, 1922 The
Ottoman Empire grouped the Eastern Orthodox Christians into the
Rum Millet. In tax registries,
Christians were recorded as "infidels" (see
giaour). After the
Great Turkish War (1683–99), relations between Muslims and Christians in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire were radicalized, gradually taking more extreme forms and resulting in occasional calls of Muslim religious leaders for expulsion or extermination of local Christians, and also Jews. As a result of the Ottoman oppression, destruction of churches and violence against the non-Muslim civilian population,
Serbs and their church leaders headed by Serbian Patriarch
Arsenije III sided with
Habsburg Austria in 1689, and again in 1737 under Serbian Patriarch
Arsenije IV, in war. In the following punitive campaigns, Ottoman forces conducted atrocities, resulting in the "
Great Migrations of the Serbs". In retaliation of the Greek rebellion, Ottomans authorities orchestrated massacres of Greeks
in Constantinople in 1821. During the massacre occurred mass executions, pogrom-type attacks, destruction of churches, and looting of the properties of the city's Greek population. The events culminated with the hanging of the
Ecumenical Patriarch,
Gregory V and the beheading of the
Grand Dragoman, Konstantinos
Mourouzis. Christians were forced to pay disproportionately higher taxes than Muslims within the empire, including the humiliating poll-tax. Even pregnant mothers had to pay jizya on behalf of their unborn children. {{Blockquote Bosnia often served as a battlefield or staging ground over the 200 years of Ottoman raids and campaigns against Hungary. Excessive taxation and conscript labor became unbearable for Christian Bosnians. “Christians therefore began to abandon their houses and plots of land situated in level country and along the roads and to retreat back into the mountains. And as they did so, moving ever higher into inaccessible regions, Muslims took over their former sites.” The Christians living in towns suffered due to the Ottomans mandated restrictions to economic advancement by non-Muslims: A Bosnian Muslim proverb and a song honoring and praising Sultan
Bayezid II show Muslim attitudes toward the Christians:"The rayah [Christian dhimmi] is like the grass, Mow it as much as you will, still it springs up anew. Once you’d broken Bosnia's horns You mowed down what would not be pruned Leaving only the riffraff behind So there’d be someone left to serve us and grieve before the cross." The sound of Church bells often angered Turks, and “wherever there invasions would go, down came the bells, to be destroyed or melted into cannon": In 1794 the Orthodox church of Serbia warned Christians not to “sing during outings, nor in their houses, nor in other places. The saying "Don't sing too loud, this village is Turk" testifies to the fact that this part of the Kanun-i Rayah was applied outside church life as well as within.” After reviewing the martyrology of Christians killed by the Ottomans from the fall of Constantinople all the way to the final phases of the Greek War of Independence, Constantelos reports: {{Blockquote Constantelos concludes:"The story of the neomartyrs indicates that there was no liberty of conscience in the Ottoman Empire and that religious persecution was never absent from the state. Justice was subject to the passions of judges as well as of the crowds, and it was applied with a double standard, lenient for Muslims and harsh for Christians and others. The view that the Ottoman Turks pursued a policy of religious toleration in order to promote a fusion of the Turks with the conquered populations is not sustained by the facts." The abolition of jizya and emancipation of formerly dhimmi subjects was one of the most embittering stipulations the Ottoman Empire had to accept to end the
Crimean War in 1856. Then, “for the first time since 1453, church bells were permitted to ring... in Constantinople,” writes M. J. Akbar. “Many Muslims declared it a day of mourning.” Indeed, because superior social standing was from the start one of the advantages of conversion to Islam, resentful Muslim mobs rioted and hounded Christians all over the empire. In 1860 up to 30,000 Christians were massacred in the Levant alone. Mark Twain recounts what took place in the levant: {{Blockquote Edouard Engelhardt observed that during the second iteration of the Tanzimat reforms, the same problems persisted: “Muslim society has not yet broken with the prejudices which make the conquered peoples subordinate…the raya [dhimmis] remain inferior to the Osmanlis; in fact he is not rehabilitated; the fanaticism of the early days has not relented…. [Even liberal Muslims rejected]…civil and political equality, that is to say, the assimilation of the conquered with the conquerors.” during the tanzimat reforms, James Zoharb made an observation of how it was doing in Bosnia and Herzegovina which he sent to British ambassador
Henry Bulwer: {{Blockquote
Roderic H. Davison explains the failure of the tanzimat reforms: {{Blockquote The
Greek genocide which included the
Pontic genocide, was the systematic killing of the Eastern Orthodox
Ottoman Greek population of
Anatolia which was carried out mainly during
World War I and
its aftermath (1914–1922) on the basis of their religion and ethnicity. The genocide included massacres, forced deportations involving
death marches through the
Syrian Desert, rapes and burnings of Greek villages, forced conversions to Islam, expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of
Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. ==Interwar period==