During the late years of the Byzantine Empire, at a time in which the authority of the emperor was overridden by the Ottoman Sultan, who wielded a much larger army and state; a philosopher named Georgios was born in the Venetian colony of Crete. He had aimed at synthetizing the faiths of Turks and Greeks living in Anatolia, Alevism and Orthodoxy respectively. Later in his life, after Constantinople had been conquered by the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet II, he addressed the newly declared Emperor in Constantinople as “the common emperor of both Romans and Turks” (Roman had been the proper term for Byzantine Greeks.) These efforts were the first example of a theoretic union between both nations inhabiting the Eastern Mediterranean. As Georgios was a Venetian subject, he had been influenced by the renaissance idea of Humanism.
Under the Ottoman State, the Padishah (equivalent to the Emperor or Basileus) recognised the Ecumenical Patriarch of Orthodoxy as the ethnarch of all Greeks in the empire. This move granted the Greeks, who had fallen into minority status as a result of the Dhimmi system, a considerable amount of autonomy. Although Greeks were legally second-class citizens, their autonomy and large population allowed them to retain major privileges. As a result of their large population, Greeks were favoured by the Ottoman government, being sent to vassal states of the empire in the Balkans as religious leaders. Greeks in the empire were allowed to keep their pre-existing institutions. After the conquest of the city, the previous Imperial University of Constantinople was transformed into the Patriarchal Academy of Constantinople (now known as the Phanar Greek Orthodox College) by Patriarch Gennadius II. This school continued to act as the main institute of education of the Greek nation within the empire. The natural system of administration in the empire had become dependant on the Turkish-dominated government working together with the Greek population.
After the French Revolution and subsequent rise of nationalism and liberalism in the European continent, the Greeks within the empire began to develop an identity independent from the rest of the empire. Influenced by Western classicism, this new Greek identity derived much more from ancient texts than it did from Byzantine and Ottoman era texts. Although at first this ideal was not far-spread, with the involvement of outside powers in Ottoman internal politics, it became much more prominent; culminating in the Greek Revolution of 1821. This revolt disturbed the internal power balance within the Ottoman state. Even though the Greeks of the empire had been loyal to the Padishah; with the creation of a new Greek state, the Greek population had to choose between loyalty to the existing system, or to their ethnicity. Following this civil dilemma and the disruption of the balance in the system, the Ottoman government headed to reform; with the Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane in 1839, the Hatt-ı Hümayun in 1856 and the Kanun-ı Esasi in 1876. Though these declarations secured equal rights for Greek citizens, the broken balance could not be fixed and the multi-national structure of the empire had collapsed.
The concept of Hellenoturkism was once again revived in the 20th century by historian Dimitri Kitsikis, an ethnic Greek. Kitsikis acted as political advisor to both Turkish president Turgut Özal, and to the Greek president Konstantinos Karamanlis. Even with the influential position Kitsikis held, the Greco-Turkish project was never realised, as both nations fell into dispute about the Cyprus and Aegean problems. Today, Hellenoturkism lacks support in both Turkey and Greece.