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Ottoman Mİllets in the Early Seventeenth Century1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Daniel Goffman
Daniel Goffman*
Affiliation:
Ball State University, Department of History
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Extract

The concept of “millet” rivals other ideas, such as “the ghazi state” and “the decline paradigm,” as one of the principal formations around which Ottoman historiography has been constructed. Significantly, it was the Ottomans themselves who originated, and manufactured powerful illusions around, each of these notions. Fifteenth-century post-Interregnum (1402-1412) historians probably invented the view that the Osmanlılar of the previous century had constituted the pre-eminent ghazi principality along the Byzantine frontier; late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ottoman critics certainly concocted the proposal that the state was decaying after a brilliant epoch under Mehmed II, Bayezid II, Selim I, and Süleyman I (1451-1566); and post-Tanzimat (1839) reformers formulated the construct of millet as a defining characteristic of Ottoman society. Modern historians have tended to accept these models rather uncritically; only recently have we begun to examine the contents and contexts of such Ottoman self-portraits.

Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 11 , fall 1994 , pp. 135 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 1994

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Footnotes

1

The author gratefully acknowledges the financia1 support of the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities as administered by the Near and Middle East division of the Social Science Research Council, the Office of Research at Ball State University, and the Summer Stipend Division of the National Endownlent for the Humanities, as well as the assistance of the staffs of the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi in Turkey, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, and the Public Record Office in England.

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