Tom Papademetriou. Render unto the Sultan

Tom Papademetriou’s book is a compact, well-written, and comprehensive study of the status of the Greek Orthodox Church under the Islamic Ottoman Empire. I strongly believe that as a textbook, it will be extremely useful for a wide variety of Ottoman or Middle Eastern history courses. In terms of originality, though, I am afraid that the book relies too heavily on the earlier studies on this particular subject by the Turkish Ottomanist Halil Inalcik (“The Status of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate under the Ottomans,” Turcica 23 [1991]: 407–436) and the Greek Ottomanists Elizabeth A. Zachariadou (Déka tourkiká éggrapha gia tēn Megálē Ekklēsía, 1483–1567 [1996]) and Paraskevas Konortas (Othomanikes Theoriseis gia to Oikoumeniko Patriarcheio: Beratia gia tous prokatehmenous tes Megales Ekklesisas (17os–arches 20ou aiona) [1998]). Furthermore, Papademetriou’s dismissal of the conventional idea of fragmentation of the Ottoman society along ethnoreligious lines according to the “millet system,” supposedly established at the time when Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481) “gave back the Church to the Christians” (as his contemporary eulogist Kritovoulos wrote) (22) and appointed Gennadios Scholarios (1454–1456, 1462?, 1464) as patriarch of the Orthodox in his new capital of Kostantiniyye/Constantinople (Istanbul), is not novel. Benjamin Braude convincingly argued as early as 1978 (“Foundation Myths of the Millet System,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, ed. B. Braude and B. Lewis [1982], 69–88) that the millet system is a nineteenth-century development. Papademetriou revisits the historiography on the millets (chap. 1) and concludes, in a very balanced way, that “the history of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire is not as black and white as either the anachronistic or nationalist historians wish it to be, nor as harmonious and cheery as the imperial ideologues project” (62). However, it has to be noted that, in his historiographical approach, Papademetriou has clearly been inspired by Halil Inalcik and Heath W. Lowry’s conceptualization of an early Ottoman strategic realpolitik of “accommodation” (istimālet) vis-à-vis the Christian subjects of the empire, which, however, has not been adequately documented (chap. 2).

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