Christmas celebration in present day Istanbul

During those troubled decades, the empire also became a haven for the religiously oppressed. In the mid seventeenth century, for example, a cluster of Hugenots, forced into exile from France, resided in Istanbul, and several Anglican clergymen who had fled commonwealth England, Quakers, Anabaptists, and even Catholic Jesuits and Capuchins settled in and wandered through the empire.

Such an eclectic mixture of Christians suggests that North America was not the only refuge for western European religious dissenters in the early colonial period. Indeed, it was generally understood that spiritually oppressed Christians as well as Jews could find sanctuary in the Ottoman Empire. As early as 1529, Luther was aware of the relative moderation of Ottoman society, despite his grumblings that Christians could not worship openly there [which is not true, SC]. By the 1580’s, a thinker such as Jean Bodin could write in open admiration about this aspect of Ottoman society:

The great emperour of the Turkes doth with as great devotion as any prince in the world honour and observe the religion by him received from his auncestours, and yet detesteth hee not the straunge religions of others; but to the contrarie permitteth every man to live according to his conscience: yea and that more is, neere unto his pallace at Pera, suffereth foure divers religions, viz. That of the Jews, that of the Christians, that of the Grecians, and that of the Mohametans.

Bodin held the empire up as a model of religious toleration, an assessment with which some even today would agree. The claim is sometimes made that minorities in the Islamic state constructed by the Ottomans lived more comfortably and with less fear than they did in rival European states, and even than they do in the modern secular state. Compared with other seventeenth-century states such as the habsburgs, the French, the Venetian, or the Russian this argument certainly holds, and it probably also is valid in comparison withh those modern nation states that define citizenship exclusively in fabricated categories of ethnicity, race, or religion.

Daniel Goffman. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002; 111-112