Athens had been under Ottoman rule continuously since 1456, apart from a brief Venetian occupation in 1687–1688, during the Morean War. Under Ottoman rule, the city was denuded of any importance and is commonly dismissed as a "small country town" by modern scholars such as Franz Babinger, but this image is incorrect: the city's population grew rapidly during the 16th century, and with was for a time the fourth-largest Ottoman town in the Balkans, after the capital Constantinople, Adrianople, and Thessalonica. The Venetian occupation led to the near-abandonment of the city in fear of Ottoman reprisals, and it began to recover only slowly. By the middle of the century, the city numbered inhabitants, of whom about 4/5 were Greek Orthodox, i.e. Greeks and a few Arvanites—most of the Arvanites in the area of Attica lived in the countryside rather than in Athens itself—and the rest "Turks", i.e. Muslims regardless of ethnic origin, including Gypsies and "Aethiopians"; as well as a few Catholics (mostly Westerners resident in the city). There does not appear to have been a Jewish community in Athens during that time.