The Ottoman Millet System — Imperial Ottoman

The millet system is one of the most discussed, and most often misunderstood, of Ottoman institutions. The word millet — Arabic for a confessional community under Islamic rule — was used by Ottoman chancery practice from the eighteenth century to designate the recognized non-Muslim religious communities of the empire: the Rum (Greek Orthodox), the Armenian, the Jewish, and a number of smaller Eastern Christian millets. The system, in its mature form, gave these communities a substantial measure of internal autonomy in matters of personal status, education, and community discipline, in return for loyalty to the state, the payment of the cizye, and submission to the political and legal supremacy of the sultan. Modern scholars are split on whether the system was, on balance, a tolerant accommodation or a tool of control: Karen Barkey, in Empire of Difference (2008), argues the former; Selim Deringil, in The Well-Protected Domains (1998), leans toward the latter. The institutional design of the system is the topic of the present article. For the territorial counterpart, see the article on the Ottoman provincial system; for the broader institutional framework, see the overview of Ottoman government.

Key dates

1454 — Mehmed II appoints Gennadios Scholarios as Ecumenical Patriarch, the traditional founding moment.
1461 — the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople is established.
1839 — the Gülhane Decree extends the principle of equality to non-Muslims.
1856 — the Islahat Edict; the cizye is abolished and millet reorganization begins.
1862 — the Rum Millet Regulation (modified 1872).
1863 — the Armenian National Constitution; 1865 the Jewish Millet Regulation.
1872 — the Bulgarian Exarchate is established; the largest single split from the Rum millet.
1924 — the caliphate is abolished; the millets lose their last legal foundation.

Origins and Early Development

The origins of the millet system are the subject of considerable scholarly debate. The traditional account, popular in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography, attributed the system to a deliberate charter granted by Mehmed II the Conqueror to the Greek Orthodox community after the fall of Constantinople in 1453: the appointment of the Ecumenical Patriarch Gennadios II Scholarios as the head of the millet-i Rum and the grant of wide-ranging internal autonomy under his authority. Modern scholarship — Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (1982), Karen Barkey, in Empire of Difference (2008), and Selim Deringil, in The Well-Protected Domains (1998) — has questioned the precision of this narrative. The appointment of Gennadios in 1454 is well documented; a single formal charter is not. The millet system, in its mature form, was the product of a long historical development rather than a single moment of foundation. The practice of corporate autonomy for religious communities was inherited from the Byzantine, Seljuk, and earlier Islamic states that preceded the Ottomans; the Ottomans extended and codified the practice in a way that, by the eighteenth century, gave the millets a recognizable institutional form.

The Three Major Millets

In the mature Ottoman system, three millets had formal corporate status: the millet-i Rum (the Roman or Greek Orthodox millet), the millet-i Ermeni (the Armenian millet), and the millet-i Yahudi (the Jewish millet). Each millet was headed by a senior ecclesiastical figure appointed by the sultan and serving at the sultan’s pleasure: the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople for the Greeks, the Armenian Patriarch of Istanbul (the office was created in 1461) for the Armenians, and the Chief Rabbi (Hahambaşı) for the Jews. Each millet had a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and rabbis; a system of religious courts that adjudicated marriage, divorce, inheritance, and other matters of personal status; a network of schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions; and a bureaucracy that represented the community before the imperial authorities, communicating with the Grand Vizier and the Divan through its lay notables.

The Rum millet, headed by the Ecumenical Patriarch, was by far the largest. It included the Greek Orthodox communities of the Balkans, Anatolia, the Aegean islands, and the Black Sea coast. The Armenian millet included the Armenian communities of eastern Anatolia, Cilicia, the Caucasus, and (after the eighteenth century) Istanbul and the western provinces, and it played a major role in the overland trade with Persia. The Jewish millet included the Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1496, and who found a refuge in the empire — particularly in the communities of Salonica, Edirne, and Istanbul, which became major centers of Sephardic culture and commerce.

The Berat and the Lay Notables

The institutional relationship between the millet and the Ottoman state was articulated principally through the berat (plural: beratlar) — the imperial patent by which the sultan appointed the head of each millet and granted the new patriarch or chief rabbi the formal authority to govern his community. The berat named the appointee, defined the scope of his jurisdiction (a patriarch’s berat, for example, specified the dioceses under his authority and the rights he could exercise in them), and was sealed with the mühr-ü hümayun of the Grand Vizier. The berat was the legal foundation of the millet system: it converted a religious dignity (patriarch, chief rabbi) into an office of the Ottoman state, with the corresponding right to receive a salary (maaş) from the imperial treasury, to manage the community’s pious foundations (vakıflar), and to nominate the lower clergy of the millet for imperial confirmation. The berat was issued by the chancery of the Nişancı and recorded in the ruus registers — the same mechanism that handled tımar appointments and provincial governorships.

The berat could be revoked, transferred, or modified by the sultan, and the threat of revocation was the principal instrument by which the imperial government disciplined the religious heads of the millets. Sultans used the berat repeatedly as a lever — to remove an uncooperative patriarch, to detach a diocese from one millet and attach it to another, to discipline a metropolitan who had exceeded his authority. The famous deposition of the Ecumenical Patriarch Cyril Lucaris in 1621, his reinstatement in 1622, his deposition again, his banishment to Rhodes, and his execution by the Janissary sipahis of Üsküdar in 1638, all played out under the manipulation of the berat. The berat was, in short, both the foundation of the millet system and the instrument of its subjection to the sultan — a duality that modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized.

In addition to its religious head, each millet had a class of lay notables who represented the community’s interests before the imperial authorities and who often had more practical influence with the Sublime Porte than the religious heads themselves. The Greek community had the kocabaşı (also proestós or kodjabashis) — wealthy lay notables drawn largely from the merchant and tax-farmer classes of the Balkans and Anatolia; the most prominent were the Phanariot families of Istanbul (the Mavrocordato, the Ypsilanti, the Mourouzi) who, from the late seventeenth century, supplied the hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia. The Armenian community had the amira class — wealthy merchants, bankers, and sarrafs (moneylenders) of Istanbul whose financial leverage over the imperial treasury made them indispensable intermediaries; among the most prominent were the Balyan family of architects (who designed much of nineteenth-century Istanbul, including the Dolmabahçe Palace) and the Duzian family of sarrafs to the Sublime Porte. The Jewish community had senior parnasim (ward leaders) and, in Istanbul and Salonica, wealthy Jewish bankers and merchants — among them the Çelebi family of Salonica, who held the de facto leadership of the Romaniote and Sephardic communities of that city for several generations. These lay figures were not strictly state officials, but their position was recognized by the Ottoman authorities, and they influenced the appointment of community officials, the administration of the schools, and the conduct of community affairs.

The Avârız and the Fiscal Burden

The non-Muslim communities carried a distinctive fiscal burden that varied with the campaigns and the emergencies of the state. The principal ordinary tax was the cizye, the poll tax on adult non-Muslim males, assessed on a sliding scale by wealth and abolished by the Islahat Edict of 1856. On top of the cizye, however, non-Muslim communities were also liable for the avârız — extraordinary levies in cash or kind, imposed for wartime emergencies, for the construction of fortifications, for the maintenance of the imperial fleet, and for the lodging and supply of troops in transit. The avârız was a per-household assessment, calculated by the kadı and the local community leaders; the burden was heavy, and the responsibility for distributing it within the community fell to the lay notables (the kocabaşı, the amira, the senior parnasim) and to the religious head.

The avârız system is one of the keys to the millet system as it actually worked. The state did not directly assess or collect the avârız; it left the distribution within the community to the community’s own leaders, who in turn were held responsible for the total. The arrangement gave the lay notables a leverage over their co-religionists that often exceeded the leverage of the religious heads, and it gave the religious heads a reason to retain the favor of the lay notables. The arrangement also gave the state a powerful lever: when a patriarch exceeded his authority, the state could impose a punitive avârız assessment on his millet, with the lay notables as the instrument of collection. Aron Rodrigue’s study of the Jewish communities of Istanbul in the sixteenth century, Jewish Life under Islam (1990), shows the arrangement in close detail for the Sephardic population of the Ottoman capital.

The Millets in the Reform Era

The millet system, in its classical form, survived until the nineteenth century. The Tanzimat reforms of 1839 and the Islahat Edict of 1856 attempted to modernize the system and to extend civil equality to the non-Muslim communities. The 1856 Islahat Edict — a Hatt-ı Hümayun, distinct from the 1839 Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane — promised “perfect equality” of the empire’s subjects, regardless of religion; the 1864 Vilayet Law attempted to impose a uniform administrative pattern on the empire and to limit the role of the millets. The 1862 Rum Millet Regulation (modified in 1872), the 1863 Armenian National Constitution, and the 1865 Jewish Millet Regulation codified the existing practice and brought the millets under closer state supervision: each regulation laid down the procedure for electing the head of the millet, the composition of the lay and clerical councils, the rules for managing the community’s schools and pious foundations, and the limits of the millet’s judicial authority.

The most significant change, however, was the rise of nationalism. The Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian national movements, which began as ecclesiastical and linguistic movements within the Rum millet, gradually acquired a political character and challenged the legitimacy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1872 — recognized by the Sublime Porte in the context of the Russo-Turkish war and the Treaty of Berlin (1878) — was the most consequential split, because it carved the largest Balkan client community out of the Rum millet and attached it to a national church. The recognition of the Romanian church as autocephalous in 1885 and of the Serbian church as autocephalous in 1879 further eroded the authority of the Rum millet. The Armenian national movement similarly challenged the authority of the Armenian Patriarchate, and the 1915–1916 events — the wartime deportations and mass deaths of Ottoman Armenians in eastern Anatolia — marked the end of the Armenian millet as a coherent institution. The Jewish millet, by contrast, was less directly affected by the nationalisms of the nineteenth century and survived in attenuated form until the abolition of the caliphate in 1924.

The formal abolition of the millet system came in three steps. The 1922 abolition of the sultanate stripped the religious heads of the millets of their berat-derived authority, because the berat had been issued in the name of the sultan. The 3 March 1924 abolition of the caliphate eliminated the last symbolic foundation of the Islamic basis of the millet system. The Turkish Republic’s 1924 constitution and 1926 civil code replaced the religious courts of the millets with secular courts and converted the pious foundations (vakıflar) into a category of public law — a decisive break that completed the work begun by the Tanzimat reformers.

Frequently asked questions

Was the Ottoman millet system a model of religious tolerance?

The answer depends on what is being compared and on what counts as tolerance. By the standards of early modern Europe, the Ottoman millet system was notably permissive: the empire did not maintain a state church, did not impose confessional tests for entry into commerce or government, and did not (with important exceptions in periods of crisis) coerce mass conversion. By the standards of the modern pluralist state, the system was corporatist rather than individualist: a Christian or a Jew was, in the eyes of the state, a member of a millet first and an individual second. Bruce Masters, in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World (2001), is closer to the first reading; Selim Deringil, in The Well-Protected Domains (1998), is closer to the second.

Did the millets really run their own affairs?

Up to a point. The religious heads of the millets (the Ecumenical Patriarch, the Armenian Patriarch, the Chief Rabbi) had extensive authority over personal-status law — marriage, divorce, inheritance — and over the lower clergy, the schools, and the pious foundations of their communities. They did not, however, have military command, fiscal authority, or criminal jurisdiction. The patriarchs could excommunicate; they could not imprison. Karen Barkey, in Empire of Difference (2008), describes the system as “limited pluralism under imperial control”; that formulation captures both the autonomy the millets enjoyed and the limits of that autonomy.

Why was the millet system abolished?

The 1915–1916 destruction of the Armenian millet in eastern Anatolia and the 1922 abolition of the sultanate and the 1924 abolition of the caliphate removed the institutional and symbolic foundations of the system. The Turkish Republic, in its 1924 constitution and 1926 civil code, replaced the religious courts with secular courts and converted the pious foundations into a category of public law. The abolition completed a long process that the Tanzimat reformers of 1839 and 1856 had begun.