The Ottoman Empire • 149most Muslim youth, and performed other religious tasks. Sometimes they
also served as a buffer between the subject peoples and the other branches
of the ruling class. What was new in the Ottoman system was that the
higher ulama became a recognized governmental branch headed by an of¬
ficial called the shaykh al-Islam, appointed by the sultan.
The subject class (re'aya) included everyone in the Ottoman Empire
who did not belong to the ruling class. Its function was to produce the
wealth of the empire. Herders and peasants, miners and builders, artisans
and merchants, were all reaya. Their cohesion was strengthened by trade
guilds, Sufi orders, and athletic clubs. Their political and social organiza¬
tion was the millet, or "religious community." The Greek Orthodox church
was a millet, headed by a patriarch who served at the pleasure of the sul¬
tan. All ecclesiastical, judicial, educational, and other benevolent activities
involving Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, from Bosnia to
Basra, were handled by their millet. The Armenian millet performed simi¬
lar functions for Armenians (and, in theory, other Monophysite Chris¬
tians) no matter where in the empire they lived. Later on, the Ottoman
sultan appointed a chief rabbi to head the Jewish millet, with similar juris¬
diction over Ottoman Jews. The Muslim reaya, who made up less than
half the population of the Ottoman Empire at its height, were considered
members of the Islamic umma. They, too, often called themselves a millet,
but the cultural branch of the ruling class was their equivalent of an eccle¬
siastical organization.
Europeans living or doing business in the Ottoman Empire, being
Catholic or (from the sixteenth century) perhaps Protestant, did not care to
be a part of any of these millets. Nor did they have to be. The Ottoman gov¬
ernment adopted a practice, dating back to the Ayyubids, of issuing "Capit¬
ulations" that gave autonomy to foreigners living in a Muslim territory. In
effect, European nationals were freed from having to obey Ottoman laws or
pay local taxes. Although older books claim that the Capitulations began
with a treaty between Suleyman the Magnificent and the king of France, in
fact the system was taken over from the Mamluks. The deal was reciprocal:
Muslim merchants received the same concessions when living in foreign
states. It may seem odd that the Ottoman sultans would accept a system
that kept them from prosecuting criminals within their empire, if they had
the protection of a foreign power. Indeed, when the European states grew
stronger and the Ottomans weaker in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen¬
turies, many Westerners did abuse the privileges they enjoyed under the
Capitulations. Muslims conceive of the law as binding on people who es¬
pouse the religion from which it stems, not on those who happen to be