Abstract EN:

As soon as the middle-ages, two competitive parties coexisted in anatolia and later in the balkans : the greek-byzantine group, from hellenic and christian filiation, a sedentary and imperial people from mediterranean tradition, happened to be tightly mingled with a population whose language was turco-mongolic, who was muslem, from central-asian nomadic origin. Between those two very different worlds, many were the conflicts from the xith century down to the nationality crises that opposed the ottoman turks in the xixth century to the sultan's sujects from orthodox and byzantine tradition. However, if one limits one's study to the sole aspect of war and conflicts between greeks and turks who have been living on the same territory for almost a millenary, one cannot understand neither how quick was the turkish conquest, neither the long life of the ottoman empire, nor the common inheritance of the peoples born from it. The present study gathers medieval and ottoman sources that were chosen so as to show that besides the undeniable conflicts, there has been between the two societies, along their long living together, a dynamics in political alliances, in cultural exchanges, in trends of ideas and behaviours, that allowed a common consensus and a relatively harmonious coexistence. The peace trend even existed in religion and a few mystics in both parties played an active part in a transreligious and even sometimes supraconfessionnal approach that lead to unite all the sultan's subjects by the means of syncretism, or, on the contrary, that sometimes opposed the government through anarchy and armed rebellion.