Armenian millet

The Armenian millet (Turkish: Ermeni milleti) was the Ottoman millet (autonomous ethnoreligious community) of the Armenian Apostolic Church. It initially included not just Armenians in the Ottoman Empire but members of other Oriental Orthodox and Nestorian churches including the Coptic Church, Chaldean Catholic Church, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Syriac Orthodox Church, and the Assyrian Church of the East, although most of these groups obtained their own millet in the nineteenth century.

Mehmet II separated them from the Greek Orthodox because of the disagreements that they had over orthodoxy. The members of the millet were not only able to handle things autonomously, they had the legal status to bring a case to the Islamic courts. The Armenian millet did not have the ability to hold authority over the many people they were supposed to, and the Armenian patriarch's power had no real authority in Constantinople being so far from Anatolia.