Daily Life In The Ottoman Empire (19 page)

SERBIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

At the time of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in
1453, there were two other autocephalous churches in existence: in Peć
(Hungarian:
Pécs)
, for the Serbs, and in Ohrid, for the Bulgarians. As
the power of the Orthodox Church in Istanbul —backed and supported by the
Ottoman government — increased, the authority and influence of the Serbian and
Bulgarian churches waned, allowing the patriarch to secure their abolition in
1463. Serbian and Bulgarian bishops were replaced by Greek priests, who were
dispatched by the patriarch from Istanbul. This policy ignited deep resentment
among the local clerical establishment and the native population, who would
later accuse the Greek clergy of trying to assimilate them by banning Serbian
and Bulgarian liturgy and imposing Greek language and culture.

The Serbian people, who had inhabited vast areas in
modern-day southern Hungary, Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
and Croatia, were unified under a single institution, namely the Serbian
Orthodox Church, and its religious hierarchy, which constituted an important
segment of the Serbian elite. Established in 1219 as an autocephalous member of
the Orthodox communion, the Serbian Orthodox Church followed the traditions of
Orthodox Christianity but was not subordinate to an external patriarch, such as
the ecumenical patriarch in Istanbul. Serbian Orthodox religious texts were
written in the old Serbian-Slavonic language, in which services were also
conducted.

The Serbian state established by the Nemanjić dynasty
in the 12th century reached the zenith of its power under Stephen Dušan
(1331–1355), who elevated the Serbian Orthodox Church “to the rank of
patriarchate with its seat in Peć.” Though the Serbian prince Lazar
(1371–1389) was defeated and killed at the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, the
Serbs resisted direct Ottoman rule for decades before they were fully conquered
in 1459. The memory of the defeat and martyrdom of Serbia’s last independent
monarch was, however, preserved by the Serbian Orthodox Church. During long
centuries of Ottoman occupation, the Patriarchate of Peć “felt itself the
heir to the medieval Serbian kingdom and was well aware of its national
mission.” The church referred to lands under its ecclesiastical jurisdiction as
“Serbian Lands” despite the varying religious and ethnic characters the
territories exhibited. In this manner, the Serbian Orthodox church became the
repository of the national ideal and kept alive in the minds of the Serbian
faithful their unique identity and glorious past. Through their membership and
participation in their church, the Serbian people preserved their religion, as
well as their language and historical identity, which distinguished them from
their neighbors such as the Hungarians and Albanians.

To appease the Serbs, Süleyman the Magnificent restored the
Serbian Patriarchate in 1557 and appointed a relative of his grand vizier,
Sokollu Mehmed Paşa (Mehmed Paşa Sokolović), as the patriarch.
This restoration played an important role in safeguarding the Serbian national
and cultural identity under a unified religious authority. During the Long War
of 1593–1606, the Ottoman war against the Holy League (1683–1699), and the
Habsburg-Ottoman wars of 1716–1718, 1736–1739, 1788–1791, however, the Serbs “took
an active part as opponents of the Ottomans” and “suffered severe consequences.”
One result was that the Ottoman government abolished the Serbian patriarchate
in 1766 and placed it under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of
Istanbul, igniting strong anti-Greek sentiment among the Serbs, who resented
the increasing power of Greek bishops. The resistance of Serbian churches to
Ottoman rule led to Serbian Orthodoxy becoming inextricably linked with Serbian
national identity and the new autonomous Serbian principality that emerged
after the first Serbian national uprising (1804–1813) led by George Petrović
or Karageorge (Karadjordje). The Serbian Orthodox Church finally regained its
status as an autocephalous church in 1879, a year after Serbia gained its full
independence.

BULGARIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

In A.D. 679, “a small tribe of Proto-Bulgars” arrived in
the Balkans under the leadership of their khan, Asparukh, and settled in “an
area near the mouth of the Danube.” These Proto-Bulgars, who were originally a
Turkic/Turanian people from Central Asia and who “had once inhabited an area
between the Sea of Azov and Kuban,” entered “into an alliance with the Slovanic
tribes” who had already settled in southeast Europe in the 6th and 7th
centuries, and “a Slavo-Bulgar state was set up, in which, in spite of the
numerical superiority of the Slavs, the Proto-Bulgars provided the leadership.”
By the time the Bulgarian ruler Khan Boris Michael I (867–889) adopted
Christianity, “the Proto-Bulgars had been completely absorbed by the more
numerous Slavs.” The “reign of Boris’s son, Simeon (893–927)” has been
generally recognized “as the Golden Age of Bulgarian literature.” It also marks
“the zenith of Bulgaria’s territorial expansion” when the country’s frontiers “stretched
from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, embracing most of Serbia, Albania and
Southern Macedonia.” The first Bulgarian empire elevated the Bulgarian church
into a patriarchate in 927. As in Serbia, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church played
a central role in preserving the Slavonic liturgy and the Bulgarian language
and history. Although their country came under Byzantine rule in 1018, the
Bulgarians managed to regain their independence in 1185 and established the
second Bulgarian empire (czardom), which granted the Bulgarian Church “the rank
of patriarchate again” in 1235. The power of the Bulgarian state, however,
waned soon after, and by the end of the 14th century, the territory of the empire
had fallen into the hands of rival nobles and feudal lords who were ultimately
manipulated and conquered by the Ottoman Turks. On the eve of the Ottoman
conquest, “the Second Bulgarian Empire had split into three more or less
independent States.” The Ottomans captured Plovdiv (Philippopolis) in 1363 and
Sofia in 1385. The conquest of Turnovo in 1393 and Vidin in 1398 by Bayezid I
brought any hope of Bulgarian independence to an end. The Bulgarian territory
was divided into the three
sancaks,
or administrative units, of Vidin,
Nicopolois, and Silistria, each governed by a
sancak bey.
Though the
Ottomans did not force the Christian population to renounce and abandon their
religion, a large number of Bulgarians, particularly in the Rhodopes, converted
to Islam. Today, these Muslim Bulgarians or Pomaks constitute the
second-largest population group in Bulgaria.

In 1454 when Mehmed II appointed the Greek bishop Gennadios
Scholarios as the head of Orthodox Christian
millet,
he assumed that the
office of the new patriarch represented the “interests of all Orthodox subjects
in his empire.” But not all Orthodox Christians were Greeks. Bulgarians, like
the Serbs, possessed their own native church hierarchies and organizations,
which were taken over by the Greek appointees of Istanbul’s patriarchate. Greek
“interests and culture came to pervade the Orthodox
millet”
to the
increased exclusion of the Bulgarian and Serbian churches. Greek “bishops and
Greek liturgical books replaced the Bulgarian bishops who were banished.” As a
sense of Greek superiority emerged within the church hierarchy, its Slavic
faithful grew increasingly resentful. Their ethnic and cultural self-awareness
grew correspondingly, and a deep-seated animosity toward Greek superiority
began to make itself felt within the Orthodox
millet.
It was the
Bulgarian religious leaders and monks from remote monasteries and spiritual
enclaves who called for throwing off the supremacy of the Greek clergy and
Greek language. If the Bulgarians wished to establish Bulgarian schools and
liturgy, they needed an independent ecclesiastical system. In 1557, when
Süleyman the Magnificent reconstituted the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć,
the Ottomans placed the Bulgarian eparchies under its authority. The Peć
Patriarchate was, however, abolished by the Ottoman government in 1766. In the
19th century, as the authority of the Ottoman central government waned, the
Bulgarians demanded “church services in Bulgarian, Bulgarian-speaking high
clergy, the establishment of a national church, and a form of political
autonomy.” The first “major struggles” for Bulgarian cultural independence were
waged against “the domination of the Greek clergy” in the 1820s, and they were
organized around the refusal of the Bulgarian people to pay taxes demanded by
Greek bishops and a call to create an independent educational system with
modern Bulgarian as the language of instruction. By “the beginning of the
1870s, more than 1,600 Bulgarian language schools had been founded.” The most
important aspect of this movement was the popular demand for the creation of an
independent Bulgarian ecclesiastical hierarchy. Finally, “in 1870, the sultan
issued a decree authorizing the establishment of a Bulgarian exarchate.”

ARMENIAN MILLET

Armenians constituted the oldest and the largest non-Muslim
community in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. There were also
Armenian communities in the urban centers of the empire, particularly in
Istanbul.

The Arsacid (Arshakuni) Kingdom of Armenia was the first
state in history to adopt Christianity as its religion. In A.D. 301, Trdat
(Tiridates) III converted to Christianity by Grigor Lusavorich (Gregory the
Illuminator), and in A.D. 314, Grigor Lusavorich was ordained as the first
bishop of Armenia. For Armenians, their church emerged as the focal point of
communal identity that preserved their unity in face of threats, domination,
and conquest by larger and stronger neighbors. Sometime around A.D. 400, an
Armenian alphabet was invented, ushering in the golden age of Armenian culture
and civilization, when numerous books and manuscripts in foreign languages,
including the Bible, were translated into Armenian. Starting in the last decade
of the 4th century, Armenia lost its independence to the Byzantine and the
Sassanid Persian empires, which partitioned the country. Despite several
attempts to reestablish their independence, the Armenians lost their
sovereignty as the Arab Muslims, and later the Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Ottomans,
and Safavid Iranians invaded and occupied their ancient homeland.

During the long Byzantine rule, the Armenian Apostolic
Church was not allowed to operate in Constantinople because the Greek Orthodox
Church viewed it as heretical. Persecution by the Byzantine authorities only
strengthened the separate and distinct Armenian identity. After the Ottoman
conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II was determined to make his new capital a “universal
metropolis” by “officially recognizing the spiritual leaders of the Greek
Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish communities” under his rule. He aspired to
establish an Armenian patriarchate of Istanbul, but he faced a problem in the
case of Armenians that did not arise with either the Orthodox Christians or
Jews. At the time of the conquest, the majority of the Armenian population did
not live under the authority of the sultan. The most important center of the
Gregorian Church and the seat of the Armenian Patriarch, the
Catholicos
at
Echmiadzin (Ejmiatsin) was “outside the borders of the Ottoman Empire, in
adjacent hostile territory.” In 1461, Mehmed II appointed Bishop Hovakim of
Bursa as the first Armenian patriarch of Istanbul and the religious and secular
leader of all Armenians living in the Ottoman domains.

The Armenian
millet
differed from the Orthodox not
only in certain beliefs, rituals, and customs, but also in that its members
were all from one ethnic group and the majority lived far from the urban
centers of the empire in eastern Anatolia and the south Caucasus, which were
contested by the Ottoman and Safavid empires. The devastating wars between the
Ottoman Empire and the Safavid dynasty in Iran partitioned Armenian-populated
territory. The south Caucasus, including the seat of the Armenian Patriarch,
the
Catholicos
at Echmiadzin, was incorporated into the Iranian state,
and eastern Anatolia remained under Ottoman rule. During the Ottoman-Iranian
wars, the Armenian population suffered. Armenian towns and villages were
destroyed, harvest was burnt, and water wells were filled by the Iranians who
forcibly moved entire communities and settled them in the interior of their
territory so that they would not supply the Ottoman forces with food and
shelter. Many Armenians were never allowed to return. Others helped the Safavid
monarch Shah Abbas (1587–1629) and his successors divert the silk trade from a
land route, which would have benefited the Ottomans, to a sea route, which
skipped Ottoman territory to establish a direct link between Iran and the
Christian powers of Europe.

Meanwhile, the Armenian population living under Ottoman
rule was also depleted by military campaigns, the anarchy caused by internal
revolts (i.e.,
celali
revolts) in the 17th century, and emigration. The
vacated lands and villages of the Armenians were mostly occupied and
repopulated by various Kurdish tribes from eastern Anatolia. Since the central
government in Istanbul viewed the borderland between western Iran and eastern
Anatolia as strategically vital, Ottoman sultans rewarded the Kurds, who fought
against the Iranians, by dividing the region into administrative units called
sancaks
and appointing loyal Kurdish tribal chiefs as hereditary governors (
sancak
beys)
, responsible for collecting taxes and maintaining order. Thus, while
Ottoman rule restored peace and tranquility, it forced the Armenians to live
under the dominance of their mortal enemies, the Kurds. As long as the central
government was strong and could protect Armenian communities through its local
officials, a certain balance was maintained between the Kurds and the Armenians.
But in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the power of the state waned, Kurdish
tribal chiefs “had matters all their own way and the Armenians suffered
accordingly.”