Life went on
The simple answer is that they mostly stayed put and went about their business under the Ottomans. Greeks and Armenians – defined by religion – were still 22%-25% of the population of Anatolia (the Asian part of modern Turkey) in 1910 according to official Ottoman statistics. This doesn’t count all those of Byzantine descent who converted over the preceding five centuries. DNA analysis has shown that most current Turks have some Byzantine ancestry.
To be sure, the decline of Byzantine wealth and power in the 13th and 14th centuries led to a brain drain to Italy and the West that was a major fuel of the Renaissance (another major source was the cultural loot hauled West during the Franco/Venetian occupation.) But most people stayed put – often paying their taxes to the exact same local functionaries they had under the old regime.
In the 20th century – with the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the modern Greek and Turkish states – ethnicity became more important. The Christian & Greek populations in what is now Turkey plummeted from the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, (with its attendant massacres and ethnic cleansing,) and the subsequent “population exchange” (forced migration) between the two new states. Whereas in 1900 there were about 300,000 Greeks in Constantinople (out of a population of about 1,000,000), by year 2000 they numbered slightly more than 2000 in number (out of an exploding population of over 13,000,000) in the now renamed city of Istanbul. (And the city was exempted from the population exchange in the Treaty of Lausanne!)
By the way, it is a mistake to think of 1453 as a turning point. Constantinople was then a small, surrounded, impoverished outpost still enjoying fraying allegiance from a few far-flung hinterland territories. And after 500 years of living in and out of each other’s pockets the cultural differences between Greek and Turk were pretty small. Mehmet the Conqueror saw himself as the legitimate Roman emperor in the line from Augustus to the man he just vanquished (Constantine IX), his change of state religion being no different from Theodosius’ earlier change from Pagan to Christian and a long time coming – and the evidence is that his new subjects mostly agreed. It was mostly in the West that they saw it as a millennial event.
The simple answer is that they mostly stayed put and went about their business under the Ottomans. Greeks and Armenians – defined by religion – were still 22%-25% of the population of Anatolia (the Asian part of modern Turkey) in 1910 according to official Ottoman statistics. This doesn’t count all those of Byzantine descent who converted over the preceding five centuries. DNA analysis has shown that most current Turks have some Byzantine ancestry.
To be sure, the decline of Byzantine wealth and power in the 13th and 14th centuries led to a brain drain to Italy and the West that was a major fuel of the Renaissance (another major source was the cultural loot hauled West during the Franco/Venetian occupation.) But most people stayed put – often paying their taxes to the exact same local functionaries they had under the old regime.
In the 20th century – with the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the modern Greek and Turkish states – ethnicity became more important. The Christian & Greek populations in what is now Turkey plummeted from the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, (with its attendant massacres and ethnic cleansing,) and the subsequent “population exchange” (forced migration) between the two new states. Whereas in 1900 there were about 300,000 Greeks in Constantinople (out of a population of about 1,000,000), by year 2000 they numbered slightly more than 2000 in number (out of an exploding population of over 13,000,000) in the now renamed city of Istanbul. (And the city was exempted from the population exchange in the Treaty of Lausanne!)
By the way, it is a mistake to think of 1453 as a turning point. Constantinople was then a small, surrounded, impoverished outpost still enjoying fraying allegiance from a few far-flung hinterland territories. And after 500 years of living in and out of each other’s pockets the cultural differences between Greek and Turk were pretty small. Mehmet the Conqueror saw himself as the legitimate Roman emperor in the line from Augustus to the man he just vanquished (Constantine IX), his change of state religion being no different from Theodosius’ earlier change from Pagan to Christian and a long time coming – and the evidence is that his new subjects mostly agreed. It was mostly in the West that they saw it as a millennial event.
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