The Ottoman Empire, historically and colloquially known as the Turkish Empire, was an empire centred in Anatolia that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe between the early 16th and early 18th centuries.
Pomaks are Bulgarian-speaking Muslims inhabiting Bulgaria, northwestern Turkey, and northeastern Greece. The c. 220,000 strong ethno-confessional minority in Bulgaria is recognized officially as Bulgarian Muslims by the government. The term has also been used as a wider designation, including also the Slavic Muslim populations of North Macedonia and Albania.
"Muslims" is a designation for the ethnoreligious group of Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims of Slavic heritage, inhabiting mostly the territory of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The term, adopted in the 1971 Constitution of Yugoslavia, groups together a number of distinct South Slavic communities of Islamic ethnocultural tradition. Prior to 1993, a vast majority of present-day Bosniaks self-identified as ethnic Muslims, along with some smaller groups of different ethnicity, such as Gorani and Torbeši. This designation did not include Yugoslav non-Slavic Muslims, such as Turks, some Romani people and majority of Albanians.
In the Ottoman Empire, a millet was an independent court of law pertaining to "personal law" under which a confessional community was allowed to rule itself under its own laws.
Kemalism or Atatürkism is a political ideology based on the ideas of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. Its symbol is the Six Arrows.
Bulgarisation, also known as Bulgarianisation is the spread of Bulgarian culture beyond the Bulgarian ethnic space. Historically, unsuccessful assimilation efforts in Bulgaria were primarily directed at Muslims, most notably Bulgarian Turks, but non-Islamic groups have also faced cultural assimilation.
Confessionalism is a system of government that is a de jure mix of religion and politics. It typically entails distributing political and institutional power proportionally among confessional communities.
Ottomanism or Osmanlılık was a concept which developed prior to the 1876–1878 First Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire. Its proponents believed that it could create the Unity of the Peoples, İttihad-ı Anasır, needed to keep millets from tearing the empire apart.
The Armenian national awakening resembles that of other non-Turkish ethnic groups during the rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman statesmen tried to negate Armenian nationalism during the Tanzimat era, first with the Ottomanism movement and then with transforming the state into a constitutional monarchy during the First Constitutional Era. However, the reorganization of the millets, or courts of law for confessional communities, further entrenched the problem of dualism in the Ottoman state.
Armenians were a significant minority in the Ottoman Empire. They belonged to either the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Armenian Catholic Church, or the Armenian Protestant Church, each church serving as the basis of a millet. They played a crucial role in Ottoman industry and commerce, and Armenian communities existed in almost every major city of the empire. The majority of the Armenian population made up a reaya, or peasant, class, in Eastern Anatolia. The Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century sought to manifest the doctrine of equality before the law. Despite their importance, Armenians were persecuted by the Ottoman authorities, especially from the latter half of the 19th century, culminating in the Armenian Genocide.
The Ottoman Empire was one of the most dominant empires in the Mediterranean region, having lasted ~600 years and controlling much of the eastern and southern portions of the Sea. Albert Hourani described the Ottoman Empire as "a bureaucratic state, holding different regions within a single administrative and fiscal system".
Ottoman Greeks were ethnic Greeks who lived in the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922), much of which is in modern Turkey. Ottoman Greeks were Greek Orthodox Christians who belonged to the Rum Millet. They were concentrated in eastern Thrace, and western, central, and northeastern Anatolia. There were also sizeable Greek communities elsewhere in the Ottoman Balkans, Ottoman Armenia, Ottoman Syria and the Ottoman Caucasus, including in what, between 1878 and 1917, made up the Russian Caucasus province of Kars Oblast, in which Pontic Greeks, northeastern Anatolian Greeks, and Caucasus Greeks who had collaborated with the Russian Imperial Army in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829 were settled in over 70 villages, as part of official Russian policy to re-populate with Orthodox Christians an area that was traditionally made up of Ottoman Muslims and Armenians.
In AD 1453, the city of Constantinople, the capital and last stronghold of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Ottoman Empire. By this time Egypt had been under Muslim control for some eight centuries. Jerusalem had been conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate Muslims in 638, won back by Rome in 1099 under the First Crusade and then reconquered by Saladin's forces during the siege of Jerusalem in 1187. Later in the seventh Crusade, it was briefly taken back by the Catholics once again. It was conquered by the Ottomans 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 "Greek Orthodox nation", which encompassed all the Eastern Orthodox subjects of the Empire.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity is today the religion of only a minority in Turkey. It was once the dominant religion, during the time of the Byzantine Empire, as the region that comprises Turkey today was a central part of the Byzantine heritage. Today, less than one tenth of one percent of the population are Orthodox Christians. The provinces of Istanbul and Hatay, which includes Antakya, are the main centers of Christianity in Turkey, with comparatively dense Christian populations, though they are minorities in these areas. The traditional variant of Orthodox Christianity present in Turkey is the Eastern Orthodox branch, focused mainly in the Greek Orthodox Church.
Turco-Albanian is an ethnographic, religious, and derogatory term used by Greeks for Muslim Albanians from 1715 and thereafter. In a broader sense, the term included both Muslim Albanian and Turkish political and military elites of the Ottoman administration in the Balkans. The term is derived from an identification of Muslims with Ottomans and/or Turks, due to the Ottoman Empire's administrative millet system of classifying peoples according to religion, where the Muslim millet played the leading role. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the term Turk and from the late nineteenth century onwards, the derivative term Turco-Albanian has been used as a pejorative term, phrase and or expression for Muslim Albanian individuals and communities. The term has also been noted to be unclear, ideologically and sentimentally charged, and an imperialist and racialist expression. Albanians have expressed derision and disassociation toward the terms Turk and its derivative form Turco-Albanian regarding the usage of those terms in reference to them. It has been reported that at the end of the 20th century some Christian Albanians still used the term "Turk" to refer to Muslim Albanians.
Taxation in the Ottoman Empire changed drastically over time, and was a complex patchwork of different taxes, exemptions, and local customs.
Rūm millet was the name of the Eastern Orthodox Christian community in the Ottoman Empire. Despite being subordinated within the Ottoman political system, the community maintained a certain internal autonomy.
Bulgarian Millet was an ethno-religious and linguistic community within the Ottoman Empire from the mid-19th to early 20th century.
The ethnonym Turks has been commonly used by the non-Muslim Balkan peoples to denote all Muslim settlers in the region, regardless of their ethno-linguistic background. The majority of these, however, were indeed ethnic Turks. In the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic faith was the official religion, with Muslims holding different rights from non-Muslims. Non-Muslim ethno-religious legal groups were identified by different millets ("nations").
The Ullah millet was a separate millet within the Ottoman Empire. It was established by the Ottoman authorities for the Aromanians in 1905, during the rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire. Although the Megleno-Romanians are also sometimes called Vlachs, the Ullah millet was not intended for them.
