At the turn of the twentieth century, Greek jurists insisted that the Ottoman Empire was legally pluralistic. While one jurist acknowledged the Sultan's ‘political purpose' in respecting the Greeks' privileges, another denied Muslims any agency free from Sharia. The alleged incommensurability between the Christian and Islamic law was their common agenda. Greek historians, on the other hand, saw the privileges as the Turks’ sign of goodwill, and emphasized the civilizational gap between the Catholic West and Ottoman East. Being a normative expression rather than a neutral description, legal pluralism functioned as a method of neglecting the Muslim quest for legal unity.

This article examines the events leading to the execution of Gregory V, Patriarch of Constantinople, utilizing accounts and documents in Ottoman Turkish and Greek. Gregory was the occupant of a post which involved striking a balance between different Phanariot factions, pro- and anti-Enlightenment tendencies, and localist and imperial expectations. This article argues that it was the outbreak of the Revolution in the Morea, rather than Ypsilantis’ movement, that upset the status quo, convincing the Ottoman elite that Gregory was no longer useful for the smooth functioning of Ottoman governance.

This article examines the tombstone of Meletios II, a native of Tenedos, who was briefly Ecumenical Patriarch in 1768–9. It also offers an account of his troubled patriarchate and sketches events in the rest of his ecclesiastical career. This hitherto unknown tombstone has rested for an indeterminate number of years in the garden of North Bank, a large Victorian mansion in Pages Lane in the North London suburb of Muswell Hill. It appears to have been in the grounds of North Bank before the house became an annexe of Muswell Hill Methodist Church. It is not known where in the Ottoman Empire Meletios' grave was originally situated, nor has it been possible to establish the circumstances in which the tombstone came to North Bank. On the basis of the inscription on the tombstone it is possible to establish Meletios' previously unknown date of death, 5 January 1780. It appears to be one of the earliest known tombstones of an Ecumenical Patriarch during the period of the Tourkokratia.