This article has been written for Easy History by Deniz Gün Erazlan.
Introduction:
In discussion of the Ottoman Empire’s legacy in the Middle East, much attention is paid to borders, imperial collapse, and nationalist struggles. Yet one of the empire’s most distinctive and enduring contributions was its system for managing religious and communal diversity: the millet system (not to be confused with the agricultural product of the same name!).
Far from advocating rigid uniformity, the Ottomans inherited and refined a model in which recognized religious communities – Muslims, Christians, Jews – governed many aspects of their own affairs under the broader sovereignty of the Sultan. Each millet maintained its own courts, schools, welfare institutions, and leadership structures. As historian Karen Barkey observes, this pragmatic system fostered an imperial model of pluralism that allowed coexistence in many cities and provinces where modern states have struggled with sectarian division.
Though the millet system was far from egalitarian and reinforced hierarchies, its echoes remain deeply embedded in the political and social fabric of several modern Middle Eastern states. From Lebanon’s sectarian consociationalism to the personal status laws governing religious minorities across the region, the Ottoman approach to diversity continues to shape how difference is managed and contested today.
This article explores how the millet system worked, its legacies, and its complicated relevance in the 21st-century Middle East.
How the Millet System Worked:
Empire of Difference – Governance through pluralism
The Ottoman Empire ruled over one of the most religiously and ethnically diverse populations in the early modern world. Stretching across the Balkans, Anatolia, the Levant, and North Africa, it encompassed Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Jews, and smaller religious communities – each with its own legal traditions, cultural practices, and communal identities. Managing this diversity without fragmenting imperial authority required a flexible system, and the Ottomans developed one of history’s most distinctive models of pluralist governance: the millet system.
The term millet originally meant “religious community” and was rooted in Islamic legal traditions regarding the dhimmi – non-Muslims (People of the Book) who were granted protected status under Muslim rule. The Ottomans formalized and expanded this framework into a more complex administrative structure. Under the millet system, recognized religious communities such as Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Apostolic Christians, and Jews were granted a significant degree of autonomy in their internal affairs. As Karen Barkey notes, the empire’s goal was not to assimilate these groups but to manage difference pragmatically under overarching imperial sovereignty.
Each millet was led by a senior religious figure – the Patriarch for the Orthodox, the Armenian Patriarch, the Chief Rabbi, among others – who served both as a spiritual leader and as an intermediary with Ottoman authorities. These leaders oversaw religious courts that governed family law (marriage, divorce, inheritance), education, and religious observance within their communities. In addition, millets operated their own schools, hospitals, charities, and social welfare institutions, funded through community donations and often through waqfs – religious endowments protected by Ottoman law.
While millets paid special taxes to the state, such as the jizya (poll tax on non-Muslims), they were generally spared direct interference in their communal life, so long as they remained loyal to the sultan. This system allowed for a remarkable degree of religious coexistence in Ottoman cities, where different communities lived side-by-side yet maintained distinct identities. It also created a layered legal order: a Muslim might be tried in a sharia court, while a Christian or Jew would typically be tried in their own religious court for matters of personal status.
However, the system was far from egalitarian. Muslims enjoyed a privileged legal and social status, and non-Muslims were subject to legal and fiscal discrimination. Still, as Braude and Lewis emphasize, the millet system offered a relatively stable framework for managing diversity in an empire where forced assimilation would have been both impractical and destabilizing.
By balancing imperial control with communal autonomy, the millet system fostered a dynamic, if hierarchical, model of pluralism. It allowed the Ottoman state to maintain political stability across a fragmented religious landscape – a legacy whose echoes still resonate in many parts of the Middle East today.
The Millet System in Ottoman Cities:
Diversity in Practice – How Ottoman Cities Balanced Difference
The millet system was not merely an abstract administrative framework – it was most visible and tangible in the everyday life of Ottoman cities. It was in the bustling streets of Istanbul, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Sarajevo where imperial pluralism was negotiated in practice, and where religious communities coexisted, interacted, and occasionally clashed. The city, in many ways, was the living stage of the emipre’s management of difference.
Urban space reflected communal organization. Which Ottoman cities, religious communities often clustered in distinct neighborhoods, or mahalles, where they could maintain their places of worship, schools, communal buildings, and charitable institutions. As Bruce Masters details in his study of Aleppo and other Ottoman Arab cities, Christian and Jewish communities developed vibrant internal communal life under the millet framework, supported by religious endowments (waqfs) that financed churches, synagogues, hospitals, and schools.
In Istanbul, the imperial capital, the system was especially formalized. The Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish millets each maintained their patriarchal headquarters in the city. The Patriarch of Constantinople acted as both religious leader and official representative of the Orthodox millet to the Ottoman court. Each millet operated its own courts of personal status, governing matters of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and religious education, while relying on imperial courts only in cases involving Muslims or intercommunal disputes.
Aleppo offers a particularly vivid example of this layered urban coexistence. According to Masters, Aleppo’s Christian and Jewish quarters were deeply integrated into the city’s commercial life, particularly through its sprawling covered markets (souqs), caravanserais, and international trade networks. While residential areas reflected communal boundaries, the commercial heart of the city brought communities together daily. Nora Lafi notes that the municipal governance of Aleppo balanced imperial oversight with significant local autonomy, with notables from various religious communities participating in urban administration.
Jerusalem presents another instructice case. Under Ottoman rule, the city was divided into four quarters – Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Armenian – a structure that persists today. As Alexander Schölch highlights, this division was not rigidly imposed by the state but reflected evolving communal patterns, supported by Ottoman policies of religious recognition and autonomy. This city’s many waqf-endowed buildings, from mosques to Christian monasteries and Jewish charitable institutions, exemplified the material underpinnings of millet-based governance.
Crucially, interaction across communal lines was common. In markets, courts, and certain guilds, religious boundaries were crossed regularly. Masters emphasizes that in many Ottoman cities, mixed guilds included Muslim and non-Muslim artisans and merchants, facilitating daily economic and social integration. While each community preserved its internal identity, urban life fostered a pragmatic pluralism shaped by mutual dependence and imperial policy.
At the same time, the system could reinforce hierarchies and segregation. Non-Muslims were legally subordinate to Muslims, and urban space reflected this, with Muslim neighborhoods typically occupying central or elevated positions. Occasional outbreaks of tension – particularly during periods of imperial crisis or nationalist agitation – exposed the system’s fragility.
Yet for centuries, the millet system in Ottoman cities enabled remarkable stability and coexistence in some of the world’s most religiously diverse urban centers. As Barkey argues, it was not a system of full equality, but one of managed difference, designed to preserve imperial order amid deep pluralism.
In the modern Middle East, many of the spatial and communal patterns shaped by the millet system remain visible. In cities like Jerusalem, Beirut, and Istanbul, religious neighborhoods, sectarian institutions, and community-run schools still echo the Ottoman era – a testament to the enduring imprint of imperial models of diversity on urban life.
Modern Echoes and Contested Legacies:
From Empire to Nation-States – The Afterlife of the Millet System
The Millet system formally ended with the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-19th century, which sought to modernize the Ottoman Empire by replacing communal legal pluralism with a more centralized, secular legal order. In theory, all imperial subjects were to be equal citizens under Ottoman law. In practice, however, the millet legacy proved remarkably resilient, and its echoes remain embedded in the political and social fabric of several modern Middle Eastern states.
As Ussama Makdisi argues in The Culture of Sectarianism, the millet system left behind both institutional frameworks and ways of thinking about difference that continue to shape sectarian dynamics, particularly in Lebanon. The country’s modern political system is an explicit heir to Ottoman communalism: its confessional power-sharing allocates political offices by religious identity, a structural echo of millet-era governance. The President must be Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of Parliament Shi’a Muslim – a sectarian arrangement rooted in long-standing communal identities.
Beyond Lebanon, the legacy of the millet system is visible in personal status laws across the region. In Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and even Turkey, religious courts still govern matters of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and family law for recognized religious communities. As Braude and Lewis observe, this legal pluralism, which once allowed Ottoman millets to preserve communal identity, laid institutional foundations that persist in modern Middle Eastern legal systems.
In Turkey, the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) guaranteed cultural and religious rights to recognized minorities (primarily Armenians, Greeks, and Jews), institutionalizing a form of minority recognition that echoes millet principles, even as the modern Turkish state rejected Ottoman identity. Minority schools, religious institutions, and communal leadership structures persist under Turkish law, though often under tight state supervision.
Elsewhere, the millet system’s legacy is more indirect but cultural. In countries like Syria and Iraq, sectarian identities remain politically salient, shaped in part by long histories of communal autonomy under Ottoman rule. The persistence of sectarian personal status laws and community-run religious institutions in these states reflects this inheritance. In Jerusalem, as Alexander Schölch observed, the enduring spatial divisions of the Old City – Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Armenian quarters – are a living reminder of Ottoman-era communal management.
At the same time, nationalist movements in the 20th century often cast the millet system in a negative light. Arab and Turkish nationalists viewed it as backward, a source of division, and foreign interference. Secular modernizers sought to erase the old communal divisions in favor of national unity. Yet these efforts often produced only partial results. As Karen Barkey notes, the Ottoman millet system, for all its hierarchies, offered a pragmatic model of coexistence that modern nation-states have struggled to replace with fully inclusive civic identities.
Today, the question of how to manage religious and sectarian diversity remains a central political challenge across the Middle East. In this sense, the Ottoman millet system casts a long shadow – not as a model to simply revive, but as a historical framework whose strengths and flaws continue to inform how difference is negotiated in the region’s politics and societies.
Conclusion:
The Ottoman millet system was an imperfect but pragmatic response to governing one of the most religiously diverse empires in history. It did not offer equality in the modern sense, but it provided a flexible framework in which difference could be managed rather than suppressed. Through the millet system, the empire balanced imperial control with communal autonomy, enabling many religious communities to maintain their identities for centuries.
Its legacies, though transformed by nationalism, colonialism, and modern state-building, remain visible today – in the personal status laws that shape family life across the region, in the sectarian structures of states like Lebanon, and in the spatial and institutional echoes that persist in Middle Eastern cities. As Karen Barkey and Ussama Makdisi both suggest, the Ottoman approach to managing diversity still influences how modern societies in the region negotiate identity and difference.
In an era when questions of pluralism and coexistence remain deeply contested, the history of the millet system offers both cautionary lessons and unexpected insights. It reminds us that models of governance, even those born in an imperial context, can cast long shadows – and that the legacies of the Ottoman Empire remain deeply woven into the fabric of the modern Middle East.
Sources:
- Barkey, K. Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge University Press.
- Braude, B. & Lewis, B. (eds.). Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Holmes & Meier.
- Makdisi, U. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. University of California Press.
- Lafi, N. Urban Governance Under the Ottomans: Between Cosmopolitanism and Conflict. Routledge.
- Schölch, A. Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882: Studies in Social, Economic and Political Development. Institute for Palestine Studies.
About the Author:
Deniz Gün Eraslan is an undergraduate student of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading. His academic interests focus on the history of the Ottoman Empire, Middle Eastern politics, and the study of political memory. He is committed to presenting complex historical subjects in an accessible and thoughtful manner for a broader audience.
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