The Armenian millet (Turkish: Ermeni milleti, Millet-i Ermeniyân) or the Armenian Gregorian Millet 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. The Armenian Catholic and Armenian Protestants also obtained their own millets in 1831 and 1850 respectively.
Mehmet II separated the Armenian millet from the Greek Orthodox millet because of the disagreements that they had over orthodoxy. By establishing a new Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople, 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, as the majority of the Armenian population in Eastern Turkey was far from Constantinople. This Patriarchate proved to be more powerful than the Catholicosates of Sis and Etchmiadzin. Ottoman Armenians had institutions such as courts of law, schools, prisons, and hospitals for their own community.
