In the Ottoman Empire, a millet (; , ) was an independent court of law pertaining to "personal law" under which non-Muslim populations belonging to confessional communities were allowed to rule themselves under their own laws (Christian canon law, or Jewish halakha).
Despite frequently being referred to as a "system", before the nineteenth century the organization of what are now retrospectively called millets in the Ottoman Empire was not at all systematic. Rather, non-Muslims were simply given a significant degree of autonomy within their own community, without an overarching structure for the millet as a whole. The notion of distinct millets corresponding to different religious communities within the empire would not emerge until the eighteenth century. Subsequently, the millet system was justified through numerous foundation myths linking it back to the time of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1451–81), although it is now understood that no such system existed in the fifteenth century. Heads of millets, or milletbaşı (Ethnarch), usually had absolute secular and ecclesiastical power over their communities, being answerable only to the Sultan.
During the 19th century rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, as a result of the Tanzimat reforms (1839–76), the term was used for legally protected ethno-linguistic minority groups, similar to the way other countries use the word nation. During this era, the status of these groups, their relation to the central government, and their self-governance, were codified into constitutions, elevating the power of the laity at the expense of clergy. The word millet comes from the Arabic word millah (ملة) and literally means "nation". Abdulaziz Sachedina regards the millet system as an example of pre-modern religious pluralism, as the state recognized multiple different religious groups in exchange for some control over religious identification and the enforcement of orthodoxy. Notably, Ethnarchs principally conversed with the Foreign Ministry, as if they represented foreign nations, but after 1878 it was through the Justice Ministry.
Historian Johann Strauss wrote that the term "seems to be so essential for the understanding of the Ottoman system and especially the status of non-Muslims". (info page on book at Martin Luther University) // CITED: p. 44-45 (PDF p. 46-47/338). Other authors interpret the millet system as one form of non-territorial autonomy and consider it as such a potentially universal solution to the modern issues of ethnic and religious diversity.Barkey, Karen and George Gavrilis. 2016. "The Ottoman Millet System: Non-Territorial Autonomy and its Contemporary Legacy." Ethnopolitics 15, no. 1: 24–42. According to Taner Akçam, the Ottoman state was "... based on the principle of heterogeneity and difference rather than homogeneity and sameness, [which] functioned in an opposite way to modern nation-states."
Term
The term millet, which originates from the Arabic milla, had three basic meanings in Ottoman Turkish: religion, religious community and nation. The first sense derives from Quranic usage and is attested in Ottoman administrative documents into the 19th century. Benjamin Braude argues that in the earlier centuries of the Ottoman empire before the Tanzimat reforms, the word millet denoted the Muslim religious community or foreign Christians outside of the Ottoman Empire. This view is supported by Donald Quataert. In contrast, Michael Ursinus writes that the word was used to refer to non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire even before that time. The term was used inconsistently prior to the 19th century.
The systematic use of millet as designation for non-Muslim Ottoman communities dates from the reign of Sultan Mahmud II () in the early 19th century, when official documentation came to reiterate that non-Muslim subjects were organized into three officially sanctioned millets: Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish."Millet", Bruce Masters, Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, Ed. Gábor Ágoston and Bruce Alan Masters, (InfoBase Publishing, 2009), p. 383 The bureaucrats of this era asserted that the millet system was a tradition dating back to the reign of Sultan Mehmed I (). Many historians have accepted this claim and assumed that a millet system of this form existed since early Ottoman times. Recent scholarship has cast doubt on this idea, showing that it was rather a later political innovation, which was introduced in the rhetorical garb of an ancient tradition. The Ottoman state used religion rather than ethnicity to define each millet, and people who study the Ottoman Empire do not define the Muslims as being in a millet. - Cited: p. 72
The Ottoman Turkish version of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 uses the word "millet", as do the Arabic and Persian versions; despite this, at the time the usage of the Arabic word "milla" was declining in favour of the word "ummah".
The Armenian, Greek, and Jewish residents did not use the word "millet" and instead described themselves as "nations" (, Armenian: ազգ (azg), Greek: Έθνος (ethnos), and Ladino: nasyon). (info page on book at Martin Luther University) // CITED: p. 37 (PDF p. 39/338). The lack of use of the word "millet" among the Christian and Jewish minorities reflected in versions of the Ottoman Constitution in their respective languages: The French version of the Ottoman Constitution used the word "communauté" in the place of "millet", and so the others used words modeled after or based on the French: հասարակութիւն (hasarakut'iwn) in Armenian, общност/община (obstina) in Bulgarian, κοινότης (koinotēs) in Greek, and komunita in Judaeo-Spanish.
Concept
The millet system is closely linked to Islamic rules on the treatment of non−Muslim minorities living under Islamic dominion (dhimmi). The Ottoman term specifically refers to the separate legal courts pertaining to personal law under which minorities were allowed to rule themselves (in cases not involving any Muslim) with fairly little interference from the Ottoman government.
People were bound to their millets by their religious affiliations (or their confessional communities), rather than their ethnic origins, according to the millet concept (excepting the Armenian case, until the modern era).. The millets had a great deal of power – they set their own laws and collected and distributed their own taxes. All that was required was loyalty to the Empire. When a member of one millet committed a crime against a member of another, the law of the injured party applied, but the ruling Islamic majority being paramount, any dispute involving a Muslim fell under their sharia-based law.
Later, the perception of the millet concept was altered in the 19th century by the rise of nationalism within the Ottoman Empire.
Position within the Ottoman hierarchy The millet system combined substantial communal autonomy with an unequal imperial hierarchy. Armenians, Greeks, and Jews exercised religious, cultural, legal, fiscal and administrative autonomy, but non-Muslim communities remained politically subordinate. Ottoman law regarded non-Muslims as inferior subjects, denied them certain rights, excluded them from sections of the government and military, and required them to pay extra taxes (e.g. military-exemption tax). This hierarchy positioned Turks and Muslims as the ruling population. Even after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, demands for equal citizenship from non-Muslims encountered resistance from those who regarded Muslim government over non-Muslims as an established Ottoman tradition. The Turkish journalist and politician Hüseyin Cahit described Turks as the millet-i hâkime (the "ruling nation") and argued that if Muslims wanted to preserve their way of life they should retain political authority rather than permit non-Muslims to acquire it.
Specific Millets Although the Ottoman administration of non-Muslim subjects was not uniform until the 19th century and varied according to region and group, it is possible to identify some common patterns for earlier epochs. Christian and Jewish communities were granted a large degree of autonomy. Tax collection, education, legal and religious affairs of these communities were administered by their own leaders. This enabled the Ottomans to rule over diverse peoples with "a minimum of resistance". The Jewish community, in particular, prospered under Ottoman rule, and its ranks were swelled with the arrival of Jews who were expelled from Spain. At the same time, non-Muslims were subject to several forms of discrimination and excluded from the Ottoman ruling elite.Cleveland, William (2013). A History of the Modern Middle East. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. p. 45-46. . Armenians formed three millets under the Ottoman rule.Ortaylı, İlber. "Osmanlı Barışı (Ottoman Peace)", İstanbul: Timaş Yayınları (Timaş Press), 2007, p. 148. . A wide array of other groups such as Catholics, Karaites, and Samaritans was also represented.
Orthodox Christians
The Orthodox Christians were included in the Rum Millet (millet-i Rûm) or the "Roman nation", and enjoyed a certain autonomy. It was named after Roman ("Byzantine") subjects of the Ottoman Empire, but Orthodox Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Georgians, Antiochians, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, Romanians, and Serbs were all considered part of the same millet despite their differences in ethnicity and language and despite the fact that the religious hierarchy was dominated by the Greeks. Nevertheless, ethnonyms never disappeared and some form of ethnic identity was preserved as evident from a Sultan's Firman from 1680, that lists the ethnic groups in the Balkans as follows: Greeks (Rum), Albanians (Arnaut), Serbs (Sirf), "Vlachs" (Eflak, referring to the Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians), and Bulgarians (Bulgar).История на българите. Късно средновековие и Възраждане, том 2, Георги Бакалов, TRUD Publishers, 2004, , p. 25. (Bg.)
The Ecumenical Patriarch was recognized as the highest religious and political leader (millet-bashi, or ethnarch) of all Eastern Orthodox subjects of the Sultan, though in certain periods some major powers, such as Russia (under the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca), or Britain claimed the rights of protection over the Ottoman Empire's Orthodox subjects. The Serbian Patriarchate of Peć and the Archbishopric of Ohrid, autonomous Orthodox Churches under the tutelage of the Ecumenical Patriarch, were taken over by the Greek Phanariots during the 18th century, in 1766 and 1767 respectively.
By the 19th century the Orthodox Christian millet was dominated by Greeks, which were worried of Bulgarian and Romanian autocephalism. Over the course of 1860–1862, a series of laws were produced by a constitutional committee which, taken together, make up the Basic Laws of the Greek Orthodox Millet.
Armenians