So I was play assassin's creed revelations earlier and I was just wondering how accurate their portrayal of the city's demographics is. 60 years after the fall of Constantinople it shows the city's residence as predominantly Turks. Was the Greek population massacred or enslaved and scattered when the city was conquered? Or should we been seeing them as the largest ethnicity that soon after the ottomans conquered it?
Was the Greek population massacred or enslaved and scattered when the city was conquered?
The simple answer for why were most of the Greek inhabitants not in the city post-conquest: they were already gone. Anyone who could get out early on, got out. George Sphrantzes reports something like 7000 men in the city in 1453, on the eve of the siege.
Yes there were massacres after the fall of the city, but the city was already nowhere near its medieval peak, and it had never really recovered from the Fourth Crusade. But once the writing was on the wall that Mehmet was besieging the city, citizens fled en masse from an already dwindling population, and compared to before the siege only a tiny fraction of its citizens even stuck around.
The key thing to know here is that the city was basically entirely repopulated by the Ottoman Empire, and that happened almost immediately. The few remaining citizens were deported, and Ottoman subjects were brought in from elsewhere. Post-conquest, the city's residents could definitely be called Ottoman, although calling them Turks doesn't really adequately reflect the diversity of the Ottoman Empire, which was already quite European, with a capital in Thrace and control over a huge part of the Balkans. Many of the Ottomans who repopulated the city were European and Christian, but yes, there were many Turkish people as well.
Greeks were - oddly enough - imported as well from both what's now Greece and from the Greek populations of Trebizond in what's now Turkey. Simplistically speaking, these Greeks eventually became the class of people called the Phanariotes, after the Greek quarter of the Ottoman city, called the Phanar or Fener in Turkish.
I'm unfamiliar with your game, but I hope that helps to explain what the demographics looked like.
I am no historian lol. But could it have been possible that the city residents became Turkified? I mean. What makes someone Turkish? Or Osmani at the time. The concept of nationalism was not as strong at this time in this part of the world. Asking a someone who lived in the Ottoman empire in this time his nationality. I believe you would get an answer more on the lines that he was apart of the Osman empire rather than saying I am a Turk or Greek.