Orthodoxy under the Ottomans — the Second Act

For a century and a half after 1650 the Orthodox church of the Ottoman Empire was both a church and an arm of the state: the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople answered to the Sultan for the obedience of all Orthodox subjects, collected their taxes and judged their marriages and inheritances. It was a position of real power and total insecurity — patriarchs were deposed and restored constantly. And it came increasingly to be held under the influence of the Phanariots, the wealthy Greek families of Constantinople's Phanar quarter who supplied the empire's interpreters and the princes of its Danubian provinces. In 1672 the Synod of Jerusalem, under Patriarch Dositheus, issued a confession answering the Calvinist ideas that had been circulating under an Orthodox name — the East's own equivalent of the West's confessional settlements. That power also worked against its neighbours: the Serbian patriarchate of Peć was abolished in 1766 and the archbishopric of Ohrid in 1767, both absorbed into Constantinople. It ended violently — when the Greek revolt broke out in 1821, Patriarch Gregory V was hanged in his vestments from the gate of his own patriarchate.