Pierre Belon, the sixteenth-century French naturalist, wrote ‘the Turks force nobody to live according to the Turkish way, but all Christians are allowed to follow their own law.

This is precisely what has supported the power of the Turk; because when he conquers a country, he is satisfied if it obeys and once he receives the taxes he doesn't care about the souls.'¹ Belon's comments, along with those of countless other Europeans, are an important reason why the Western association of the Ottomans with religious tolerance has proved so remarkably enduring.

Such a depiction of the sultan's domains of course bears directly on questions of religiously motivated violence in the early modern Ottoman world. One would expect to see very little of it and, indeed, the remarkable diversity of the empire from beginning to end - religious, ethnic and linguistic - owes a good deal to imperial traditions of governance. No one would deny that the Ottoman disinclination to forcibly convert non-Muslims is the primary reason why the Balkans remained majority Christian through the long period of Ottoman rule, which stretched from the fourteenth century to the early twentieth century.

Nevertheless, Ottoman historians today are less satisfied than they used to be with Belon's depiction. The reasons for this are fourfold. First, Belon's explanation for Ottoman tolerance is indifference: ‘when he conquers a country, he is satisfied if it obeys and once he receives the taxes he doesn't care about the souls'.

The Ottomans, like the Romans, gained a reputation as better administrators and warriors, even if less subtle minds, than the former representatives of their civilizations; they possessed less taste for philosophical finesse perhaps but had greater success in creating and deploying technologies of power.^[106]

Today, it is clear that the Ottomans were far more invested in their subjects' souls than was previously thought and historians no longer assume that indifference was the default assumption of the authorities. Whether a more religiously engaged elite translated into more religious violence in the empire is a question we will consider below.

Second, there was religious persecution in the empire but it most com­monly targeted Muslims rather than non-Muslims. Western Europeans tended to focus on Ottoman Christians and Jews and thus often overlooked this fact. Until recently, so did Ottoman historians.

Then there is the question of periodisation. The empire lasted a long time - over six hundred years - and it does not make sense that state policy would be unwavering over such a long period.^[107] This chapter will concentrate on what is known as the classical period, roughly 1300 to 1800, and will not delve into the empire's final century, a time of increasing and, in the end, catastrophic, violence. The arrival of nationalism, an ambitious programme of state reforms and increasing European intervention in its affairs all contributed to creating a situation quite different from the previous half millennium.

Finally, Ottoman historians are now careful to point out that tolerance in and of itself was never valued, neither by the sultans in Istanbul nor by their subjects. Instead, it was a governing strategy and there were others - persecu­tion, assimilation, conversion and expulsion - that the state could and did use.^[108]

Ottoman historiography has always privileged the state, a tradition of which today's historians of the empire are very aware and which they are trying to remedy. Therefore, this chapter will also consider the place of religious violence within Ottoman society, to the extent that existing studies and extant sources allow us to do so.