In recent years the late Ottoman era has become an increasingly popular topic in research and fiction. Despite what might be called an Ottoman revival, the early Ottoman centuries have so far not attracted much attention. ThusTom Papademetriou's Render unto the Sultan is a most welcome contribution to the growing body of research on Ottoman historiography and the Greek Orthodox communities in the Ottoman Empire.

Papademetriou's study proposes a new approach to interpreting the role of the Orthodox Church during the first centuries of Ottoman rule by consulting Ottoman sources such as tax registers in combination with the traditional Greek chronicles and Western travelogues that have hitherto formed the basis of central works of history by Runciman, Vakalopoulos and others whom he accuses of orientalism, anachronisms and ethnocentrism. Thus the famous agreement between Mehmet the Conqueror and Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios in 1454 has been mistakenly interpreted as a symbol of the Ottoman state's recognition of the Patriarch's role as community leader. According to Papademetriou, the sources that exist from the first centuries of Ottoman rule all demonstrate that the Church was exclusively seen as a source of revenue for the state and therefore the ideal of the patriarch as both a religious and a secular community leader has simply been emphasized for modern purposes to strengthen the role of the Church or to support the mission of contemporary religious leaders such as Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, who also acted as a secular leader.

In Chapter One, Papademetriou raises two strong objections to existing research on the role of the Orthodox Church under Ottoman rule, namely its tendency to focus on individual stories (e.g. corrupt individuals) and on the Church and conquered Christian populations as isolated or distinct from the Ottoman social and economic context. The aim of Papademetriou's study is to place the Church ‘within the broader context of Ottoman society’ and examine the ‘social role of the Church’. In reality, however, the study is primarily focused on the Church hierarchs’ role as tax farmers, omitting other aspects of Ottoman social context and the social role of the Church. Despite Papademetriou's scepticism about focusing on individual cases, Chapter Two opens with Gregory Palamas’ account of his experiences as a hostage at the Ottoman court in 1354. This serves as an illustration of the hospitability of the Ottomans (Palamas was treated well and allowed to preach and participate in inter-religious dialogues) and of the Ottomans’ practical attitude towards Orthodox religious leaders, who were seen simply as a source of revenue, in this early case in the form of a ransom but later by instating the Church as a tax-farming institution. Papademetriou calls attention to the early interactions between the conquering Ottoman forces and the Church hierarchs by showing that the Church was absorbed into the Ottoman fiscal administration and that fiscal relations dominated the relationship between the new Ottoman rulers and the Christian leaders. The purpose is to refute the theory that the Ottomans from the beginning saw Church hierarchs as community leaders and the patriarch as millet-basi, leader of an ethno-religious millet. This function, he claims, only emerged in the seventeenth century when the empire started to decline and decentralise. Chapter Three proceeds to illustrate the relationship between the Ottoman State and the Orthodox patriarch in the sixteenth century. This chapter focuses on the role of the patriarch as a tax farmer and how the attractiveness of this position led to many cases of simony, i.e. the buying and selling of offices. It is striking that theological and other ideological issues regarding the Church in this historical period are entirely absent. This absence follows from Papademetriou's insistence on contextualising the Church within its Ottoman social and economic context but it seems to this reader at least that an integration of the ideological/theological dimension could have helped develop a fuller picture of the Greek Orthodox Church. Obviously, there are many previous studies on these aspects; however, a newcomer to the field must wonder whether the function of tax farmer and interactions with Ottoman officials fully portrays a Church hierarch's life in the sixteenth century. Another element which is absent from the analysis is the subjects paying the taxes. No doubt sources referring to lay people are sparse, yet it is obvious that Papademetriou has chosen to exclusively focus on the relationship between Greek Orthodox elites and the Ottoman state which again leaves the non-specialist wondering what, for example, kept the Orthodox subjects from converting to Islam. If their Church leaders did not provide anything beyond an economic institution collecting taxes, and a corrupt one at that, what then restrained them from converting to Islam and thereby avoiding taxation? Chapter Four turns to direct evidence in the Ottoman sources of the fiscal relationship between the Ottoman state and the Church, showing the Church hierarchs as functionaries of the state. Disputing the view that the Church was semi-autonomous like a guild, Papademetriou suggests that it was governed entirely by the state like any other fiscal institution. Chapter Five moves from the role of clerics to the influential Greek Orthodox lay elite, particularly focusing on one colourful individual, the influential archon Michael Kantakouzenos, also called Seytanoglou, son of Satan, from the sixteenth century. The Conclusion points to the fact that even though the patriarchal offices were in principle life appointments, the patriarchs changed on average between every second and every third year during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The frequent changes of patriarchs were caused by tough competition for this lucrative position and the power interests of Greek economic elites. Only from the seventeenth century are there signs of the patriarchate consolidating its corporate authority over individual bishops as a first step to developing real authority over the Greek community, as is known from the concept of millet where the patriarch is considered a community leader – millet-basi.

Papademetriou convincingly shows that Church hierarchs in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries often accepted the rules of the game set by the Ottoman state and also personally profited from it but he fails to address the ways in which lay members of the Church experienced their leaders and the Church community. For this end we need other sources than those used in this study. In a sense, Papademetriou risks falling into the same traps as the scholarship he criticises: overgeneralisation and anachronism. Nevertheless, as a first book-length study proposing an alternative source-based understanding of the relationship between the Church and the Ottoman state over the centuries, Papademetriou's provides an important new perspective on the field and a fascinating account, introducing a rich Ottoman vocabulary indicative of the author's broad insight and linguistic proficiency. Unfortunately, the glossary is somewhat inadequate and the author seems to have been let down by the copy-editor, as the text suffers from many errors, repetitions and inconsistencies that do not serve as a fair presentation of the study's effort to challenge previous ways of seeing the Orthodox Church exclusively from the perspective of the conquered and its spiritual mission. In spite of these caveats, Render unto the Sultan is a refreshing scholarly contribution that pragmatically observes the Church as deeply embedded in the Ottoman state and not simply as a dormant ethno-national community awaiting redemption.