The resulting vacuum of leadership was filled by the Church. Thus,
paradoxically, it was Islam and its excesses that made the Church
the undisputed shepherd of the peoples of the Balkan, a position it
did not enjoy before. The new rulers did not encourage conversions
to their faith for fear of reducing their tax base - non-Moslem
"zimmis" (the Qur'an's "People of the Book") paid special (and
heavy) taxes to the treasury and often had to bribe corrupt
officials to survive.
Still, compared to other Ottoman exploits (in Anatolia, for
instance), the conquest of the Balkan was a benign affair. Cities
remained intact, the lands were not depopulated and the
indiscriminately ferocious nomadic tribesmen that usually
accompanied the Turkish forces largely stayed at home. The Ottoman
bureaucracy took over most aspects of daily life soon after the
military victories, bringing with it the leaden stability that was
its hallmark. Indeed, populations were dislocated and re-settled as
a matter of policy called "sorgun". Yet such measures were intended
mainly to quell plangent rebelliousness and were applied mainly to
the urban minority (for instance, in Constantinople).
The Church was an accomplice of the Turkish occupiers. It was a part
of the Ottoman system of governance and enjoyed both its protection
and its funding.
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