The Church under Islam
In brief
When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the heart of the Orthodox world passed under Muslim rule — a condition much of the East had already known for centuries. Orthodox Christians became a tolerated but subordinate people: their faith survived, their worship continued, but they lived hemmed in by law and taxation, and often at the price of martyrdom. For nearly four hundred years the Church endured as a subject people, keeping the faith alive under conditions that no longer allowed it to flourish freely.
A tolerated but subject people
On May 29, 1453, the walls of Constantinople were breached and the thousand-year Christian empire of Byzantium came to an end. Yet the Church did not vanish with the empire. Under Islamic law Christians and Jews were dhimmi — "protected" peoples of an earlier revealed book, permitted to keep their religion in exchange for submission and a special tax. The Sultan Mehmed II, within a year of the conquest, installed a new Patriarch of Constantinople, the learned monk Gennadios Scholarios, and confirmed the Church's right to exist. Much of the Christian East — Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem — had lived this way since the seventh-century Arab conquests; now the Byzantine heartland joined them.
Toleration was real, but it was not freedom. The Church could worship, but under heavy constraint. Christians paid the jizya, the poll-tax levied on non-Muslims. They could not proselytize, and conversion from Islam to Christianity was a capital crime. New churches were generally forbidden and old ones fell into disrepair; the great Hagia Sophia became a mosque. Christians were second-class subjects — barred from the army and most offices, their testimony discounted in court, marked out in dress. In some regions the devshirme, the levy of Christian boys taken to be raised as Muslim soldiers and officials, tore children from Orthodox families. The faith was preserved, but preserved as if in a besieged fortress.
How the faith was kept
Cut off from schools and public life, the Church became the guardian of a whole people's identity. The parish, the monastery, and the home carried what the wider culture no longer could. Monasticism above all held the line: Mount Athos, granted protected status, remained a reservoir of prayer, manuscripts, and learning through the darkest centuries. In the eighteenth century the Kollyvades movement on Athos gathered the treasures of the hesychast tradition into the Philokalia, a renewal that fed the whole Orthodox world.
The cost of fidelity was often blood. Throughout the Ottoman centuries thousands of Orthodox Christians were put to death for refusing Islam or for returning to Christ after conversion — the New Martyrs of the Turkish yoke. Their number and their courage so struck the Church that in 1799 Sts. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth published a New Martyrologion, gathering their lives to show that the age of martyrs had never really ended. The Church remembered that Christ had promised His people tribulation in the world, and had bidden them be faithful unto death.
What the long captivity cost
Survival came with lasting scars. Theology grew defensive and inward; the confident intellectual life of Byzantium contracted to the copying and guarding of what had been received. Because the Ottoman state governed its Christians through the Patriarch as a single administrative body — the Rum millet — church leadership was drawn into politics, taxation, and the buying of office, and the boundary between the faith and Greek ethnic identity blurred in ways that would trouble the Church long after. The Phanariot elite of Constantinople rose to influence within this system, for good and for ill.
The Orthodox do not tell this story as one of mere defeat. A Church that could no longer build could still baptize, could still offer the Liturgy, could still produce saints. When the long night ended — beginning with the Greek revolution of 1821 and the slow birth of the modern Orthodox nations — it was because the faith had been kept alive in exactly the humble places to which it had been driven. The captivity was a wound; it was also, the Church believes, a furnace in which fidelity was tested and refined.