Ottoman society organised difference through the institution of the millet. In official usage, the term, though it meant “nation”, denoted a religious community endowed with corporate standing. By the Sultan’s grant, monotheist bodies—Christians, Jews and others—received a defined legal status. Protection came by charter, the ahdname (ahtiname), which set out the conditions of life in common. Within their own spheres, millets maintained courts and disciplines grounded in religious law, managed their internal revenues, and lived under the overarching authority of the throne. The Muslims, the imperial majority, were known as the millet-i hakime. Alongside them, Rum, Jewish and Armenian communities formed principal corporate bodies; over time the catalogue expanded, and certain confessional currents acquired recognition as separate millets.

From such materials emerges a civilisation assembled rather than uniform. The Empire’s identity took the form of a mosaic: Islamic learning, Turkish custom, Byzantine continuities, and a multitude of local cultures, all articulated within imperial structure. To compress this into a single national picture narrows the field of vision and misreads the evidence. An inquiry framed by the assumptions of the contemporary nation-state risks importing foreign categories into an earlier world. Better method prefers sympathy for context: ideas judged within the horizon that produced them, institutions weighed by the purposes they served then. The historian’s craft benefits when analysis proceeds with this restraint, allowing the Ottoman past to appear as a complex settlement of plural ways of life bound to a common political roof.