OTTOMAN VIGNETTE—REVISED WITH MINOR REFINEMENTS

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1. From Baghdad to Istanbul: Another Kind of Coexistence

The School of Ḥunayn exemplified something like high syncretism: genuine intellectual fusion across confessional lines, enabled by thin Tier‑1 virtues operating within a relatively favorable imperial patronage structure. Not all successful intercultural arrangements look like that. More common—and often more durable—are structured modi vivendi: arrangements in which deep differences persist, communities remain segmented, yet coexistence is maintained over long periods through institutional frameworks and calibrated policies. By modus vivendi here, I mean a working arrangement for coexistence that does not require shared ultimate values or thick mutual recognition, only institutions and reciprocal restraint.¹ The Ottoman Empire under Mehmed II and his successors offers a particularly instructive case of a third type: a non‑liberal, hierarchical order that nonetheless sustained multi‑confessional coexistence for centuries. Understanding how such arrangements work—what thin virtues they require, what limits they face—expands our conceptual repertoire beyond the liberal/illiberal binary that dominates contemporary debates.

2. Palimpsest and Word–Deed Integrity

Mehmed II has long functioned as a kind of Rorschach figure. Contemporary Venetian reports, later Habsburg pamphlets, and some Byzantine exiles cast him as an apocalyptic Antichrist; nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century Turkish nationalists refigure him as a proto‑secular nation‑builder; other modern biographers emphasize his patronage of Greek and Italian humanists, or his supposed attraction to Christianity, or his ruthless "one faith, one ruler" intransigence.² Babinger, to his credit, warns the reader at the outset that "the absence of reliable documentation makes it impossible to sketch a psychologically rounded portrait of Mehmed," and then spends several pages doing precisely that in his closing chapter, stitching together hostile diplomatic reports, courtly panegyrics, retrospective theological judgments, and romantic nationalist histories into a vivid but internally strained figure.³ Genres and temporal layers blur into a single palimpsest. The result tells us at least as much about the hopes and fears of successive observers as it does about Mehmed himself.

A stricter evidentiary discipline is possible. In what follows, only those words that are tied to Mehmed's acts of will, and that cohere with institutional practices over time, will count as evidence for his priorities. That means privileging texts such as his kanunname (law code), his charters to the Orthodox Patriarch and the Bosnian Franciscans, and the theological confession he commissioned Gennadios Scholarios to write, and pairing them with deeds such as the systematic use of the devşirme (the "human tithe"—a periodic levy of Christian boys from Balkan villages, converted, trained in palace schools or Janissary corps, and often promoted to high office), the reorganization of the Janissaries, and the long, messy work of repopulating and rebuilding Constantinople.⁴ What falls away are uncorroborated anecdotes and free‑floating ascriptions of motive. This does not yield a "true inner Mehmed," but it does allow a more disciplined reconstruction of the thin virtues his rule in fact exhibits.

3. A Thin Virtue Profile

Viewed through that word–deed filter, Mehmed does not look like a proto‑liberal avant la lettre, nor like a flat caricature of "Oriental despotism." What comes into focus instead is a cluster of thin virtues: traits of intelligence and restraint that help make a multi‑confessional modus vivendi governable from above, without presupposing egalitarian respect or high syncretic openness.

3.1 Prudential, systemic intelligence

The first is a kind of cold prudential intelligence: an ability and willingness to think in systemic, long‑term terms about the empire as a whole. The devşirme turns scattered Christian village boys into a centrally controlled corps whose advancement depends on the sultan, addressing recurrent problems of military loyalty and provincial magnate power.⁵ The Janissary corps and palace schools built on that human material become key instruments of centralized rule, staffed by men with no local power base apart from their office.⁶ The kanunname codifies punishments, taxes, salaries, and offices in a way that both constrains lesser officials and concentrates ultimate authority in the palace.⁷ The notorious succession clause—on which more below—casts even dynastic violence in the same dry, impersonal idiom of "order of the world" rather than personal vendetta.⁸ None of this requires attributing humane motives. It does show a ruler preoccupied with consequences at the scale of the dynasty and the empire, and willing to impose relatively stable, general rules on his own officials in pursuit of that end.

3.2 Structured openness to difference

A second thin virtue is structured openness to difference. Mehmed shows little interest in theological fusion; there is no Ottoman analogue to the collaborative translation workshops of Baghdad in his court. But he consistently treats confessional and ethnic diversity as a resource to be organized rather than an anomaly to be crushed. Greek and Italian architects and engineers are employed to repair and adapt Byzantine structures and to construct new mosques and fortifications; Armenian and Greek merchants and financiers are drawn into the fiscal apparatus; Jewish and Christian diplomats and dragomans serve as indispensable intermediaries with Latin Christendom.⁹ His charter to the restored Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople recognizes the Patriarch as ethnarch of the Greek Orthodox community, grants him certain tax exemptions and judicial authority, and promises protection in exchange for loyalty and tribute.¹⁰ A similar pattern appears in the ahidnâme granted to the Bosnian Franciscans, which confirms their right to maintain churches and property on condition of political obedience.¹¹ None of these documents proclaim equality of faiths. They do, however, instantiate a durable, formalized place for religious others within the imperial order. That is a recognizable virtue of structured openness: the capacity to treat plural communities as enduring components of an imperial system rather than as temporary hostages or enemies to be extirpated.

3.3 Conditional tolerance and calibrated restraint

A third thin virtue is conditional tolerance and calibrated restraint. Isaac Zarfati's mid‑fifteenth‑century letter, urging German and Hungarian Jews to migrate to Ottoman lands, contrasts the persecutions and expulsions of Christendom with the relative security and opportunity Jews enjoy under the sultan: "Here every man may dwell in peace under his own vine and fig tree, and no one makes them afraid."¹² The rhetoric is promotional, but it reflects a real pattern. Mehmed's policies toward the Greek population of Istanbul, as Halil İnalcık shows, combine coercive forced migrations (sürgün) to repopulate the city with tax privileges and recognition of communal institutions; churches are sometimes converted to mosques, sometimes left in Christian hands, and major Byzantine buildings are repaired rather than destroyed.¹³ Across the empire, non‑Muslims remain subordinate, marked and taxed as such. Yet they are also repeatedly treated as communities to be governed and taxed, not as permanent enemies to be expelled or annihilated. Toleration here is not premised on equal respect; it is a calibrated restraint grounded in revenue needs, geopolitical calculation, and a certain recognition that the empire cannot function without its religious minorities.

4. Constantinople as Test Case

Constantinople provides the clearest test of this thin virtue profile. The city could easily have gone the way of other conquered centers: left to decay into a garrisoned semi‑ruin, stripped of its multi‑confessional character, or broken into a provincial backwater eclipsed by some upstart capital. Mehmed instead treats it as the linchpin of a new, explicitly imperial project. Strategically, it controls the Bosporus and joins Anatolia to the Balkans; symbolically, it allows him to claim the title Qayser‑i Rûm (Caesar of Rome) and to present the Ottoman house as heir to both Byzantine and Islamic imperial traditions.¹⁴

The ensuing policies are anything but haphazard. Immediately after the conquest, Mehmed ransoms some prisoners himself and allows them to remain; shortly thereafter, he issues edicts ordering the transfer of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish households from other parts of the empire to repopulate the city.¹⁵ These forced migrations (sürgün) are often paired with inducements: tax reductions, grants of land or lodging, the allocation of specific quarters to particular confessional groups.¹⁶ Over time, as İnalcık and others document, the state layers voluntary migration on top of these coerced movements, creating a city in which Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish neighborhoods are distinct yet economically interdependent.¹⁷ By the end of Mehmed's reign, Constantinople's population likely exceeded its late Byzantine levels, and the city had resumed its role as a major commercial and administrative center of the eastern Mediterranean.¹⁸

This is not a melting pot. Confessional lines remain salient and legally encoded in what would become the millet system—formal recognition of religious communities as corporate bodies under their own religious leaders, with jurisdiction over internal affairs, education, and family law. The foundations of this structure are visible in Mehmed's charters to the Patriarch and other communal heads, though the system would be more fully elaborated under later sultans. At the same time, it is not a simple story of zero‑sum domination. Mehmed's word–deed pattern here illustrates the thin virtues already identified: systemic planning, structured openness to difference, and conditional tolerance as tools for building a multi‑faith modus vivendi under autocratic rule. The empire that emerges is hierarchical, often harsh, and never liberal in any meaningful sense. Yet for centuries it sustains a dense, multi‑confessional urban life in its capital and across its provinces under conditions that, on many alternative paths, could easily have yielded depopulation, expulsion, or permanent low‑grade religious war.

5. Fratricide as Limit Case

It is precisely against this background that the law of fratricide must be read—not as an awkward detail to be explained away, but as a dark counterpoint. Mehmed's kanunname does not merely record a brutal custom; it explicitly authorizes whoever ascends the throne to kill his brothers "for the order of the world" (nizâm‑i 'âlem), and states that "the majority of the ulema have approved this procedure."¹⁹ Later Ottoman jurists labor to justify the article using the familiar tools of maslaha (public interest), "lesser of two evils" reasoning, and the Qurʾanic dictum that "fitna is worse than killing," presenting the elimination of rival princes as a measure adopted in the name of public order.²⁰

By almost any Tier‑2 standard one might bring to bear—including those of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, humanism, and, crucially here, the Qurʾan and Sharia as understood within the empire itself—deliberately killing non‑rebellious or infant brothers is a grave sin. Ottoman legal discussions themselves acknowledge that the execution of non‑rebelling princes pushes the limits of Sharia, conflicting with basic norms against killing innocents and punishing one person for another's potential sins.²¹ Jurists distinguish between executing a brother in open rebellion (treated as uncontroversially legal), killing one clearly preparing revolt (debated but sometimes shoehorned into the law of rebelliousness), and killing non‑rebellious or infant princes merely for their potential to cause future fitna (the most contentious category).²² Some scholars refuse to endorse the broadest applications; others acquiesce under political pressure, and the kanunname itself conspicuously concedes that only "most" jurists approve.²³

What is most striking, in this context, is not simply that fratricide occurs—dynastic killings were common from Europe to Asia—but that Mehmed's law frames what is a grave sin by almost any standard, including the Qurʾan and Sharia, not even as a "necessary evil" but as a public good, an act done "for the order of the world" in the public interest.²⁴ It stands as one of the darkest chapters in this autocratic regime's history, and after a particularly shocking succession in which Mehmed III had nineteen brothers—many of them young children—strangled in a single day, it was quietly abandoned in practice.²⁵ Within a generation, Ahmed I broke with precedent by sparing his brother Mustafa and shifting toward a system of seniority and confinement in the kafes; the fratricide clause was never formally repealed, but it ceased to guide succession.²⁶ Even judged narrowly on its own instrumental terms, the law misfires: it generates controversy, trauma, and continued succession strife rather than the stable order it purports to serve.

The law of fratricide, in other words, marks a limit case. The same systemic, order‑obsessed intelligence that helps construct a durable multi‑confessional modus vivendi in Constantinople is, in this domain, willing to override the religious and moral standards the regime otherwise enforces and to recode a grave sin as a public good. Thin virtues of planning and consequence‑tracking can coexist with, and even abet, serious moral failures. The Ottoman example is instructive not because it offers a model to emulate, but because it shows how far a non‑liberal, autocratic regime can go in sustaining a multi‑faith modus vivendi for reasons that have little to do with liberal ideals of equal respect—and how sharply those same thin virtues can break loose from the thicker moral frameworks in whose name they are exercised.

6. Political–Philosophical Payoff

In a world where many nominally liberal states struggle to maintain even a minimal modus vivendi in the face of resurgent nationalism and religious polarization, this pre‑Westphalian, unapologetically hierarchical, yet remarkably durable imperial order has something to teach. The lesson is not that one should "be like Mehmed," still less that empire is a superior form of life. It is that the conceptual space between "liberal toleration" and "pure oppression" is not empty. An autocrat with extensive coercive power and little tolerance for organized political opposition can nonetheless, under some conditions, choose structured coexistence over homogenization or expulsion for his religiously diverse subjects.²⁷

The virtues on display in that choice are thin and the justice they support is limited. But that is precisely what makes the case worth dwelling on. Mehmed's regime combines serious moral failures—including a succession law that recodes fratricide as a public good—with a set of thin dispositions that enable a multi‑confessional city and empire to function for centuries without requiring deep agreement or modern liberal norms of equal respect. That combination neither licenses nostalgia for empire nor supports fatalism about contemporary democracies. It suggests, more modestly, that the repertoire of workable modi vivendi is broader than our current binaries admit—and that thinking clearly about thin virtues and dark chapters together is part of learning how to live, and let others live, under conditions of enduring difference.

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FOOTNOTES

¹ For the conceptual distinction between modus vivendi and more ambitious forms of consensus, see John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 2000).

² For contrasting portraits, see Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and standard biographical overviews.

³ Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), Book 7, p. 410, where he concedes the lack of material for "reliable documentation concerning his personality" even as he proceeds, over the next several pages of that closing chapter, to describe Mehmed's motives, intentions and beliefs in unwarranted detail, by his own lights. 

⁴ On the kanunname, see Mehmet Akif Aydın, "Kanunname," in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: TDV, 1988–), vol. 24, 333-337. On Mehmed's charter to the Patriarch, see Halil İnalcık, "The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23 (1969): 229-249. On the Gennadios confession, see Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 165-167. On the devşirme system, see Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 1: Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 114-116. On Constantinople's repopulation, see İnalcık, "Policy of Mehmed II," and Heath Lowry, "Pushing the Stone Uphill: The Impact of Bubonic Plague on Ottoman Urban Demography in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries," Osmanlı Araştırmaları 23 (2003): 93-132.

⁵ Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, 114-116.

⁶ Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 134-148.

⁷ Aydın, "Kanunname."

⁸ On the fratricide clause in the kanunname, see Halil İnalcık, "Fratricide in Ottoman Law," in Belleten 38 (1974): 541-552.

⁹ İnalcık, "Policy of Mehmed II"; Imber, Ottoman Empire, 195-210.

¹⁰ İnalcık, "Policy of Mehmed II," 235-238; Runciman, Great Church in Captivity, 165-177.

¹¹ Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 52-54.

¹² Isaac Zarfati's letter in translation, in B. Cooperman, ed., In Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998); and online reproductions.

¹³ İnalcık, "Policy of Mehmed II," 239-245.

¹⁴ On Qayser-i Rûm and imperial ideology, see Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003); and Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

¹⁵ İnalcık, "Policy of Mehmed II," 231-233.

¹⁶ Ibid., 240-242.

¹⁷ Ibid., 243-246.

¹⁸ On population estimates and recovery, see İnalcık and demographic reconstructions in Suraiya Faroqhi, ed., The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 356-359.

¹⁹ İnalcık, "Fratricide in Ottoman Law," text of the kanunname.

²⁰ Ibid.; see also Daily Sabah, "The history of fratricide in the Ottoman Empire," parts 1–2 (online, 2014).

²¹ İnalcık, "Fratricide in Ottoman Law."

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ On Mehmed III's execution of nineteen brothers and contemporary shock, see İnalcık, "Fratricide in Ottoman Law," and Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 95-97.

²⁶ On Ahmed I, Mustafa I, and the shift to kafes and seniority, see Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 176-178.

²⁷ For the contrast with contemporary "liberal" failures of modus vivendi, see later case studies in this volume on the EU, Northern Ireland, and India.