Within Constantinople, Mehmed established a
millet or an autonomous religious community, and appointed the former Patriarch
Gennadius Scholarius as religious leader for the Orthodox Christians
[67] of the city. His authority extended to all Ottoman Orthodox Christians, and this excluded the
Genoese and
Venetian settlements in the suburbs, and excluded Muslim and
Jewish settlers entirely. This method allowed for an indirect rule of the Christian Byzantines and allowed the occupants to feel relatively autonomous even as Mehmed II began the Turkish remodeling of the city, turning it into the Turkish capital, which it remained until the 1920s.