The Ottoman Turks were culturally closer to Byzantium than the Western Christians were

Evidence

Both shared—or rather, divided—the Hel­ lenistic heritage, of which Islam preserved the philosophy and science, while the West kept the literature and art. Islam is far more akin to Europe in its cultural traditions than to the true Orient, in India and China. But the Turks were familiar in a nearer and more material sense. They had been in Anatolia since the 11th century, absorbing the ancient races of the peninsula; in Europe since the fourteenth century. By the time that they conquered Constantinople, they were well acclimatized in the Balkans, mingled with Greek, Slavonic and Al­ banian blood. Men of Christian birth were prominent at the court and in the army—the corps of janissaries consisted exclusively of such. Mehmet the Conqueror was at home both in Greek and in Greece. In many senses, the Turks were less alien to Constantinople than were the Western Christians. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 645

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to discussions of Ottoman-Byzantine continuity and how empires absorb predecessors’ populations, parallels to Rome absorbing Greeks and to Mughal rule over Hindu India.
• SEED: An essay angle on how ‘conquest’ narratives erase the actual porosity between colonizer and colonized — janissaries as Christian-born soldiers of empire.