Turkey: from Manzikert to the end of the caliphate

Anatolia was Christian for longer than it has been Muslim. The seven churches of Revelation are in Turkey. Nicaea, where the creed was written, is Iznik. Chalcedon is a district of Istanbul. In 1914 Christians were roughly a fifth of Anatolia’s population. Today they are well under one per cent.

That collapse did not happen in the seventh century. Most of it happened between 1915 and 1923, which is why Turkey is the case that cannot be filed under medieval history.

1071 to 1453: the slow conquest

The Arab armies never took Anatolia. Constantinople held them off in 674 and again in 718, and the frontier stayed roughly on the Taurus mountains for four hundred years.

It broke at Manzikert in 1071, where the Seljuk Turks destroyed a Byzantine field army and captured the emperor. What followed was not a single conquest but three centuries of Turkic settlement, raiding and the gradual conversion of a Greek-speaking Christian peasantry under new landlords. The Ottomans emerged from that world around 1299.

Constantinople fell on 29 May 1453. The Roman Empire, in continuous existence since 27 BC, ended that afternoon. Hagia Sophia, the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years, was converted to a mosque within days. It was made a museum by the Turkish Republic in 1935 and converted back to a mosque in July 2020.

The blood tax

The Ottoman state ran on a practice with no parallel in the other empires of its day. From the late fourteenth century, the devshirme levied Christian boys from Balkan and Anatolian villages, roughly every three to seven years, between about eight and twenty years old. They were taken to Istanbul, converted to Islam by force, and trained as janissaries or palace administrators.

Scholarly estimates run to about three thousand boys a year. One documented levy in 1603 to 1604 gathered 2,604 in a single season, recorded in the Ottoman registers themselves.

Defenders of the system note, correctly, that it was a route to the highest offices in the empire, and that some families volunteered sons. Both are true. Neither changes what it was: a tax on a religious community collected in children, and the community that paid it called it the blood tax.

1915 to 1923

The Armenian genocide. Between one and one and a half million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman state, beginning with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople on 24 April 1915, then deportation columns into the Syrian desert.
The Assyrian genocide, Sayfo, ran in parallel and destroyed the Assyrian and Syriac communities of the southeast.
The Greek genocide, including the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea coast, ran from 1914 to 1922 and ended with the burning of Smyrna in September 1922.
The population exchange of 1923 moved roughly 1.2 million Greek Orthodox out of Turkey under treaty.

The Committee of Union and Progress that organised this was a nationalist movement more than a religious one, which is the qualification the record requires. It is also true that the Sheikh ul-Islam proclaimed jihad in November 1914, that the deportation machinery ran on the empire’s existing legal category for the non-Muslim, and that the property of the deported was redistributed under laws written for the purpose.

Turkey denies the genocide to this day, and prosecutes citizens who affirm it.

What is left

The Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul, continuous since the city was founded, numbers around two thousand people. The Halki seminary, which trained its clergy, has been closed by the Turkish state since 1971, so the Ecumenical Patriarchate cannot legally train a successor generation inside Turkey. The Armenian community is around fifty thousand. The Syriac community in Tur Abdin is a few thousand.

Turkey’s Jewish community, which received the expelled Jews of Spain in 1492 and numbered around 80,000 in 1948, is now under 15,000.

Why this page exists on a Jewish site

Because the Armenian genocide is the precedent case for everything this project deals with: a documented extermination, denied by the state that committed it for over a century, with the denial treated as a legitimate diplomatic position by governments that know better. Every technique used against the memory of 7 October was used against the Armenians first, and used successfully.

And because the caliphate abolished in Istanbul on 3 March 1924 is the thing every jihadist movement since has been trying to restore. Islamic State’s declaration in 2014 was a claim to that specific office, vacant for ninety years.