Donald Quataert. In contrast, Michael Ursinus writes that the word was used to refer to non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire even before that time. The term was used inconsistently prior to the 19th century. The systematic use of millet as designation for non-Muslim Ottoman communities dates from the reign of Sultan Mahmud II () in the early 19th century, when official documentation came to reiterate that non-Muslim subjects were organized into three officially sanctioned millets: Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish. The bureaucrats of this era asserted that the millet system was a tradition dating back to the reign of Sultan Mehmed I (). Many historians have accepted this claim and assumed that a millet system of this form existed since early Ottoman times. Recent scholarship has cast doubt on this idea, showing that it was rather a later political innovation, which was introduced in the rhetorical garb of an ancient tradition. The Ottoman state used religion rather than ethnicity to define each millet, and people who study the Ottoman Empire do not define the Muslims as being in a millet. The Ottoman Turkish version of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 uses the word "millet", as do the Arabic and Persian versions; despite this, at the time the usage of the Arabic word "milla" was declining in favour of the word "ummah". The Armenian, Greek, and Jewish residents did not use the word "millet" and instead described themselves as nations (, Armenian: ազգ (azg), Greek: Έθνος (ethnos), and Ladino: nasyon). The lack of use of the word "millet" among the Christian and Jewish minorities reflected in versions of the Ottoman Constitution in their respective languages: The French version of the Ottoman Constitution used the word "communauté" in the place of "millet", and so the others used words modeled after or based on the French: հասարակութիւն (hasarakut‘iwn) in Armenian, obština (now Общност) in Bulgarian, κοινότης (koinotēs), in Greek, and komunita in Judaeo-Spanish. Concept The millet system is closely linked to Islamic rules on the treatment of non−Muslim minorities living under Islamic dominion (dhimmi). The Ottoman term specifically refers to the separate legal courts pertaining to personal law under which minorities were allowed to rule themselves (in cases not involving any Muslim) with fairly little interference from the Ottoman government. People were bound to their millets by their religious affiliations (or their confessional communities), rather than their ethnic origins, according to the