Citation:
Thesis Type:
PhD dissertationAbstract:
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Muslim and Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Istanbul were becoming more alike in terms of the way they lived and conducted their daily lives; on the other hand, the Greek Orthodox community (or certain members thereof) was also becoming more aware of itself as an entity distinct both from other groups that comprised the empire as well as from the Ottoman state that granted it varying degrees of sovereignty and autonomy. Both trends existed simultaneously: a growing feeling of a group identity, based on a distinct sense of a Greek heritage, did not undermine the sense of being an integral part of the fabric of Ottoman society.
The type of sovereignty the Ottoman state exercised over the Greek Orthodox community played a significant role in how the members of this portion of the subject population articulated their perceptions of their place in Istanbul at the turn of the eighteenth century. The paradoxical situation reveals itself in which the more Greek Orthodox subjects avail themselves of Ottoman institutions such as the Imperial Divan, the more decisions rendered there create an environment which fosters a heightened sense of belonging to a distinct group. This is, moreover, the period in which, for the first time, Greek Orthodox are incorporated into the state apparatus without conversion to Islam. Leading Greek Orthodox thus become leading Ottomans as well.
Ottoman archival documents found in the mühimme (“important affairs”) and s˛ikayet (“complaint”) registers supply the state's perspective on the degree of sovereignty granted the Greek Orthodox community while Greek literary sources provide viewpoints from within the elite of the community of its role in Ottoman society. Philological and textual analyses reveal the repetition and evolution in the meaning of certain Ottoman and Greek terms, such as, respectively, tā`ife (“group”) and genos (“nation”). It is in the interplay of all these terms in dialogue with one another that the dynamic influence of the exercise of Ottoman sovereignty over the Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries may be discerned.