recognition of their own millet in 1873. Jews Under the millet system the Jews were organized as a community on the basis of religion, alongside the other millets (e.g. Eastern Orthodox millet, Armenian millet, etc.). They were the most geographically spread group within the empire. The Ottoman Jews enjoyed similar privileges to the Christians in the Ottoman Empire. In the framework of the millet they had a considerable amount of administrative autonomy and were represented by the Hakham Bashi ( حاخامباشی), who held broad powers to legislate, judge, and enforce the laws among the Jews in the Ottoman Empire and often sat on the Sultan's divan. The Jews, like the other millet communities of the Ottoman Empire, were still considered a people of the book and protected by the Sharia Law of Islam. However, while the Jews were not viewed in the eyes of the law to be on an equal playing field with Muslims, they were still treated relatively well at points during the Ottoman Empire. Norman Stillman explains that the prosperity of medieval Jews was closely tied to that of their Muslim governors. Stillman notes that during the time between the 9th and 13th centuries when Jewish culture blossomed, "medieval Islamic civilization was at its apogee". Given their rampant persecution in medieval Europe, many Jews looked favorably upon millet. In the late 19th century such groups as the Bilu, a group of young Russian Jews who were pioneers in the Zionist movement, proposed negotiating with the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to allow a millet like settlement which would allow them greater independence in Palestine. Roman Catholics After the fall of Constantinople, the only Latin Catholic group to be incorporated into the Sultan's domain were the Genoese who lived in the Byzantine capital. Over the next decades, Turkish armies pushed into the Balkans, overrunning the Catholic populations of Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Hungary. The Melkite Catholics gained their autonomy as a religious community in 1848 by Sultan Abdulmecid. Bruce Masters claims that Melkite Catholics insisted that they have a millet of their own, that would grant them "sense of distinctiveness". In the Orient, the 16th century saw the Maronites of Lebanon, the Latins of Palestine, and most of the Greek islands, which once held Latin Catholic communities, come under Turkish rule. Papal response to the loss of these communities was initially a call to the crusade, but the