each with its own national Orthodox Church aspiring to complete independence from Constantinople. In 1833 the Church of Greece became self-governing under its Holy Synod, presided over by the Archbishop of Athens. The Orthodox Church in Romania claimed independence in 1859, and it was granted in 1885. In 1879 the Serbian Church became autocephalous (i.e. independent within the Orthodox fold), with the approval of Constantinople, and in 1920 the Patriarchate was restored in Belgrade. The Bulgarian Church claimed autocephaly under an Exarch in 1870, and was excommunicated by Constantinople for the heresy of philetism, or nationalism. Only in 1945 was the breach healed. The Metropolitan of Sofia took the title of patriarch in 1953, receiving recognition by Constantinople in 1961. In Romania the Holy Synod was replaced as supreme church authority by a patriarch in 1923.