Armenians in The Ottoman Empire - Background

Background

See also: State organisation of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottomans introduced and developed a number of unique traits into the traditions of Islam, a culture that did not enact a separation between religious and secular matters. In fact, the Ottomans visualized an idea that two separate "establishments" shared state power. Historians often label the Ottoman sociopolitical construct the "Ottoman System", a system characterized by militarism and State power sharing the responsibility of both governing a nation's citizens and its religious establishments. However, the Ottomans left civic control to the civic institutions. That term, however, conveys a sense of structural rigidity that probably was nonexistent throughout the Ottoman period as Sultan is the highest power over everything, since with the state organization operating specific model in the first half of the sixteenth century under Suleyman I, also known as "Lawgiver", gained more definite organization.

The Armenian population's integration was partly due to the nonexistent structural rigidity throughout the initial period. Armenian people, related to the issues of their own internal affairs were, were administered by the civil administration. Townspeople, villagers and farmers formed a class called the reaya, including Armenian reaya. Civil and judicial administration was carried out under a separate parallel system of small municipal or rural units called kazas. The civil system was considered a check on the military system since beys, who represented executive authority on reaya, could not carry out punishment without a sentence from the religious leader of the person. As a dip note; Sultan was beyond the mentioned control. Ecumenical Patriarchate was the leader of the Armenian People. This whole structure named as Millet, or in Armenian case Armenian Millet

During the Byzantine period, the Armenian Church was not allowed to operate in Constantinople, because the Greek Orthodox Church regarded the Armenian Church as heretical. With the establishment of Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, Armenians become religious leaders, and bureaucrats under Ottoman Empire, more influential than just their own community. The idea that two separate "establishments" shared state power gave people a chance to occupy important positions, administrative, the religious-legal, and the social-economic.