Hasan Çolak: Ottoman Central Administration and Primacy in the Orthodox Church

Hasan Çolak, "Ottoman Central Administration and Primacy in the Orthodox Church: Sources and Agents of Knowledge and Inter-Patriarchal Conflicts" in P. V. Ermilov and M. B. Gratsianskii (eds.), Poniatie pervenstva: Istoki i konteksty (Moscow: PTGSU, 2022): 539-562. 

Çolak is one of the only scholars working on the history of the Orthodox Church as an Ottoman institution on the basis of Ottoman archival sources, so anything he publishes is of extreme interest.

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Bearing in mind all that has been said above, it may be concluded that, throughout its history as part of the Ottoman state, the Orthodox Church was an active agent in its dealings with the state, rather than a passive receiver of its demands. As part of its interaction with the Otto-man state, the large network of the Orthodox Church, consisting both of clergymen and laymen, Christians and non-Christians, and formal and informal agents, made it possible for the Ottoman state to form its knowledge on the Orthodox Church. As the above examples illustrate, the primacy of the patriarchate of Constantinople was not a point of reference for the Ottoman central administration in its dealings with ecclesiastical matters in its domains between the fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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