OTTOMAN EMPIRE

OTTOMAN EMPIRE. Successors to the Seljuk Turks, the Ottomans, named for the bey Osman (d. 1326), first ruled Asia Minor (q.v.), then Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Arabia, and North Africa from the late 14th c. until the overthrow of Sultan Mohammed VI in 1923. By the time Constantinople (q.v.) fell to Mohammed II on 29 May 1453, the entirety of the Orthodox oikoumene (q.v.), with the sole exceptions of Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy, had come under Ottoman rule. This underlined the importance of the Muscovite Grand Duke as the single remaining, independent Orthodox sovereign. It certainly assisted the rise of the 15th-c. myth of Moscow as the “Third Rome,” i.e., successor to both Rome and Constantinople (qq.v.) as capital of the Orthodox Christian world.

For the vast population of Greeks, Slavs, Romanians, Armenians, Georgians, Copts, and Arabic-speaking Orthodox, the long centuries of Ottoman rule meant a permanent reduction to second-class citizenship in a Muslim Empire. In several instances, this slowly whittled away their communities, which were lured to Islam (q.v.) by the promise of social betterment, or else simply in search of relief from the taxes imposed on the non-Moslem population. Paradoxically, Ottoman rule accentuated the outward power of the Orthodox Church, elevating the Ecumenical Patriarch (q.v.) to the position of ruler of the Christian populace, and his bishops, in like manner, to the role of magistrates.

This status and its limits, coupled with the later decadence of the Empire and the importation of romantic nationalism in the 18th and 19th c., had a singularly poisonous effect on the fabric of church life: Ecclesiastical offices were bought and sold; scrambles for power and continual intrigue dimmed the moral authority of the hierarchy; and, perhaps worst of all, the Church’s leaders became identified with the interests of a particular nation and language. (See Ethnarch.) This occurred first of all with the Greeks, following the lead of the Phanariots (q.v.). Their favoring of their own nation led to similar movements-in part, reactions against the patriarchate (q.v.)-among the Slavs, Romanians, and Arabic-speakers.

The 19th-c. wave of revolt in the Balkans (q.v.) and creation of independent states saw the erection of an equal number of independent (autocephalous [q.v.]) national churches-and the acceptance of the equation of nationality with church and hierarchy. In 1870 Constantinople labeled this principle in its extreme form “phyletism,” the heresy of tribalism. While the condemnation has been generally accepted theologically, national allegiance as identical with church membership and the continuing inability of the Orthodox to act together as the Church remain the single most crippling legacy of the Ottomans. Its effects are particularly clear in the 20th-c. Orthodox “diaspora” in the Americas, Australia, and Western Europe: a plethora of nationally based “jurisdictions” simultaneously overlapping one another and claiming to be manifestations of the one, undivided Church of Christ.