Ottoman rule tolerated minorities while Christian reconquests erased entire populations

Evidence

If we define toleration as the absence, not of discrimination, but of persecution, then the Ottoman record until the late nineteenth century is excellent. The well-known preference of the fifteenthcentury Greeks for Muslim rather than Frankish rule was not without its reasons. The confrontation of Christendom and Islam has sometimes been compared with the Cold War. The comparison is valid at many points, but we must remember in making it that the main movement of refugees in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was from Europe to Turkey and not the other way. When Ottoman rule in the Balkans ended, the Balkan peoples resumed their national existence, with their own religions and languages and national cultures intact. After the Christian conquest, no Muslims remained in Spain or Sicily, and no speakers of Arabic. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 641 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

This model of religiously determined nationhood was adopted not only by Orthodox Christians, but also by the Muslim Turks. The establishment of a Turkish nation-state in the 1910s and 1920s involved the extermination or expulsion of literally millions of Christians. A million Armenians were murdered in the Armenian Genocide of 1915, amounting to 50% of the pre-war Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, while another half million were deported but survived, according to the estimate of Donald Bloxham. The remaining Christian population of Anatolia, above all Greek, was mostly exterminated or expelled during the 1920s Turkish War of Independence and the subsequent population exchanges. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1046 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Killing community leaders preceded mass extermination across Ottoman lands — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 19; Ottoman society was relatively tolerant toward Jews and Christians; Ottoman rule was relatively non-persecuting compared with Christian reconquests (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Ottoman rule was relatively non-persecuting compared with Christian reconquests #corroborates (0.95)
• Ottoman treatment of subject peoples compared favorably with Christian reconquest practices #corroborates (0.95) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 641
• Turkish nation-building exterminated or expelled millions of Christians #complicates (0.75) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1046