THE “TOLERANT” MILLET SYSTEM— FROM OTTOMAN JIHAD TO OTTOMAN DHIMMITUDE
Molla Khosrew (d. 1480) was a celebrated writer and Hanafi jurist who was appointed the Ottoman Shaykh- al-Islam, the leading clerical authority, by Sultan Mehmed II in 1469. He wrote authoritative, widely cited legal works, which reiterated these classical views on jihad:
[J]ihad is a fard al-kifaya, that is, that one must begin the fight against the enemy, even when he [the enemy] may not have taken the initiative to fight, because the Prophet...early on...allowed believers to defend themselves, later, however, he ordered them to take the initiative at certain times of the year, that is, at the end of the haram months, saying, “Kill the idolaters wherever you find them.” (Q9:5).
He finally ordered fighting without limitations, at all times and in all places, saying, “Fight those who do not believe in God, and in the Last Day.” (Q9:29); there are also other [similar] verses on the subject. This shows that it is a fard al-kifaya.48The contemporary Turkish scholar of Ottoman history Halil Inalcik has emphasized how this conception of jihad—as formulated by Molla Khosrew and both his predecessors and followers—was a primary motivation for the conquests of the Ottoman Turks:
The ideal of gaza, Holy War, was an important factor in the foundation and development of the Ottoman state. Society in the frontier principalities conformed to a particular cultural pattern imbued with the ideal of continuous Holy War and continuous expansion of the Dar ul Islam—the realms of Islam—until they covered the whole world.49
Incited by pious Muslim theologians, these ghazis were at the vanguard of both the Seljuk and Ottoman jihad conquests. A. E. Vacalopoulos highlights the role of the dervishes during the Ottoman campaigns:
fanatical dervishes and other devout Muslim leaders, constantly toiled for the dissemination of Islam.
They had done so from the very beginning of the Ottoman state and had played an important part in the consolidation and extension of Islam. These dervishes were particularly active in the uninhabited frontier regions of the east. Here they settled down with their families, attracted other settlers, and thus became the virtual founders of whole new villages, whose inhabitants invariably exhibited the same qualities of deep religious fervor. From places such as these, the dervishes or their agents would emerge to take part in new military enterprises for the extension of the Islamic state.50The Islamization of Asia Minor was complemented by parallel and subsequent Ottoman jihad campaigns in the Balkans. Vacalopoulos, commenting on the initial Ottoman forays into Thrace during the mid-fourteenth century, and Dimitar Angelov, who provides an overall assessment highlighting the later campaigns of Murad II (1421-1451), and Mehmed II (1451-1481) elucidate the impact of the Ottoman jihad on the vanquished Balkan populations:
(Vacalopoulos) From the very beginning of the Turkish onslaught [in Thrace] under Suleiman [son of Sultan Orchan], the Turks tried to consolidate their position by the forcible imposition of Islam. If [the Ottoman historian] Sukrullah is to be believed, those who refused to accept the Moslem faith were slaughtered and their families enslaved. “Where there were bells,” writes the same author [i.e., Sukrullah], “Suleiman broke them up and cast them into fires. Where there were churches he destroyed them or converted them into mosques. Thus, in place of bells there were now muezzins. Wherever Christian infidels were still found, vassalage was imposed on their rulers. At least in public they could no longer say ‘kyrie eleison’ but rather ‘There is no God but Allah’; and where once their prayers had been addressed to Christ, they were now to “Muhammad, the prophet of Allah.’”51
(Angelov)...[T]he conquest of the Balkan Peninsula accomplished by the Turks over the course of about two centuries caused the incalculable ruin of material goods, countless massacres, the enslavement and exile of a great part of the population—in a word, a general and protracted decline of productivity, as was the case with Asia Minor after it was occupied by the same invaders.
This decline in productivity is all the more striking when one recalls that in the mid-fourteenth century, as the Ottomans were gaining a foothold on the peninsula, the States that existed there—Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia—had already reached a rather high level of economic and cultural development.. The campaigns of Mourad II (1421-1451) and especially those of his successor, Mahomet II (1451-1481) in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania and in the Byzantine princedom of the Peloponnesus, were of a particularly devastating character. During the campaign that the Turks launched in Serbia in 1455-1456, Belgrade, Novo-Bardo and other towns were to a great extent destroyed. The invasion of the Turks in Albania during the summer of 1459 caused enormous havoc. According to the account of it written by Kritobulos, the invaders destroyed the entire harvest and leveled the fortified towns that they had captured. The country was afflicted with further devastation in 1466 when the Albanians, after putting up heroic resistance, had to withdraw into the most inaccessible regions, from which they continued the struggle. Many cities were likewise ruined during the course of the campaign led by Mahomet II in 1463 against Bosnia— among them Yaytze, the capital of the Kingdom of Bosnia.. But it was the Peloponnesus that suffered most from the Turkish invasions. It was invaded in 1446 by the armies of Murad II, which destroyed a great number of places and took thousands of prisoners. Twelve years later, during the summer of 1458, the Balkan Peninsula was invaded by an enormous Turkish army under the command of Mahomet II and his first lieutenant Mahmoud Pasha. After a siege that lasted four months, Corinth fell into enemy hands. Its walls were razed, and many places that the sultan considered useless were destroyed. The work by Kritobulos contains an account of the Ottoman campaigns, which clearly shows us the vast destruction caused by the invaders in these regions. Two years later another Turkish army burst into the Peloponnesus. This time Gardiki and several other places were ruined. Finally, in 1464, for the third time, the destructive rage of the invaders was aimed at the Peloponnesus. That was when the Ottomans battled the Venetians and leveled the city of Argos to its foundations.52In examining how the non-Muslim populations vanquished by the Ottoman jihad campaigns fared, it is useful to begin with the Jews, the least numerous population, who are also generally believed to have had quite a positive experience. Joseph Hacker studied the fate of Jews during their initial absorption into the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His research questions the uncritical view that from its outset the “Jewish experience” in the Ottoman Empire “was a calm, peaceful, and fruitful one.” Hacker notes that the Jews, like other inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire, suffered heavily from the Ottoman jihad conquests and policies of colonization and population transfer (i.e., the surgun system). This explains the disappearance of several Jewish communities, including Salonica, and their founding anew by Spanish Jewish immigrants.53 Hacker observes, specifically:
[T]he fate of the Jews was not different from that of Christians. Many were killed; others were taken captive, and children were [enslaved, forcibly converted to Islam, and] brought to devshirme [forced enslavement of infidel children in periodic “levies”].54
Three summary conclusions are drawn by Hacker:
(1) Strong anti-Ottoman feelings prevailed in some Byzantine Jewish circles in the first decades after the fall of Constantinople. (2) Mehmed II's protective policies toward non-Muslims, especially Jews, were not continued by Bayezid II and there is evidence that under his rule the Jews suffered severe restrictions in their religious life. (3) The friendly policies of Mehmed on the one hand, and the good reception, initially, by Bayezid II of Spanish Jewry on the other, cause the Jewish writers of the sixteenth century to overlook both the destruction which Byzantine Jewry suffered during the Ottoman conquests and the later outbursts of oppression under both Bayezid II and Selim I.55
Ivo Andric analyzed the rayah (meaning “herd” and “to graze a herd”) or dhimmi condition imposed upon the indigenous Christian population of Bosnia, for four centuries.
Those native Christian inhabitants who refused to apostatize to Islam lived under the OttomanKanun-i-Rayah, which merely reiterated the essential regulations of dhimmitude originally formulated by Muslim jurists and theologians in the seventh and eighth centuries CE.— Andric's presentation musters:
a wealth of irrefutable evidence that the main points of the Kanun, just those that cut the deepest into the moral and economic life of Christians, remained in full force right up to the end of Turkish rule and as long as the Turks had the power to apply them...[thus] it was inevitable that the rayah decline to a status that was economically inferior and dependent.57
The prevailing discriminatory conditions were exacerbated by Bosnia's serving as either a battlefield or staging ground during two centuries of Ottoman razzias and formal jihad campaigns against Hungary.58 Overcome by excessive taxation and conscript labor:
Christians therefore began to abandon their houses and plots of land situated in level country and along the roads and to retreat back into the mountains. And as they did so, moving ever higher into inaccessible regions, Muslims took over their former sites.59
Moreover, those Christians living in towns suffered from the rayah system's mandated impediments to commercial advancement by non-Muslims:
Islam from the very outset, excluded such activities as making wine, breeding pigs, and selling pork products from commercial production and trade. But additionally Bosnian Christians were forbidden to be saddlers, tanners, or candlemakers or to trade in honey, butter, and certain other items. Countrywide, the only legal market day was Sunday. Christians were thus deliberately faced with the choice between ignoring the precepts of their religion, keeping their shops open and working on Sundays, or alternatively, forgoing participation in the market and suffering material loss thereby. Even in 1850, in Jukic’s “Wishes and Entreaties” we find him beseeching “his Imperial grace” to put an end to the regulation that Sunday be market day.60
Christians were also forced to pay disproportionately higher taxes than Muslims, including the intentionally degrading non-Muslim poll-tax.
The specific Kanun-i- Rayah stipulations which prohibited the rayahs from riding a saddled horse, carrying a saber or any other weapon in or out of doors, selling wine, letting their hair grow, or wearing wide sashes, were strictly enforced until the mid-nineteenth century. Hussamudin- Pasa, in 1794, issued an ordinance which prescribed the exact color and type of clothing the Bosnian rayah had to wear. Barbers were prohibited from shaving Muslims with the same razors used for Christians. Even in bathhouses, Christians were required to have specifically marked towels and aprons to avoid confusing their laundry with laundry designated for Muslims. Until at least 1850, and in some parts of Bosnia, well into the 1860s, a Christian, upon encountering a Muslim, was required to jump down from his (unsaddled) horse, move to the side of the road, and wait for the latter to pass.61Christianity’s loud and most arresting symbol, church bells, Andric notes, always drew close, disapproving Turkish scrutiny, and, “wherever there invasions would go, down came the bells, to be destroyed or melted into cannon.”62 Predictably:
Until the second half of the nineteenth century, “nobody in Bosnia could even think of bells or bell towers.” Only in 1860 did the Sarajevo priest Fra Grgo Martic manage to get permission from Topal Osman-Pasa to hang a bell at the church in Kresevo. Permission was granted, though, only on condition that “at first the bell be rung softly to let the Turks get accustomed to it little by little.” And still the Muslim of Kresevo were complaining, even in 1875, to Sarajevo that “the Turkish ear and ringing bells cannot coexist in the same place at the same time”; and Muslim women would beat on their copper pots to drown out the noise...on 30 April 1872, the new Serbian Orthodox church also got a bell. But since the...Muslims had threatened to riot, the military had to be called in to ensure that the ceremony might proceed undisturbed.63
The imposition of such disabilities, Andric observes, extended beyond church ceremonies, as reflected by a 1794 proclamation of the Serbian Orthodox church in Sarajevo warning Christians not to
sing during.outings, nor in their houses, nor in other places. The saying “Don’t sing too loud, this village is Turk” testifies eloquently to the fact that this item of the Kanun [- i-Rayah] was applied outside church life as well as within.64
Andric concludes, “for their Christian subjects, their [Ottoman Turkish] hegemony brutalized custom and meant a step to the rear in every respect.”65
Paul Ricaut, the British consul in Smyrna, journeyed extensively within the Ottoman Empire during the midseventeenth century, becoming a keen observer of its sociopolitical milieu. In 1679 (i.e., prior to the Ottomans being repulsed at Vienna in September, 1683; see later discussion of Ottoman “tolerance”), Ricaut published these important findings: (1) many Christians were expelled from their churches, which the Ottoman Turks converted into mosques; (2) the “Mysteries of the Altar” were hidden in subterranean vaults and sepulchers whose roofs were barely above the surface of the ground; (3) fearing Turkish hostility and oppression, Christian priests, particularly in eastern Asia Minor, were compelled to live with great caution and officiate in private obscurity; (4) not surprisingly, to escape these prevailing conditions, many Christians apostatized to Islam.66
The phenomenon of forcible conversion, including coercive en masse conversions, persisted throughout the sixteenth century, as discussed by Constantelos in his analysis of neomartyrdom in the Ottoman Empire:
[M]ass forced conversions were recorded during the caliphates of Selim I (1512-1520)...Selim II (1566— 1574), and Murat III (1574—1595). On the occasion of some anniversary, such as the capture of a city, or a national holiday, many rayahs were forced to apostasize. On the day of the circumcision of Mohammed III great numbers of Christians (Albanians, Greeks, and Slavs) were forced to convert to Islam.67
Reviewing the martyrology of Christians victimized by the Ottomans from the conquest of Constantinople (1453), through the final phases of the Greek War of Independence (1828), Constantelos indicates:
[T]he Ottoman Turks condemned to death eleven Ecumenical Patriarchs of Constantinople, nearly one hundred bishops, and several thousand priests, deacons, and monks. It is impossible to say with certainty how many men of the cloth were forced to apostatize.68
However, the more mundane cases illustrated by Constantelos are of equal significance in revealing the plight of Christians under Ottoman rule, through at least 1867:
Some were accused of insulting the Muslim faith or of throwing something against the wall of a mosque. Others were accused of sexual advances toward a Turk; still others of making a public confession such as “I will become a Turk” without meaning it.69
Constantelos concludes:
The story of the neomartyrs indicates that there was no liberty of conscience in the Ottoman Empire and that religious persecution was never absent from the state. Justice was subject to the passions of judges as well as of the crowds, and it was applied with a double standard, lenient for Muslims and harsh for Christians and others. The view that the Ottoman Turks pursued a policy of religious toleration in order to promote a fusion of the Turks with the conquered populations is not sustained by the facts.70
Those scholars who continue to adhere to the roseate narrative of Ottoman “tolerance,” the notion that an “easy-going tolerance, resting on an assumption not only of superior religion, but also of superior power,” which it is claimed, persisted in the Ottoman Empire until the end of the seventeenth century (i.e., after the Turks were repulsed at Vienna in 1683), must address certain basic questions. Why has the quite brutal Ottoman devshirme-janissary system, which, from the mid to late fourteenth, through early eighteenth centuries, enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam an estimated five hundred thousand to one million nonMuslim (primarily Balkan Christian) adolescent males, been characterized exclusively as a benign form of social advancement, jealously pined for by “ineligible” Ottoman Muslim families?71
Scholars who have conducted serious, detailed studies of the devshirme-janissary system do not share such hagiographic views of this Ottoman institution. Speros Vryonis Jr., for example, makes these deliberately understated, but cogent observations:
in discussing the devshirme we are dealing with the large numbers of Christians who, in spite of the material advantages offered by conversion to Islam, chose to remain members of a religious society which was denied first class citizenship. Therefore the proposition advanced by some historians, that the Christians welcomed the devshirme as it opened up wonderful opportunities for their children, is inconsistent with the fact that these Christians had not chosen to become Muslims in the first instance but had remained Christians.72
Vasiliki Papoulia highlights the continuous desperate, often-violent struggle of the Christian populations against this forcefully imposed Ottoman levy:
It is obvious that the population strongly resented...this measure [and the levy] could be carried out only by force. Those who refused to surrender their sons—the healthiest, the handsomest and the most intelligent—were on the spot put to death by hanging. Nevertheless we have examples of armed resistance. In 1565 a revolt took place in Epirus and Albania. The inhabitants killed the recruiting officers and the revolt was put down only after the sultan sent five hundred janissaries in support of the local sanjak-bey. We are better informed, thanks to the historic archives of Yerroia, about the uprising in Naousa in 1705.. Some of [the rebels] were later arrested and put to death..
Since there was no possibility of escaping [the levy,] the population resorted to several subterfuges. Some left their villages and fled to certain cities that enjoyed exemption from the child levy or migrated to Venetian-held territories. The result was a depopulation of the countryside. Others had their children marry at an early age.. Nicephorus Angelus.states that at times the children ran away on their own initiative, but when they heard that the authorities had arrested their parents and were torturing them to death, returned and gave themselves up. La Giulletiere cites the case of a young Athenian who returned from hiding in order to save his father’s life and then chose to die himself rather than abjure his faith. According to the evidence in Turkish sources, some parents even succeeded in abducting their children after they had been recruited. The most successful way of escaping recruitment was through bribery. That the latter was very widespread is evident from the large amounts of money confiscated by the sultan from corrupt...officials. Finally, in their desperation the parents even appealed to the Pope and the Western powers for help.73
Papoulia concludes, “there is no doubt that this heavy burden was one of the hardest tribulations of the Christian population.”74
Why did the Tanzimat reforms, designed to abrogate the Ottoman version of the system of dhimmitude, need to be imposed by European powers through treaties, as so-called capitulations following Ottoman military defeats, and why even then, were these reforms never implemented in any meaningful way from 1839 until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I?
Edouard Engelhardt made these observations from his detailed analysis of the Tanzimat period, noting that a quarter century after the Crimean War (1853-1856), and the second iteration of Tanzimat reforms, the same problems persisted:
Muslim society has not yet broken with the prejudices which make the conquered peoples subordinate...the raya [dhimmis] remain inferior to the Osmanlis; in fact he is not rehabilitated; the fanaticism of the early days has not relented...[even liberal Muslims rejected],..civil and political equality, that is to say, the assimilation of the conquered with the conquerors.75
A systematic examination of the condition of the Christian rayahs was conducted in the 1860s by British consuls stationed throughout the Ottoman Empire, yielding extensive primary-source documentary evidence. Britain was then Turkey's most powerful ally, and it was in its strategic interest to see that oppression of the Christians was eliminated, to prevent direct, aggressive Russian or Austrian intervention. On July 22, 1860, Consul James Zohrab sent a lengthy report from Sarajevo to his ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Henry Bulwer, analyzing the administration of the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, again, following the 1856 Tanzimat reforms. Referring to the reform efforts, Zohrab states:
The Hatti-humayoun, I can safely say, practically remains a dead letter...while [this] does not extend to permitting the Christians to be treated as they formerly were treated, is so far unbearable and unjust in that it permits the Mussulmans to despoil them with heavy exactions. False imprisonments (imprisonment under false accusation) are of daily occurrence. A Christian has but a small chance of exculpating himself when his opponent is a Mussulman.. Christian evidence, as a rule, is still refused.76
Throughout the Ottoman Empire, particularly within the Balkans, and later Anatolia itself, attempted emancipation of the dhimmi peoples provoked violent, bloody responses against those “infidels” daring to claim equality with local Muslims. The massacres of the Bulgarians (in 1876), and more extensive massacres of the Armenians (1894-1896), culminating in a frank jihad genocide against the Armenians during World War I, epitomize these trends.77 Enforced abrogation of the laws of dhimmitude required the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. This finally occurred after the Balkan Wars of independence, and during the European Mandate period following World War I.