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‘When I was in Salonica the second time, I received an order to perform contrary deeds and so when I met a Turk on a Greek street I drew my sword & forced him to speak the name of the First and the Second and to make the sign of the cross, and then I did not let him go until he did it; similarly, having met a Greek in a Turkish street I forced him to say the words ‘Mahomet is the true prophet’, and also the names of the first two & ordered him to lift one finger upward according to the Mahometan custom. And again, when I met a Jew he had to make the sign of the cross for me, and also to pronounce those two names when this happened in a Greek street, while when I met him in a Turkish street he had to raise one finger upward & name those two names. And I was performing those deeds daily’

Yakov Frank (1726–1791), Autohagiography no. 15^1*

IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE religious affiliation provided the categories according to which the state classified its subjects. Muslims had to be readily distinguishable from non-Muslims, who existed in a position of legal inferiority. ‘Their headgear is a saffron yellow turban,’ wrote the French agent Nicolas de Nicolay of the Salonican Jews in the mid-sixteenth century, ‘that of the Greek Christians is blue, and that of the Turks is pure white so that by the difference in colour they may be known apart.’ Yellow shoes, bright clothes and white or green turbans were reserved for members of the ruling faith, as were delicate or expensive fabrics. A later traveller, Tournefort, found ‘the subjects of the Grand Signior, Christians or Jews, have [their slippers] either red, violet or black. This order is so well-establish’d, and observ’d with such Exactness, that one may know what Religion any one is of by the Feet and the Head.’²

But regulations were one thing, and what people did in real life was another, especially when out of sight of the imperial capital. Boundaries were constantly being subverted by accident or design and in a bustling commercial port in particular, religious communities could not be impermeably sealed from one another. Young Muslim boys served as apprentices to Christian shoe-makers; Jewish and Muslim hamals and casual labourers scoured the docks together for work. When well-off Muslim families employed Jewish and Christian servants and milk-nurses, the children of the families intermingled and the boys often became ‘milk-brothers’, a relationship which could endure for many years. In Salonica, with its unique confessional composition, there thus arose what a later visitor described as ‘a sort of fusion between the different peoples who inhabit the place and a happy rapprochement between the races which the nature of their beliefs and the diversity of their origins tends to separate.’³

The stress Islam laid on the unity of God made possible what was, within its own self-imposed limits, an inclusive attitude to other religions of the Book. For unlike the Jews, who regarded themselves as a chosen people, and the Christians who repudiated and distanced themselves from their origins by focusing on the charge of deicide against the Jews, Muslims explicitly acknowledged their own connection to the earlier monotheistic faiths. Christ himself, though not regarded as divine in nature, was celebrated as a prophet – one particularly stern preacher is even reputed to have had someone executed for blaspheming against his name. The adaptation too of churches and Christian shrines for Muslim use could be seen not as deliberate humiliation and desecration – though it was naturally seen that way by Christians – but as a recognition by Muslims that God lingered already in the holy places of their predecessors.⁴

One should not, obviously, ignore the powerful evidence for the mutual contempt and hostility that could be projected across the religious divides – the janissaries who beat a Christian arms merchant to death in the market, shouting ‘Why are you an unbeliever? So much sorrow you are!’; the Jewish householders who mocked Christian worshippers during holy festivals; the stuffed effigies of Judas burned with much glee by the Orthodox during Easter. (Muslims were occasionally mocked in public too, but only by those who wished to become martyrs.) Popular hostility was palpable against those who converted and abandoned their ancestral faith. Yet even – perhaps especially – when confessional boundaries were not crossed, the daily life of the city fostered a considerable sharing of beliefs and practices.⁵

For contrary to what our secular notions of a religious state might lead us to believe, the Ottoman authorities were not greatly interested in policing people’s private beliefs. In general, they did not care what their subjects thought so long as they preserved the outward forms of piety. This attitude was shared by many non-Muslims too. Visiting Catholics, for whom doctrine mattered a great deal, were struck by the perfunctory character of Orthodox observance. ‘Among this people there is immense ignorance not only of councils but of the Christian faith,’ noted a Ukrainian Catholic in the early eighteenth century. ‘They retain the name of Christ and the sign of the cross but nothing else.’ Such accusations of doctrinal ignorance said as much about the accuser as about Salonica’s Christians, for the latter tenaciously observed the feast-days and customs they felt to be important. But it is true that there was far less theological policing under the Ottomans than there was in Christendom at this time, and this laxity of atmosphere and absence of heresy-hunters fostered the emergence of a popular religious culture which more than anything else in the early modern period united the city’s diverse faiths around a common sense of the sacred and divine.⁶