13 - Christians in a changing world

Summary

Christians constituted a significant minority of the population of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although their actual numbers is a matter of scholarly speculation. The obscurity in the historical record reflects the deterioration in the regularity and accuracy of the registration of individual adult non-Muslim males for taxation (cizye) from the practice of the previous century when the central government was in a better position to maintain its authority and to count its subjects. Nevertheless, we can be reasonably sure that Christians were in the majority in the European provinces, with the exception of some Albanian kazas. They were also clearly in the minority in Anatolia and the Arab provinces, even if they were present in most cities and regions, and were perhaps the actual majority in mountainous regions such as Mount Lebanon, Sasun and the Tur Abdin, which had long served as places of refuge. It was only in the sultan’s possessions in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa that they were completely absent.

Most Christians in those two centuries were either peasants or numbered among the urban poor. As such, the rhythm of their lives differed little from that of their ancestors of a century before. Among the elites of the various Christian communities, however, significant changes were occurring. In the seventeenth century, the fortunes of Christian merchants and bankers were on the rise in the capital and in many of the provincial centres, often at the expense of Ottoman Jews.