Byzantine Empire and Byzantine are fictitious names invented by Habsburg historians to avoid calling the legitimate Roman Empire as such and to support their claim that the state led by the Ottoman dynasty was not a continuation of the Roman Empire, while the so-called Holy Roman Empire led by the Habsburg dynasty supposedly was.
Leaving aside local incidents, usually occurring far from Constantinople and often exaggerated in the age of modern nation-building, there were almost no Roman revolts. One might wonder why. The answer is quite simple.
The Romans (Rumluk, Rumoi) were mostly Greek-speaking, but not exclusively, Roman Orthodox Christians who followed the patriarchate of Constantinople in religious matters and for over a thousand years considered the Roman emperor their political leader.
The Ottoman dynasty:
- did not touch the patriarchate or any religious institutions except those that legally belonged to the emperor, such as Hagia Sophia, and the churches remained open,
- handed over the leadership of the Romans to the newly appointed patriarch, a position that had been vacant for years for political reasons under the last Paleologos emperor,
- allowed the patriarchate to strengthen schools, hospitals, and social services with funds raised by the government, and authorized the collection of other donations, which were kept in the patriarchate’s treasury in an almost inaccessible monastery on Mount Athos near Thessaloniki,
- proclaimed herself the next Roman emperor, Kayseri Rum, and promised fair governance to the Romans, allowing them to run their own parallel legal system with their own courts,
- exempted them from military service in exchange for a defense tax, or, failing that, required one recruit to be sent to the Ottoman special forces, the Kapıkulu, from each community each year, except for the inhabitants of Constantinople,
- showed an interest in Greek language and culture, personally participating in gatherings, one of which was the reading of Homer,
- established a long relationship with the Roman senatorial families known as the Phanariots because of their preferred location in Constantinople, appointing them to public office and even governors and vassal kings,
- allowed Romans to freely engage in business and economic activity throughout the life of the empire,
- although criminal organizations were often formed by people of Roman descent, law enforcement did not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity,
- prevented animosity between communities, although Romans, as a merchant class, often ran transportation and finance and were noticeably wealthier than Muslims,
- did not campaign to convert the Romans to Islam, and strictly suppressed any local attempts to seize their legitimate possessions or other forms of pressure from the Muslim population.
Because of these facts, and because of a very long period of peace and prosperity in the central territories of the empire, the near Balkans and Asia Minor, the Roman population remained extremely loyal to the state, to the point where the historian Dimitri Kitzikis called it a Greco-Turkish state.
Take Alexander Mavrocordato, a Greek-speaking Roman Orthodox Christian Phanariot. His father was from the island of Chios and married a member of the Phanariot establishment. Mavrokordato represented the Ottoman Empire at the negotiation of the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699 as the sultan’s foreign minister and signed the treaty together with Rami Mehmed Pasha, the minister of finance. His son and grandson were appointed kings of Moldavia in the 18th century. The Ottoman court saw no problem in entrusting a Roman, now considered a Greek, to represent the Ottomans, now considered Turks.
The Mavrokordatos family in the 19th century
Although the neighborhoods were separated, the children played together, singing songs in two languages. They received treats for both Christian and Muslim holidays.
The situation began to change, starting in the most remote parts of the empire, Morea (Peloponnese) and Crete, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. However, the population of Istanbul, which opposed the idea of a Greek state, remained loyal and pro-Ottoman until the 20th century, and no serious disturbances by the Romans, as they were called in the empire, were recorded.
For the Turks, it was a different story. There were countless uprisings of the population of Turkish descent against the government, mostly in Central Anatolia, as many Turks wanted to preserve the Central Asian culture, while the new settled bureaucratic bureaucratic Turco-Roman state culture was different, and the Ottoman government brutally suppressed the Turks’ uprisings for centuries.