| Abstract: | The article presents for the first time in written form three tales involving the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror and the Orthodox Christian Patriarch Gennadius. These tales purport to illustrate the relationship between the two men according to the view of the Orthodox Christian millet as represented by its religious hierarchy. The article places these otherwise unconsidered tales in the context of the general accounts of this millet which express the view of this relationship. This is a view which presents the events of around 1453 as this millet would have liked to see them as having occurred rather than as in fact they did occur. The tales present ‘snap-shot’, ‘anecdotal’ presentations of this relationship and they are shown to be in full agreement with the assumptions inherent in the base texts. By way of conclusion the texts are judged as testimony to the cultural reality of the later sixteenth-century Ottoman world. |
