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       In the year 1453, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet (Muhammad) II, better known by his sobriquet “the Conqueror” (Fetih), captured the last stronghold of the rump state of the Byzantino-Roman Empire. When the Ottoman forces had broken the invincible gates and walls built by Theodosius II, the last emperor of the Romans, Constantine XI Palaeologus, threw himself into the army of Turks only to be slashed and pierced by the enemy blades. The once proud citizens of New Rome had become subjects of the Muslim Sultan, and the former centre of Imperial worship, the Basilica of the Holy Wisdom, was made a Mosque for the new rulers of Romania. As the famous author Roger Crawley wrote: "when night fell on the B and on the city on May 29, 1453...it carried Byzantium away with it too, once and for all" (1453 107). 

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       Sultans of the Ottoman Turks were not in the least ignorant of the city’s glorious past: the land of the Romans remains "Rum", ruled by the "Sultan" of "Rum"(Isom-Verhaaren 744), and in fact, Mehmet II himself even appropriated the title of Kayser-i Rum “Caesar of Romania”(Isom-Verhaaren 939), albeit a secondary one after his claim to be the Caliph of Islam. The city’s name remained Constantinople after its founder, only in a different tongue: Konstantiniyye. Only four hundred years later was the city renamed Istanbul by the founding father of the modern Turkish nation, Kemal Ataturk, for the name Konstantiniyye sounded too Greek, notwithstanding that Istanbul itself was no less a Turkish corruption of the Greek phrase: «εἰς τὴν Πόλιν», “to the City”(Sakaoğlu). The Sultan required all the infidel populations – Jews, Christians, Samaritans – to pay a fickle poll tax (cizye) in order to be recognised as “protected minority” (dhimmi) and allowed them to remain in their homeland (Esposito 415).

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       Indeed, for all peoples living in the former Byzantine empire, Constantinople was THE City, the only city worthy of remembrance and reverence. Byzantine Romans were still a large population in the city throughout the Ottoman occupation, or in their own term, the «Τουρκοκρατία», dominance by the Turks. A small Romaic aristocracy still ran the Patriarchate and had influence over all the Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman empire. To them, the Turkish turbans did not seem as bad as they had imagined. Many of them became courtiers of the Sultan, who dispatched them to the distant Orthodox land of Wallachia and Moldavia to become princely governors. Sultan had entrusted much of his administration of all Christian communities to these Romaic aristocrats (known as Phanariotes after their traditional district in the city, Phanar), and some of them gathered immense wealth, such as Michael “Seytanoglu” Cantacuzenus, whose moniker means “son of Satan” in Turkish (Glenny)

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      To the Slavic populations of the Balkans, the City was “Царьгра̀дъ”, Tsarigrad, City of the Emperor. The Slavs in the Balkans had lived there for eight centuries when the Ottomans came and became as indigenous to Thrace and Macedonia as the Greeks. They intermingled with the Grecophone populace of the Roman Empire, appropriated a set of alphabets to write their crude tongue, and with the help of two Thessalonian (therefore, Byzantine bilinguals) missionary brothers, Sts Cyril and Methodius, their barbaric and untrimmed tongue evolved into a language capable of delivering the wisdom of Plato, rendering terms of Christology, and composing verses as elegant as Homer’s or Virgil’s. The Slavs had become fully “Byzantine” in character, distinguished only by their language to the Greeks. In Constantinople, however, they tended to learn the Greek language and join the Phanariotes as the de facto leaders of the Orthodox Christians in New Rome (Glenny 44). 

       

      People of the Caucasian mountains also had a new foothold in Constantinople. Among all of them, Armenians, who had maintained a sizable diaspora in the Byzantine world, was now granted a formal place in the imperial capital. They had acquired a Patriarchate in Constantinople, comparable to that of the Romans. The Sultan used their advice and business skills to run the newly conquered state, and they were in turn granted land and some limited prerogatives as a recognised minority. Constantinople became the centre of Armenian culture for another half millennium, where the Armenians came up with the first printing press in the Ottoman empire, first modern fiction novel in the Ottoman Turkish language (which was the mother tongue of most west coast Armenians). Armenians even utilised their own distinctive alphabet to write the Ottoman Turkish language, which the Ottoman Turks also liked occasionally (Candara). 

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       Modern “liberal” historians tend to picture the Ottoman empire as a land of utmost tolerance and plurality, where people of different faith could live in harmony and equality. This narrative tells some truths but omitted a larger part of the story: dhimmi system was based on the absolute supremacy of Islam over other religions, and in many case, this would mean that the rulers would rule as they saw fit. The poll tax, Cizye, providing a beautiful vision of protection and mutual benefit, was in fact often harsher than one can bear. Expulsions were almost none, for the Emirs and Caliphs needed quasi-slaves, civil servants and punchbags from time to time, but anytime they wanted a little more coins, they once again turned to the Christians and Jews, offering the latter two with a three-way multiple choice: give up your faith and walk away with your head, give up your head and walk away with your faith (if you can), or give up your wealth and walk away intact. Ottoman Sultans were no exception. Some of the Sultans understood the importance of cosmopolitanism and seldom enforced the Sharia with full rigour, but others with their religious zeal would lose no sleep blackmailing Christian and Jewish merchants or converting some of them by force just for fun. Quranic laws had written strictly against forced conversion, but in practice, the strict texts were interpreted in flexible ways. 

       Situation was worse with the underdogs. When the political connections and personal wealth largely protected the Phanariot aristocrats from harassment, the lack of them ruined the peasantry and small businessmen. Unlike the aristocrats, these underdogs were much more easy targets for ransom. Muslim peasantry in the Balkans in the later phases of the empire often bore grudge against the prestige and wealth of the Christian bourgeois and aristocrats, assuming that Muslims were naturally superior than Christians and Jews and the scene of Christian noblemen employing Muslim servants was out of order; however, it was the Christian peasantry (Greeks, Bulgarians, Vlachs) to whom they directed their fury because the latter had no power to fight back. Occasional rape of Christian daughters was not uncommon, for Christian testimonies did not have effect on Muslims in a Sharia court. Heavy Cizye taxes Combined with the Ottoman policy of so-call “blood-taxing”, which required every Christian household in the Balkans to give up their first-born son who would be converted to Islam and trained in an army camp, the Christian peasantry died out in many areas in the Balkans such as Bosnia and east Thrace, where a Muslim majority still persisted until our age.