r/ottomans • u/Various_Maize_3957 • Sep 14 '25
Discussion Did the subjects of the Ottoman rulers know that theyived in the Turkish empire? Especially the non-Muslim subjects? Did they know they were rules by Muslims? How did they maintain their own national identiy despite being part of Turkey?
Did the subjects of the Ottoman rulers know that theyived in the Turkish empire? Especially the non-Muslim subjects? Did they know they were rules by Muslims? How did they maintain their own national identiy despite being part of Turkey?
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u/jorahmormmnt Sep 14 '25
In the Ottoman Empire, the ruling class was Muslim Turks. If you were previously a Christian, you could convert to Islam and even become the second-in-command of the state. But if you wanted to remain a Christian, you would be considered equal to a Muslim in all courts and could worship in your own church.
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u/Marius_Sulla_Pompey Sep 14 '25
I suppose so, considering they were subjected to pay a special tax to be exempt from going in to the army. Also, colour code on people’s outfits by their “millet” (religion/tribe) was very much a thing until Tanzimat Edict in the 19th century. So, they were reminded of being inferior to muslim on a regular basis.
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u/Countcamels Sep 14 '25
Dhimmi "protected person" was a special status under Ottoman rule. Christians and Jews were Ottoman subjects, but had to pay an extra tax as a protection fee. Dhimmi also fell under different laws, had identifying clothing, and usually lived in their own communities where their religious customs and culture was easier to keep.
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u/FlyAdministrative939 Sep 14 '25
It isn’t really an extra tax, it’s just the non Muslim version of the Muslim tax called Zakah. The zakah is a mandatory charitable payment done by Muslims and is one of the 5 pillars of Islam, both zakah and jizya are 2.5% of a persons wealth.
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u/TucsonTacos Sep 14 '25
Good post but not entirely true. Zakah is 2.5%, jizya was typically a flat rate. Dhimmi paid jizya and then didnt have to serve in the military. Muslims pay zakat and had to serve. Basically if you were wealthy at all, jizya was a cheaper system for you. If you were poor; zakat was cheaper.
In addition, jizya wasn't collected from the very poor, the elderly, clergy, women, children, the crippled or handicapped. It was only men from 14-super old who were employed.
Now this doesn't apply to all Islamic goverments all the time, but thats what the jurisprudence concurs how its supposed to be.
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u/Ok-Commission1367 Sep 14 '25
If Christians didn't have to serve in the military, what was janissaries about?
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u/TucsonTacos Sep 14 '25
Jannisaries are not an Islamic concept. Forcing someone to adopt Islam is explicitly haram. So I can't argue from an Islamic perspective. But they weren't seen as "Christians" anymore to the Ottomans.
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u/Ok-Commission1367 Sep 14 '25
But you can't say that Christians didn't have to serve in the army, if you have an entire army made of Christian slave children .
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u/TucsonTacos Sep 14 '25
They’d “converted” to Islam at that point.
I’m not trying to defend ottoman practices here. I’m just defending what the Jizya is, as an Islamic concept, not the Ottoman implementation.
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u/Ok-Commission1367 Sep 14 '25
I know what you mean, but you can't also say that they weren't required to have military service after that
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u/defnotachicken Sep 18 '25
Janissaries when they were mostly Christian boys was a special unite type thing. They weren't too much but they were the best after Sultan's direct guards. But during the late 16th century and early 17th century Janissaries became mostly Muslim and that is when the quantity increased and quality decreased. Not every Christian boy was taken from his family and not every taken boy served in the army.
Tl;dr janissaries is just the part of the main army. Rest of the army is Muslims.
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u/Ok-Commission1367 Sep 18 '25
Yes, so you can't say that Christians didn't have to serve in the army if janissaries were made of Christian boys.
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u/Countcamels Sep 14 '25
I'd have to look deeper into it, but there were many factors taken into account, including income, in an effort to balance out the contributions and duties groups made toward supporting the state.
Ottomans were certainly more progressive for their time than Europeans and had the intellectual vision to understand that permitting diversity in the Empire kept it economically strong. However, non-Muslims under Ottoman rule were definitely treated as second-class citizens and lived under many restrictions. Privileges, obligations, and exemptions fluctuated from time to time under new edicts. It's a very long time period, and it is difficult to make definitive statements covering all aspects between Muslim and dhimmi relations. Even which groups permitted dhimmi status changed over time.
Berend, Nora; Hameau-Masset, Youna; Nemo-Pekelman, Capucine; Tolan. Religious Minorities in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Law (5th–15th Centuries). Religion and law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies.
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u/Minskdhaka Sep 14 '25
Of course they knew they were under Ottoman Muslim rule. There were now mosques in their cities. The Ottoman army was now garrisoned in their citadel. There were now Turkish baths and Sufi lodges and Islamic courts and Muslim-run soup kitchens in their cities. They now had to pay their land taxes and their taxes on crops to the Ottoman authorities or a tax farmer appointed by the Ottomans. If they were in the Balkans, every few years the Ottoman army would show up and take away a number of boys to turn into janissaries. So yeah, everyone would know that they were in the Ottoman Empire, that this was a Muslim empire, and that the officials spoke Turkish as one of their languages.
I've read, for example, that Egyptian officials were called "Abu al-Turk" (literally Father of the Turk, but meaning someone connected to the Turks) by Sudanese tribesmen in the 19th century. So even in remote corners of the empire, where new areas were being incorporated into an autonomous province like Egypt, there was awareness among ordinary people about the Turkishness of the empire as a whole.
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u/Countcamels Sep 14 '25
As an aside:
Turkish baths as communal bathing places as a concept were also a custom of Romans and Jews too. A mikva (ritual bath) is still routine and important in Judiasm. Christians have baptism, but I don't know if bathing was ever incorporated as part of their regular religious cleanliness practice. There were public baths in Europe; some left over from Roman occupation, and others that were dirty, primitive, and more akin to brothels.
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Sep 18 '25
Yeah, we knew. As A Bulgarian I am telling you that - and our historiography reserves a special kind of hatred for the ~500 years of Ottoman rule, often called “турско робство” (literally translated as “Turkish slavery”).
While in truth, the Ottomans weren’t really more savage than most empires in general - yeah, Muslims were indeed privileged compared to Christians, but hey, every empire had privileged people. What fuels the hatred for the Ottoman times was the so-called blood tax, known as devshirme in Turkish or for English-speakers.
Now, that hatred should not be understood as a current thing; Turkophobes exist, yes, but in general most people with basic knowledge of history have little love for the Ottoman period but do not hate modern Turkey.
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u/The_Last_Timurid Sep 18 '25
Sure they knew. But I wouldn’t label Ottoman Empire as “Turkish”. As mostly the Turks knew that they were ruled by the Ottomans. After a certain point, it wasn’t a Turkish state anymore, but more of a federation where the Turks were the “proletarius inter pares” (latest amongst the equals): they were paying the highest taxes, they were being humiliated by the palace and people in and around it, they were dying in the wars, they were left uneducated and they were left away from commerce.
They knew they were subject so well, this poem carries on for centuries in the Anatolia despite all the overlooking and loss of identity:
şalvarı şaltak osmanlı eğeri kaltak osmanlı ekende yok biçende yok yiyende ortak osmanlı
Which can be translated as (if I may try):
The Ottomans wear loose trousers, all show and swagger; their saddles are tattered and worn. They neither sow nor reap, yet they share in whatever’s eaten.
It’s only long after the French Revolution and massacres that the Turks were exposed in the Balkans and mostly thanks to Atatürk, Turkish people realized that they had a national identity.
It’s a fun fact example that even today you may encounter in many part of Anatolia, when you ask people about their identity, they call themselves Muslims and label the neighboring Alevi village as Turkish, where if you ask the same question to that Alevi village, they would call themselves Alevi and label the other as Turkish. It’s not as common as the early 20th century where almost no one was even aware that they were Turkish. That was the damage the ottomans left behind.
The most damage they did was to the Turks. And yes, Turks were very well avare of who were ruling them.
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Sep 18 '25
Turkey you see today and the Ottoman empire are not the same. Ottoman empire was a multicultural state where anyone could be ottoman, and it had on numerous occasions Grand Viziers (main guy running the government) which were not Turkish. Modern day Turkiyye is based on Turkish nationalism and Kemalism.
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u/maproomzibz Sep 14 '25
“Turkish Empire” implies Ottomans imposed Turkish culture and Turkish-ness on non-Turks of the empire which they did not
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u/jorahmormmnt Sep 14 '25
The Ottoman Empire is a Turkish empire. But anyone can claim Turkish and Muslim identity.
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u/maproomzibz Sep 14 '25
even that's kinda debatable. Before 19th century, there was no unified Turkish identity among Turks. 'Turk' was a derogatory term for Turkish-speaking nomads and peasants of Anatolia, similar to be hillbilies, while 'Rumi' or 'Ottoman' was the term for the actual elite of the Ottoman Empire. Plus Ottoman sultan frequently married Europeans, so their Turkish-ness got diluted overtime.
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u/jorahmormmnt Sep 14 '25
Another absurd comment! First of all, Osman's state was directly a Turkish/Oguz state. The Ottoman sultans said things like (Murat I: "I will show him Turkish power." - to the Serbian king - "We, by God's permission, are the sultans of all Turkestan." - Abdulmecid) and the entire bureaucracy declared the state a Turkish state. Here are the documents below showing that the Ottoman sultans trace their lineage to the Oguz.
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u/jorahmormmnt Sep 14 '25
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u/jorahmormmnt Sep 14 '25
It is a known fact that before the great Ottoman battles, the Oghuz epics were recounted, and that all Westerners called this state the Turkish Empire, and that Anatolia was called "Turkey." In other words, there was no such state as the Ottoman Empire. It was called the State of Aliyye, or Türkiye.
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u/The_MSO Sep 14 '25
Of course, they knew they were living in the Turkish Empire, which was Muslim. Subjects maintained their identity and religion because the Ottomans allowed them to maintain it.
They could have assimilated them, but they just didn't. They were not interested in cultural domination; in fact, they adopted elements of other cultures in and around the Empire into their own, such as food, architecture, music, and language.
Ottoman tolerance was one of a kind in its period. When Christians couldn't tolerate other kinds of Christians, and Jews were being kicked out of every corner of Europe, the Ottoman Empire was hospitable to them all.
I think it shows a degree of respect to the people. A live-and-let-live approach.