Millet (Ottoman Empire)

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In the Ottoman Empire, a millet (Turkish: [millet]; Ottoman Turkish: ملت, Arabic: مِلَّة) was an independent court of law pertaining to "personal law" under which non-Muslim populations belonging to confessional communities were allowed to rule themselves under their own laws (Christian canon law, or Jewish halakha). Despite frequently being referred to as a "system", before the nineteenth century the organization of what are now retrospectively called millets in the Ottoman Empire was not at all systematic. Rather, non-Muslims were simply given a significant degree of autonomy within their own community, without an overarching structure for the millet as a whole. The notion of distinct millets corresponding to different religious communities within the empire would not emerge until the eighteenth century. Subsequently, the millet system was justified through numerous foundation myths linking it back to the time of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1451–81), although it is now understood...

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