History of The Orthodox Church - Ottoman Empire

Ottoman Empire

Main article: History of the Eastern Orthodox Church under the Ottoman Empire Further information: Ottoman Greece See also: Treaty of San Stefano

In 1453AD, the city of Constantinople the last stronghold of the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottoman Empire.

By this time Egypt had been under Muslim control for some seven centuries. Jerusalem had been conquered by the Umayyad Muslims in 638, won back by Rome in 1099 under the First Crusade and then finally reconquered by the Ottoman Muslims in 1517.

Orthodoxy however was very strong in Russia which had recently acquired an autocephalous status; and thus Moscow called itself the Third Rome, as the cultural heir of Constantinople.

Under Ottoman rule, the Greek Orthodox Church acquired power as an autonomous millet. The ecumenical patriarch was the religious and administrative ruler of the entire "Orthodox nation" (Ottoman administrative unit), which encompassed all the Orthodox subjects of the Empire, but was dominated by ethnic Greeks.

The Ottoman Empire was marked by periods of tolerance and periods of often bloody repression of non-Muslims. One of the worst such episodes occurred under Yavuz Sultan Selim I. These event include the atrocities against the Serbs in AD 1804-1878 the Greeks in AD 1814-1832 . and the Bulgarian AD 1876-1877 to selectively name but a few instances (also see Phanariote). As well as many individual Christians being made martyrs for stating their faith or speaking negatively against Islam. The Janissary army corps consisted of young men who were brought to Istanbul as child-slaves (and were often from Christian households) who were converted, trained and later employed by the Sultan (the devshirme system).