178 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Istanbul had only about seventy thousand people at the time of the
conquest, so Mehmet the Conqueror launched a set of policies such as tax
concessions and property giveaways to repopulate his new capital.
Mehmet also reestablished the classical Islamic principles of conquest:
non-Muslims were accorded religious freedom and left in possession of
their land and property but had to pay the jizya. People of every religion
and ethnicity came flowing in, making Istanbul a microcosm of an em-
pire pulsing with diversity.^6
Now the Ottomans ruled an empire that straddled Europe and Asia
with substantial territory in both continents. The greatest city in the world
was theirs. Their greatest achievement, however, wasn't conquest. Some-
how, in the course of their fifteen decades of rule, they had brought a
unique new social order into being. Somehow, that anarchic soup of no-
mads, peasants, tribal warriors, mystics, knights, artisans, merchants, and
miscellaneous others populating Anatolia had coalesced into a society of
clockwork complexity full of interlocking parts that balanced one another,
each acting as a spur and check on the others. Nothing like it had been
seen before, and nothing like it has been seen again. Only contemporary
American society offers an adequate analogy to the complexity of Ot-
toman society-but only to the complexity. The devil is in the details, and
our world differs from that of the Ottomans in just about every detail.
Broadly speaking, the Ottoman world was divided horizontally be-
tween a ruling class that taxed, organized, issued orders, and fought, and a
subject class that produced and paid taxes. But it was also organized verti-
cally by Sufi orders and brotherhoods. So people separated by their classes
might find themselves united in reverence to the same sheikh.
On the other hand, Ottoman society as a whole was compartmental-
ized into the major religious communities, each with its own vertical and
horizontal divisions, and each a semi-autonomous nation or millet, in
charge of its own religious rites, education, justice, charities, and social
services.
The Jews, for example, were one millet, headed by the grand rabbi in
Istanbul, a considerable community because Jews came flocking into the
Ottoman world throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, fleeing
from persecution in western Europe-England had expelled them during
the Crusades, they had endured pogroms in eastern Europe, they were fac-