The War has brought us into a new relation with Armenia and the Armenianpeople. We knew them before as the name of an ancient civilisation, a stubbornrearguard of Christendom in the East, a scene of mission work and massacresand international rivalry ; but only a few of us---missionaries, geographers,travellers and an occasional newspaper correspondent---were personally acquaintedwith the country and its inhabitants. To most people they remained a name,and when we read of their sufferings or traditions or achievements theymade little more impression than the doings of the Hittites and Assyrians,who moved across the same Near Eastern amphitheatre several millenniumsago. We had no living contact, no natural relation, with Armenia in ourpersonal or even in our political life.
Such a relation has suddenly been created between us by the War, andit is one of the strangest ironies of war that it fuses together and illuminatesthe very fabric it destroys. The civilisation in which we lived was likea labyrinth, so huge and intricate that none of the dwellers in it couldaltogether grasp its structure, while most of them were barely consciousthat it had any structural design at all. But now that the War has caughtit and it is all aflame, the unity and symmetry of the building are revealedto the common eye. As the glare lights it up from end to end, it standsout in its glory, in matchless outline and perspective ; for the firsttime (and possibly for the last) we see its parts simultaneously and inproper relation, and realise for one moment the marvel and mystery of thiscivilisation that is perishing---the subtle, immemorial, unrelaxing effortthat raised it up and maintained it, and the impossibility of improvisingany equivalent structure in its place. Then the fire masters its prey ;the various parts of the labyrinth fall in one by one, the light goes outof them, and nothing is left but smoke and ashes. This is the catastrophethat we are witnessing now, and we do not yet know whether it will be possibleto repair it. But if the future is not so dark as it appears, and what hasperished can in some measure be restored, our best guide and inspirationin the task will be that momentary, tragic, unique vision snatched out ofthe catastrophe itself.
The Armenians are not protagonists in the War ; they bear none ofthe guilt for its outbreak and can have little share in the responsibilityof building up a better future. But they have been seared more cruelly thanany of us by the flames, and, under this fiery ordeal, their individualcharacter as a nation and their part in the community of the civilised worldhave been thrown into their true relief.
For the first time, England and the Armenians are genuinely in touchwith one another. In this desperate struggle between freedom and reactionwe are fighting on the same side, striving for the same end. Our lot inthe struggle has not, indeed, been the same, for while England is able toact as well as to suffer, the Armenians have suffered with hardly the powerto strike a blow. But this difference of external fortune only strengthensthe inward moral bond; for we, who are strong, are fighting not merely forthis or that political advantage, this or that territorial change, but fora principle. The Powers of the Entente have undertaken the championshipof small nationalities that cannot champion themselves. We have solemnlyacknowledged our obligation to fulfil our vow in the case of Belgium andSerbia, and now that the Armenians have been overtaken by a still worsefate than the Serbians and the Belgians, their cause, too, has been takenup into the general cause of the Allies. We cannot limit our field in doingbattle for our ideal.
It is easier, of course, for the people of France, Great Britain andAmerica to sympathise with Belgium than with a more unfamiliar nation ina distant zone of the War. It needs little imagination to realise acutelythat the Belgians are "people like ourselves," suffering all thatwe should suffer if the same atrocities were committed upon us; and thisrealisation was made doubly easy by the speedy publication of minute, abundant,first-hand testimony. The Armenians have no such immediate access to oursympathies, and the initial unfamiliarity can only be overcome by a personaleffort on the part of those who give ear to their case; but the evidenceon which that case rests has been steadily accumulating, until now it isscarcely less complete or less authoritative than the evidence relatingto Belgium. The object of the present volume has been to present the documentsto English and American readers in as accurate and orderly a form as possible.
Armenia has not been without witness in her agony. Intense sufferingmeans intense emotional experience, and this emotion has found relief inwritten records of the intolerable events which obsessed the witnesses'memories. Some of the writers are Armenians, a larger number are Americansand Europeans who were on the spot, and who were as poignantly affectedas the victims themselves. There are a hundred and forty-nine of these documents,and many of them are of considerable length; but in their total effect theyare something more than an exhaustive catalogue of the horrors they setout to describe. The flames of war illuminate the structure of the buildingas well as the destruction of it, and the testimony extorted under thisfiery ordeal gives an extraordinarily vivid impression of Armenian life---thelife of plain and mountain, town and village, intelligenzia and bourgeoisieand peasantry---at the moment when it was overwhelmed by the European catastrophe.
In Armenia, though not in Europe, the flames have almost burnt themselvesout, and, for the moment, we can see nothing beyond smoke and ashes. Lifewill assuredly spring up again when the ashes are cleared away, for attemptsto exterminate nations by atrocity, though certain of producing almost infinitehuman suffering, have seldom succeeded in their ulterior aim. But in whatevershape the new Armenia arises, it will be something utterly different fromthe old. The Armenians have been a very typical element in that group ofhumanity which Europeans call the "Near East," but which mightequally well be called the "Near West" from the Indian or theChinese point of view(189). There has beensomething pathological about the history of this Near Eastern World. Ithas had an undue share of political misfortunes, and had lain for centuriesin a kind of spiritual paralysis between East and West-belonging to neither,partaking paradoxically of both, and wholly unable to rally itself decidedlyto one or the other, when it was involved with Europe in the European War.The shock of that crowning catastrophe seems to have brought the spiritualneutrality of the Near East to a violent end, and however dubious the futureof Europe may be, it is almost certain that it will be shared henceforthby all that lies between the walls of Vienna and the walls of Aleppo andTabriz(190). This final gravitation towardsEurope may be a benefit to the Near East or another chapter in its misfortunes---thatdepends on the condition in which Europe emerges from the War; but, in eithercase, it will be a new departure in its history. It has been drawn at lastinto a stronger orbit, and will travel on its own paralytic, paradoxicalcourse no more. This gives a historical interest to any record of Near Easternlife in the last moments of the Ancient Régime, and these Armeniandocuments supply a record of a very intimate and characteristic kind. TheNear East has never been more true to itself than in its lurid dissolution;past and present are fused together in the flare.
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The documents in this volume tell their own story, and a reader mightbe ignorant of the places with which they deal and the points of historyto which they refer, and yet learn from them more about human life in theNear East than from any study of text-books and atlases. At the same timea general acquaintance with the geographical setting and historical antecedentsis clearly an assistance in understanding the full significance of the eventsrecorded here. and as this information is not widely spread or very easilyaccessible, it has seemed well to publish an outline of it, for the reader'sconvenience, in the same volume as the documents themselves. As many aspossible of the places referred to are marked on the map at the end of thebook, while here, in this historical summary, a brief account may be givenof who the Armenians are and where they live.
Like the English, the French and most other nations, the Armenians havedeveloped a specific type of countenance, and yet it would not always beeasy to tell them by sight, for they are as hybrid in their physical stockas every other European or Near Eastern people. There are marked differencesof pigmentation, feature and build between the Armenians of the East, Westand South, and between the mountaineers, plain-dwellers and people of thetowns, and it would be rash to speculate when these various strains camein, or to lay it down that they were not all present already at the dateat which we first begin to know something about the inhabitants of the country(191).
We hear of them first in the annals of Assyria, where the Armenian plateauappears as the land of Nairi---a no-man's-land, raided constantly but ineffectuallyby Assyrian armies from the lowlands of Mosul. But in the ninth centuryB.C. the petty cantons of Nairi coalesced into the Kingdom of Urartu(192), which fought Assyria on equal terms formore than two hundred years and has left a native record of its own. TheKings of Urartu made their dwelling on the citadel of Van(193).The face of the rock is covered with their inscriptions, which are alsofound as far afield as the neighbourhood of Malatia, Erzeroum and Alexandropol.They borrowed from Assyria the cuneiform script, and the earliest inscriptionsat Van are written in the Assyrian language; but they quickly adapted theforeign script to their native tongue, which has been deciphered by Englishand German scholars, and is considered by them to be neither Semitic norIndo-European, nor yet to have any discernible affinity with the still obscurerlanguage of the Hittites further west. We can only assume that the peoplewho spoke it were indigenous in the land. Probably they were of one bloodwith their neighbours in the direction of the Caucasus and the Black Sea,Saspeires(194) and Chalybes and others ;and if, as ethnology seems to show, an indigenous stock is practically ineradicable,these primitive peoples of the plateau are probably the chief ancestors,in the physical sense, of the present Armenian race(195).
The modern Armenian language, on the other hand, is not descended fromthe language of Urartu, but is an Indo-European tongue. There is a largenon-Indo-European element in it---larger than in most known branches ofthe Indo-European family---and this has modified its syntax as well as itsvocabulary. It has also borrowed freely and intimately from the Persianlanguage in all its phases---a natural consequence of the political supremacywhich Iran asserted over Armenia again and again, from the sixth centuryB.C. to the nineteenth century A.D. But when all these accretions have beenanalysed and discarded, the philologists pronounce the basis of modern Armenianto be a genuine Indo-European idiom---either a dialect of the Iranian branchor an independent variant, holding an intermediate, position between Iranianand Slavonic.
This language is a much more important factor in the national consciousnessof the modern Armenians than their ultimate physical ancestry, but its originis also more difficult to trace. Its Indo-European character proves that,at some date or other, it must have been introduced into the country fromwithout(196), and the fact that a non-Indo-Europeanlanguage held the field under the Kings of Urartu suggests that it onlyestablished itself after the Kingdom of Urartu fell. But the earliest literarymonuments of the modern tongue only date from the fifth century A.D., athousand years later than the last inscription in the Urartian language,so that, as far as the linguistic evidence is concerned, the change mayhave occurred at any time within this period. One language, however, doesnot usually supplant another without considerable displacements of population,and the only historical event of this kind sufficient in scale to producesuch a result seems to be the migration of the Cimmerians and Scythiansin the seventh century B.C. These were nomadic tribes from the Russian steppes,who made their way round the eastern end of the Caucasus, burst throughinto the Moghan plains and the basin of Lake Urmia, and terrorised WesternAsia for several generations, till they were broken by the power of theMedes and absorbed in the native population. It was they who made an endof the Kingdom of Urartu, and the language they brought with them was probablyan Indo-European dialect answering to the basic element in modern Armenian.Probability thus points to these seventh century invaders as being the sourceof the present language, and perhaps also of the equally mysterious namesof "Hai(k)" and "Haiasdan," by which the speakers ofthis language seem always to have called themselves and their country. Butthis is a conjecture, and nothing more(197),and we are left with the bare fact that Armenian(198)was the established language of the land by the fifth century A.D.
The Armenian language might easily have perished and left less recordof its existence than the Urartian. It is a vigorous language enough, yetit would never have survived in virtue of its mere vitality. The nativeAnatolian dialects of Lydia and Cilicia, and the speech of the Cappadocians(199), the Armenians' immediate neighbours on thewest, were extinguished one by one by the irresistible advance of Greek,and Armenian would assuredly have shared their fate if it had not becomethe canonical language of a national church before Greek had time to penetrateso far eastward. Armenia lay within the radius of Antioch and Edessa (Ourfa),two of the earliest and strongest centres of Christian propaganda. KingTiridates (Drdat) of Armenia was converted to Christianity some time duringthe latter half of the third century A.D.(200)and was the first ruler in the world to establish the Christian Faith ashis State religion. Christianity in Armenia adopted a national garb fromthe first. In 410 A.D. the Bible was translated into the Armenian language,in a new native script specially invented for the purpose, and this achievementwas followed by a great outburst of national literature during the courseof the fifth century. These fifth century works are, as has been said, theearliest monuments of the Armenian language. Most of them, it is true, aresimply rather painstaking translations of Greek and Syriac theology, andthe bulk of the creative literature was theological too. But there was alsoa notable school of historical writers (Moses of Khorene is its most famousrepresentative), and the really important result of the stimulus that Christianitybrought was the permanent preservation of the language's existence and itsdevelopment into a medium for a national literature of a varied kind.
Thus the conversion of Armenia to Christianity, which took place at amore or less ascertainable date, was an even more important factor in theevolution of Armenian nationality than the original introduction of thenational language, and the Armenians have done well to make St. Gregorythe Illuminator, the Cappadocian Missionary to whom the conversion was due,their supreme national hero(201). Henceforth,church and language mutually sustained each other, to the great enhancementof the vital power of both. They were, in fact, merely complementary aspectsof the same national consciousness, and the national character of the churchwas further emphasised when it diverged in doctrine from the main body ofChristendom---not by the formulation of any new or heretical dogma, butby omission to ratify the modifications of the primitive creed which wereintroduced by the (Ecumenical Councils of the fifth century A.D.(202)
This nationalisation of the church was the decisive process by whichthe Armenians became a nation, and it was also this that made them an integralpart of the Near Eastern world. Christianity linked the country with theWest as intimately as the cuneiform script of Urartu had linked it withthe civilisation of Mesopotamia ; and the Near Eastern phenomenon consistsessentially in the paradox that a series of populations on the borderlandof Europe and Asia developed a national life that was thoroughly Europeanin its religion and culture, without ever succeeding in extricating themselvespolitically from that continual round of despotism and anarchy which seemsto be the political dispensation of genuinely Oriental countries.
No communities in the world have had a more troubled political historythan these Near Eastern nationalities, and none have known how to preservetheir church and their language so doggedly through the most appalling vicissitudesof conquest and oppression. In this regard the history of Armenia is profoundlycharacteristic of the Near East as a whole.
The strong, compact Kingdom of Urartu lies at the dawn of Armenian historylike a golden age. It had only existed two centuries when it was shatteredby the invaders from the Russian steppes, and the anarchy into which theyplunged the country had to be cured by the imposition of a foreign rule.In 585 B.C. the nomads were cowed and the plateau annexed by Cyaxares, theMede, and, after the Persians had taken over the Medes' inheritance, thegreat organiser Darius divided this portion of it into two governments orsatrapies. One of these seems to have included the basins of Urmia and Van,and part of the valley of the Aras(203); theother corresponded approximately to the modern Vilayets of Bitlis, Mamouret-ul-Azizand Diyarbekir, and covered the upper valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates(204). They were called respectively the satrapiesof Eastern and Western Armenia, and this is the origin of the name by whichthe Haik and their Haiasdan are now almost universally known to their neighbours.The word "Armenia" (Armina) (205)first appears in Darius' inscriptions ; the Greeks adopted it fromthe Persian official usage, and from the Greeks it has spread to the restof the world, including the Osmanli Turks(206)
Under the Persian Dynasty of the Achæmenids and their Macedoniansuccessors, the two Armenian satrapies remained mere administrative divisions.Subject to the payment of tribute the satraps were practically independentand probably hereditary, but the rulers' autonomy did not enable their subjectsto develop any distinctive national life. In religion and culture the countrytook on a strong Persian veneer ; and the situation was not essentiallychanged when, early in the second century B.C., the two reigning satrapsrevolted simultaneously from their overlord, the Seleucid King of WesternAsia(207), and each founded a royal dynastyof their own. The decisive change was accomplished by Tigranes (Dikran)the Great (94 to 56 B.C.), a scion of the Eastern Dynasty, who welded thetwo principalities into one kingdom, and so created the first strong nativesovereignty that the country had known since the fall of Urartu five centuriesbefore.
If Gregory the Illuminator is the ecclesiastical hero of Armenia, KingTigranes is his political forerunner and counterpart. He was connected bymarriage with Mithradates, the still more famous King of Pontic Cappadocia,who may be taken as the first exponent of the Near Eastern idea. Mithradatesattempted to build an empire that should be at once cosmopolitan and national,Hellenic and Iranian, of the West and of the East, and Tigranes was profoundlyinfluenced by his brilliant neighbour and ally. He set himself the parallelambition of reconstructing round his own person the kingdom of the Seleucids,which had been shaken a century before by a rude encounter with Rome, weakenedstill further by the defection of Tigranes' own predecessors, and was nowin the actual throes of dissolution. He laid himself out a new capital onthe northern rim of the Mesopotamian steppe, somewhere near the site ofIbrahim Pasha's Viran Shehr, and peopled it with masses of exiles deportedfrom the Greek cities he devastated in Syria and Cilicia. It was to be theHellenistic world-centre for an Oriental King of Kings ; but all hisdreams, like Mithradates', were shattered by the methodical progress ofthe Roman power. A Roman army ignominiously turned Tigranes out of Tigranokerta,and sent back his Greek exiles rejoicing to their homes. The new Armeniankingdom failed to establish its position as a great power, and had to acceptthe position of a buffer state between Rome on the west and the Parthianrulers of Iran. Nevertheless, Tigranes' work is of supreme political importancein Armenian history. He had consolidated the two satrapies of Darius intoa united kingdom, powerful enough to preserve its unity and independencefor nearly five hundred years. It was within this chrysalis that the interactionof religion and language produced the new germ of modern Armenian nationality;and when the chrysalis was rent at last, the nation emerged so stronglygrown that it could brave the buffets of the outer world.
Before Tigranes, Armenia had belonged wholly to the East. Tigranes loosenedthese links and knit certain new links with the West. The period that followedwas marked by a perpetual struggle between the Roman and Parthian Governmentsfor political influence over the kingdom, which was really a battle overArmenia's soul. Was Armenia to be wrested away altogether from Orientalinfluences and rallied to the European world, or was it to sink back intobeing a spiritual and political appanage of Iran ? It seemed a clearissue, but it was not destined to be decided in either sense. Armenia wasto be caught for two millenniums in the uncertain eddy of the Nearer East.
In this opposition of forces, the political balance inclined from thefirst in favour of the Oriental Power. The Parthians succeeded in replacingthe descendants of Tigranes by a junior branch of their own Arsacid Dynasty;and when, in 387 A.D., the rivals agreed to settle the Armenian questionby the drastic expedient of partition, the Sassanid kings of Persia (whohad superseded the Parthians in the Empire of Iran) secured the lion's shareof the spoils, while the Romans only received a strip of country on thewestern border which gave them Erzeroum and Diyarbekir for their frontierfortresses. In the cultural sphere, on the other hand, the West was constantlyincreasing its ascendancy. King Tiridates was an Arsacid, but he acceptedChristianity as the religion of the State he ruled ; and when, lessthan a century after his death, his kingdom fell and the greater part ofthe country and the people came directly under Persian rule, the Persianpropaganda failed to make any impression. No amount of preaching or persecutioncould persuade the Armenians to accept Zoroastrianism, which was the establishedreligion of the Sassanian State. They clung to their national church indespite of their political annihilation, and showed thereby that their spiritualallegiance was given irrevocably to the West.
The partition of 387 A.D. produced as long a political interregnum inArmenian history as the fall of Urartu in the seventh century B.C. In thesecond quarter of the seventh century A.D., the mastery of Western Asiapassed from the Persians to the Arabs, and the Armenian provinces changedmasters with the rest. Persian governors appointed by the Sassanid Kingof Kings were superseded by Arab governors appointed by the Omayyad andAbbasid Caliphs, and the intolerance of Zoroastrianism was replaced by thefar stronger and hardly less intolerant force of Islam. Then, in the ninthcentury, the political power of the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad began todecline, the outlying provinces were able to detach themselves, and threeindependent dynasties emerged on Armenian soil:
(a) The Bagratids founded a Christian principality in the north. Their capital was at Ani, in the upper basin of the Aras, and their rule in this district lasted nearly two centuries, from 885 to 1079 A.D.
(b) The Ardzrounids founded a similar Christian principality in the basin of Van. They reigned here from 908 to 1021 A.D.
(c) The Merwanids, a Kurdish dynasty, founded a Moslem principality in the upper basin of the Tigris. Their capital was at Diyarbekir, but their power extended northward over the mountains into the valley of the Mourad Su (Eastern Euphrates), which they controlled as far upwards as Melazkerd. They maintained themselves for a century, from 984 to 1085 A.D.
The imposing remains of churches and palaces at Ani and elsewhere havecast an undue glamour over the Bagratid House, which has been extended,again, to all the independent principalities of early medieval Armenia.In reality, this phase of Armenian history was hardly more happy than thatwhich preceded it, and only appeared a Golden Age by comparison with thecataclysms that followed. From the national point of view it was almostas barren as the century of satrapial independence which preceded the reignof Tigranes, and in the politics of this period parochialism was never transcended.Bagratids and Ardzrounids were bitter rivals for the leadership of the nation,and did not scruple to call in Moslem allies against one another in theirconstant wars. The south-western part of the country remained under therule of an alien Moslem dynasty, without any attempt being made to castthem out. Armenia had no second Tigranes in the Middle Ages, and the localrenewals of political independence came and went without profit to the nationas a whole, which still depended for its unity upon the ecclesiastical traditionof the national Gregorian Church.
In the eleventh century A.D., a new power appeared in the East. The ArabEmpire of the Caliphs had long been receiving an influx of Turks from CentralAsia as slaves and professional soldiers, and the Turkish bodyguard hadassumed control of politics at Baghdad. But this individual infiltrationwas now succeeded by the migration of whole tribes, and the tribes wereorganised into a political power by the clan of Seljuk. The new Turkishdynasty constituted itself the temporal representative of the Abbasid Caliphate,and the dominion of Mohammedan Asia was suddenly transferred from the devitalisedArabs to a vigorous barbaric horde of nomadic Turks.
These Turkish reinforcements brutalised and at the same time stimulatedthe Islamic world, and the result was a new impetus of conquest towardsthe borderlands. The brunt of this movement fell upon the unprepared anddisunited Armenian principalities. In the first quarter of the eleventhcentury the Seljuks began their incursions on to the Armenian Plateau. TheArmenian princes turned for protection to the East Roman Empire, acceptedits suzerainty, or even surrendered their territory directly into its hands.But the Imperial Government brought little comfort to the Armenian people.Centred at Constantinople and cut off from the Latin West, it had lost itsRoman universality and become transformed into a Greek national state, whilethe established Orthodox Church had developed the specifically Near Easterncharacter of a nationalist ecclesiastical organisation. The Armenians foundthat incorporation in the Empire exposed them to temporal and spiritualHellenisation, without protecting them against the common enemy on the east.The Seljuk invasions increased in intensity, and culminated, in 1071 A.D.,in the decisive battle of Melazkerd, in which the Imperial Army was destroyedand the Emperor Romanos II. taken prisoner on the field. Melazkerd placedthe whole of Armenia at the Seljuk's mercy---and not only Armenia, but theAnatolian provinces of the Empire that lay between Armenia and Europe. TheSeljuks carried Islam into the heart of the Near East.
The next four-and-a-half centuries were the most disastrous period inthe whole political history of Armenia. It is true that a vestige of independencewas preserved, for Roupen the Bagratid conducted a portion of his peoplesouth-westward into the mountains of Cilicia, where they were out of themain current of Turkish invasion, and founded a new principality which survivednearly three hundred years (1080-1375). There is a certain romance aboutthis Kingdom of Lesser Armenia. It threw in its lot with the Crusaders,and gave the Armenian nation its first direct contact with modern WesternEurope. But the mass of the race remained in Armenia proper, and duringthese centuries the Armenian tableland suffered almost ceaseless devastation.
The Seljuk migration was only the first wave in a prolonged outbreakof Central Asiatic disturbance, and the Seljuks were civilised in comparisonwith the tribes that followed on their heels. Early in the thirteenth centurycame Karluks and Kharizmians, fleeing across Western Asia before the advanceof the Mongols ; and in 1235 came the first great raid of the Mongolsthemselves---savages who destroyed civilisation wherever they found it,and were impartial enemies of Christendom and Islam. All these waves ofinvasion took the same channel. They swept across the broad plateau of Persia,poured up the valleys of the Aras and the Tigris, burst in their full forceupon the Armenian highlands and broke over them into Anatolia beyond. Armeniabore the brunt of them all, and the country was ravaged and the populationreduced quite out of proportion to the sufferings of the neighbouring regions.The division of the Mongol conquests among the family of Djengis Khan establisheda Mongol dynasty in Western Asia which seated itself in Azerbaijan, acceptedIslam and took over the tradition of the Seljuks, the Abbasids and the Sassanids.It was the old Asiatic Empire under a new name, but it had now incorporatedArmenia and extended north-westwards to the Kizil Irmak (Halys). For thefirst time since Tigranes, the whole of Armenia was reabsorbed again inthe East, and the situation grew still worse when the Empire of these "Ilkhans"fell to pieces and was succeeded in the fifteenth century by the petty lordshipof Ak Koyunli, Kara Koyanli and other nomadic Turkish clans.
The progressive anarchy of four centuries was finally stilled by therise of the Osmanli power. The seed of the Osmanlis was one of those Turkishclans which fled across Western Asia before the Mongols. They settled inthe dominions of the Seljuk Sultans, who had established themselves at Konia,in Central Anatolia, and who allowed the refugees to carve out an obscureappanage on the marches of the Greek Empire, in the Asiatic hinterland ofConstantinople. The son and successor of the founder was here convertedfrom Paganism to Islam(208), towards the endof the thirteenth century A.D., and the name of Osman, which he adoptedat his conversion, has been borne ever since by the subjects of his House.
The Osmanli State is the greatest and most characteristic Near EasternEmpire there has ever been. In its present decline it has become nothingbut a blight to all the countries and peoples that remain under its sway ;but at the outset it manifested a faculty for strong government which satisfiedthe supreme need of the distracted Near Eastern world. This was the secretof its amazing power of assimilation, and this quality in turn increasedits power of organisation, for it enabled the Osmanlis to monopolise allthe vestiges of political genius that survived in the Near East. The originalTurkish germ was quickly absorbed in the mass of Osmanlicised native Greeks(209). The first expansion of the State was westward,across the Dardanelles, and before the close of the fourteenth century thewhole of South-Eastern Europe had become Osmanli territory, as far as theDanube and the Hungarian frontier. The seal was set on these European conquestswhen Sultan Mohammed II. entered Constantinople in 1453, and then the currentof expansion veered towards the east. Mohammed himself absorbed the rivalTurkish principalities in Anatolia, and annexed the Greek "Empire"of Trebizond. In the second decade of the sixteenth century, Sultan SelimI. followed this up with a sweeping series of campaigns, which carried himwith hardly a pause from the Taurus barrier to the citadel of Cairo. Armeniawas overrun in 1514 ; the petty Turkish chieftains were overthrown,the new Persian Empire was hurled back to the Caspian, and a frontier establishedbetween the Osmanli Sultans and the Shahs of Iran, which has endured, witha few fluctuations, until the present day.
In the sixteenth century the whole Near Eastern world, from the gatesof Vienna(210) to the gates of Aleppo and Tabriz,found itself united under a single masterful Government, and once more Armeniawas linked securely with the West. From 1514 onwards the great majorityof the Armenian nation was subject to the Osmanli State. It is true thatthe province of Erivan (on the middle course of the Aras) was recoveredby the Persians in the seventeenth century, and held by them till its cessionto Russia in 1834. But, with this exception, the whole of Armenia remainedunder Osmanli rule until the Russians took Kars, in the war of 1878. Theseintervening centuries of union and pacification were, on the whole, beneficialto Armenia ; but with the year 1878 there began a new and sinisterepoch in the relations between the Osmanli State and the Armenian nation.
We have now traced the political vicissitudes of Armenia down to itsincorporation in the Ottoman Empire, and are in a position to survey theeffects of this troubled political history on the social life and the geographicalextension of the Armenian people.
At the present day the Armenians are, next to the Jews, the most scatterednation in the world, but this phenomenon does not begin to appear untila comparatively late stage in their history. At the time of the Partitionof 387 A.D. they were still confined to a compact territory between theEuphrates, Lake Urmia and the River Kur. It was the annexation of the westernmarches to the Roman Empire that gave the first impetus to Armenian migrationtowards the west. After 387 A.D. the Roman frontier garrisons were movedforward into the new Armenian provinces, and these troops were probablyrecruited in the main, according to the general Roman custom, from the localpopulation. But in the middle of the seventh century the Roman frontierswere shorn away by the advance of the new Arab power; the garrisons beyondthe Euphrates were withdrawn towards the north-west, and, after a centuryof darkness and turmoil, during which all the old landmarks were effaced,we find that the "Armeniac Army Corps District" has shifted fromthe banks of the Euphrates to the banks of the Halys (Kizil Irmak) and becomeapproximately coincident with the modern Vilayet of Sivas. This transferenceof the troops must have meant in itself a considerable transference of Armenians,and it can be taken for granted that the retiring armies were accompaniedby a certain portion of the civilian population. We can thus date back tothe seventh century the beginning of those flourishing Armenian coloniesin the towns of north-eastern Anatolia which suffered so terribly in theordeal of 1915.
The mountain zone between the Roman fortress of Sivas (Sebasteia) onthe Halys and the Arab posts along the Euphrates, from Malatia to Erzeroum,was now debatable territory between the Moslem and the Christian Empires,and in the eighth century it was held by an independent community of Armenianheretics called Paulikians. These Paulikians led an untamed, Ishmaelitishexistence. They were excommunicated for their tenets by the Gregorian ArmenianChurch, as well as by the Orthodox Patriarch at Constantinople, and theyraided impartially in the territories of the Roman Empire and the Arab Caliphate.The Emperors waged against them a war of extermination, and anticipatedthe present Ottoman policy by deporting them from their mountain fastnessesto the opposite ends of the Imperial territory. In 752 A.D. a number ofthem were settled in Thrace, to exercise their military prowess in holdingthe frontier against the Bulgars ; and, in 969 A.D., the Emperor JohnTzimiskes (himself an Armenian) transplanted a further body of them to Philippopolis.It may be doubted whether there is any direct connexion between them andthe present (Gregorian) Armenian colony in the latter city, but their numbersand influence must have been considerable, if one may judge by the vigorousspread of their tenets among the Bulgars and the Southern Slavs, and theyare noteworthy as the forerunners of the Armenian Dispersion in Europe,as well as of the Protestant Reformation.(211)
Migrations on a larger scale were produced by the Turkish invasions ofthe eleventh century. In 1021 A.D., for instance, the Ardzrounian Dynastyof Van surrendered its home territory to the Roman Empire in exchange fora more sheltered principality at Sivas. It only reigned sixty years in exilebefore it was overwhelmed there also by the advance of the Turkish tide;but the present Armenian villages in the Sivas Vilayet are doubtless derivedfrom these Ardzrounian refugees. In the very year, again, in which the sovereigntyof the Ardzrounids was extinguished at Sivas, the Bagratids of Ani foundedthemselves a second kingdom in Cilicia. We have spoken of this kingdom already:it is represented to-day by a chain of Armenian mountain towns and villageswhich stretches all the way from the headwaters of the Silioun (Saros) andDjihoun (Pyramos) to the shores of the Gulf of Alexandretta.
The still more terrible invasions of the thirteenth century scatteredthe Armenians even further afield. The relations of Lesser Armenia withthe Crusader Principalities opened for the Armenians a door into WesternEurope. When the Roupenian Dynasty became extinct, it was succeeded by abranch of the French House of Lusignan summoned from Cyprus, and in 1335there was the first secession from the national Gregorian Church to theCommunion of Rome. These new adherents to the Papal allegiance spread farand wide over Latin Christendom. A strong colony of Armenian Catholics establisheditself at Lemberg, recently won by Polish conquest for the Catholic Church;and others settled at Venice, the European focus of the Levantine trade.In this Venetian settlement the tradition of Armenian culture was kept aliveby the famous brotherhood of Mekhitarist Monks. They founded the first Armenianprinting press here, in 1565, and maintained a constant issue of Armenianpublications. Their greatest work was a magnificent thesaurus of the Armenian.language, which appeared in 1836.
This Roman Catholic connexion has been of very great importance in preservingthe link between Armenia and the west, and since the beginning of the nineteenthcentury the bonds have been strengthened by a Protestant strand. The AmericanMissions in Turkey were founded in 1831. Debarred by the Ottoman Governmentfrom entering into relations with the Moslem population, they devoted themselvesto the Christian elements, and the Armenians availed themselves more eagerlythan any other Near Eastern nationality(212)of the gifts which the Americans offered. Four generations of mission workhave produced a strong Protestant Armenian community, but proselytism hasnot been the deliberate object of the missionaries. They have set themselvesto revive and not to convert the national Armenian Church, and their schoolsand hospitals have been open to. all who would attend them, without distinctionof creed. Their wide and well-planned educational activity has always beenthe distinctive feature of these American Missions in the Ottoman Empire.Besides the famous Robert College and the College for Women on the Bosphorus,they have established schools and other institutions in many of the chiefprovincial towns, with fine buildings and full staffs of well-trained Americanand Armenian teachers. Due acknowledgment must also be given to the educationalwork of the Swiss Protestants and of the Jesuits; but it can hardly comparewith the work of the Americans in scale, and will scarcely play the samepart in Armenian history. There is little need here to speak in praise ofthe American missionaries ; their character will shine out to anyonewho reads the documents in this volume. Their religion inspires their lifeand their work, and their utter sincerity has given them an extraordinaryinfluence over all with whom they come in contact.
The Ottoman Government has trusted and respected them, because they arethe only foreign residents in Turkey who are entirely disinterested on politicalquestions ; the Gregorian Church cooperates with them and feels nojealousy, and all sections of the Armenian nation love them, because theycome to give and not to get, and their gifts are without guile (213). America is exercising an unobtrusive but incalculableinfluence over the Near East. In the nineteenth century the missionariescame to its rescue from America ; in the twentieth century the returnmovement has set in, and the Near Eastern people are migrating in thousandsacross the Atlantic. The Armenians are participating in this movement atleast as actively as the Greeks, the Roumans, the Serbs, the Montenegrinsand the Slovaks, and one can already prophesy with assurance that theirtwo-fold contact with America is the beginning of a new chapter in Armenianhistory.
Meanwhile the subjection of Armenia proper to the Mongol Ilkhans fornearly two centuries, and subsequently to the Shahs of modern Persia forcertain transitory periods, produced a lesser, but not unimportant, dispersiontowards the east. In the seventeenth century the skilled and cultured Armenianpopulation of Djoulfa, on the River Aras, was carried away captive to thePersian capital of Ispahan, where the exiles started a printing press andestablished a centre of Armenian civilisation. Ever since then the Armenianelement has been a factor in the politics and the social development ofIran, and from this new centre they have spread over the Indian Peninsulahand in hand with the extension of British rule.
Thus the Armenian nation has been scattered, in the course of the centuries,from Calcutta to New York, and has shown remarkable vitality in adaptingitself to every kind of alien environment(214).The reverse side of the picture is the uprooting of the nation from itsnative soil. The immigrant tribes from Central Asia did not make a permanentlodgment in the Armenian homelands. Some of them drifted back into Azerbaijanand the steppe country along the coast of the Caspian and the lower coursesof the Aras and the Kur; others were carried on towards the north-west,along the ancient Royal Road, and imposed the Moslem faith and the Turkishlanguage upon the population of Central Anatolia. The Armenian plateau,entrenched between Tigris, Euphrates and Aras, stood out like a rock, dividingthese two Turkish eddies. Nevertheless, the perpetual shock of the Seljukand the Mongol raids relaxed the hold of the Armenians on the plateau. Thepeople of the land were decimated by these invasions, and when the invadershad passed on beyond or vanished away, the terrible gaps in the ranks ofthe sedentary population of Armenia proper were filled by nomadic Kurdishshepherds from the south-east, who drifted into Old Armenia from the mountaingirdle of Iran, just as the Albanians drifted into the Kossovo Plain fromtheir own less desirable highlands, after the population of Old Serbia hadbeen similarly decimated by the constant passage of the Ottoman armies.
This Kurdish penetration of Armenia had begun already by the tenth centuryA.D. ; it was far advanced when the Osmanlis annexed the country in1514, and it was confirmed by the policy of the Ottoman Government, whichsought to secure its new territories by granting privileges to the Kurdishintruders and inviting their influx in greater numbers from their homelandsin the sphere of influence of the rival Persian Empire. The juxtapositionof nomad and cultivator, dominant Moslem and subject Giaour, was henceforthan ever-present irritant in the social and political conditions of the land ;but it did not assume a fatal and sinister importance until after the year1878, when it was fiendishly exploited by the Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid.
But before we examine the relations between the Armenian nation and theOttoman Government, it will be well to survey the distribution of the Armenianelement in the Ottoman Empire, as it had developed during the four centuriesof Ottoman rule that elapsed between the campaign of Selim I. and the interventionof Turkey in the present European War. The survey shall be brief, for ithas been anticipated, sometimes in greater detail, in the separate notesprefixed to the different groups of documents in the volume.
A traveller entering Turkey by the Oriental Railway from Central Europewould have begun to encounter Armenians at Philippopolis in Bulgaria, andthen at Adrianople, the first Ottoman city across the frontier. Had he visitedany of the lesser towns of Thrace, he would have found much of the localtrade and business in Armenian hands, and when he arrived at Constantinoplehe would have become aware that the Armenians were one of the most importantelements in the Ottoman Empire. He would have seen them as financiers, asexport and import merchants, as organisers of wholesale stores ; andwhen he crossed the Bosphorus and explored the suburban districts on theAsiatic side, he might even have fancied that the Armenian population inthe Empire was numerically equal to the Turkish. The coast of the Sea ofMarmora was overlooked by flourishing Armenian villages; at Armasha, aboveIsmid, there was a large Theological Seminary of the Gregorian Church, andthere were important Swiss and American institutions at Bardizag (Baghtehedjik)and Adapazar. At Adapazar alone the Armenian population numbered 25,000.
Beyond Adapazar, however, the Armenian element dwindled, and anyone whofollowed the Anatolian Railway across Asia Minor to the rail-head in thenorthern spurs of Taurus, would have felt that he was travelling throughan essentially Turkish land.
There were colonies of Armenian artisans and shopkeepers and businessmen in important places on the line, like Afiun Kara Hissar or Konia :but there were an equal number of Greeks, and both in town and country theTurks outnumbered them all. But once Taurus was crossed, the Armenians cameagain to the fore. They were as much at, home in the Cilician plain andcoastland as on the littoral of the Sea of Marmora and the Bosphorus. Adana,Tarsus and Mersina, with their Armenian churches and schools, had the sameappearance of being Armenian cities as Adapazar or Ismid ; and if atthis point the traveller had left the beaten track and worked his way upnorth-eastward into the Cilician highlands, he would have found himselffor the first time in an almost exclusively Armenian country, and wouldhave remarked a higher percentage of Armenians in the population than inany other district of Turkey till he came to Van. But this belt of Armenianvillages, though thickly set, was quickly passed, and when you emerged onthe south-eastern side of it and stepped out on to the rim of the Mesopotamianamphitheatre, you had reached one of the boundaries of the Armenian DispersionThere were Armenian outposts in the cities of the fringe---Marash, Aintab,Ourfa, Aleppo---but as soon as you plunged into the Mesopotamian steppeor the Syrian desert You were in the Arabic world, and had left Armeniabehind(215).
The traveller would have seen more of the Armenians if he had turnedoff from the Anatolian Railway at Eski Shehr, a few hours' journey southof Adapazar, and taken the branch line eastward to Angora. At Angora theArmenians were again a conspicuous element, and the further east you wentfrom Angora the more they increased in social and numerical importance.Beyond the Kizil Irmak (Halys), in the Sandjak of Kaisaria and the Vilayetof Sivas, they constituted the great majority of the urban middle class.The strongest centres of Armenian national life in Turkey were towns likeMarsovan, Amasia, Zila, Tokat, Shabin Kara-Hissar or the City of Sivas itself,or such smaller places as Talas and Everek in the neighbourhood of Kaisaria.In all this region Turks and Armenians were about equally balanced, Turksin the country and Armenians in the town, and the proportions were the samein the riviera zone along the Black Sea coast---Samsoun and Kerasond andTrebizond---though here other racial elements were intermingled---Lazesand Greeks, and the advance guards of the Kurds.
Trebizond in ancient times was the last Greek colony towards the east,and it is always a place that beckons travellers forward, for it is theterminus of that ancient caravan route which stretches away across Persiainto the far interior of the Asiatic continent. Anyone who started to followthis highway across the mountains, through Gumushkhané and Baibourtto Erzeroum, would have noticed little change in these first stages of hisjourney from what he had seen in the Vilayet of Sivas. There were the sameTurkish countryside and the same Armenian towns, with, perhaps, an increasingArmenian element in the rural population, culminating in an actual preponderanceof Armenian villages when you reached the plain of Erzeroum. With Erzeroumthe second section of the caravan road begins ; it crosses from valleyto valley among the headwaters of the Aras and the Eastern Euphrates (MouradSu), and winds away eastward at the foot of Ararat in the direction of Bayazidand Tabriz. But here the explorer of Armenia must turn his face to the south,and, as he does so, his eyes are met by a rampart of mountains more forbiddingthan those he has traversed on his journey from the coast, which stretchacross the horizon both east and west.
This mountain barrier bears many names. It is called the BingölDagh where it faces Erzeroum; further westward it merges into the ill-famedDersim; but the whole range has a common character. Its steeper slope istowards the north, and this slope is washed by the waters of the Aras andthe Kara Su (Western Euphrates), which flow east and west in diametricallyopposite directions, flanking the foot of the mountain wall with a deepand continuous moat.
Whoever crosses this moat and penetrates the mountains passes at onceinto a different world. The western part of Turkey, which we have been describingso far, is a more or less orderly, settled country---as orderly and settled,on the whole,. as any of the other Near Eastern countries that lie betweenthe Euphrates and Vienna. The population is sedentary; it lives in agriculturalvillages and open country towns. But when you cross the Euphrates, you entera land of insecurity and fear. The peasant and townsman live on sufferance;the mastery is with the nomad ; you are setting foot on the domainof the Kurd.
This insecurity was the chronic condition of Armenia proper, and it wasnot merely due to the unfortunate political experiences of the land. Inits geographical configuration, as well as in its history, the Armenianplateau is a country of more accentuated characteristics and violent contraststhan the Anatolian Peninsula which adjoins it on the west. It contains vaststretches of rolling, treeless down, where the climate is too bleak andthe soil too thin for cultivation ; and, again, there are sudden depressionswhere the soil is as rich and the climate as favourable as anywhere in theworld. There are the deep ravines of rivers, like the Mourad Su, which carvetheir course haphazard across tableland and plain. There are volcanic cones,like the Sipan and the Nimroud Dagh, and lacustrine areas, like the basinof Lake Van. The geography of the country has partitioned it eternally betweenthe shepherd and the cultivator---the comparatively dense and sedentarypopulation of the plains and the scattered and wandering inhabitants ofthe highlands---between civilisation and development on the one hand andan arrested state of barbarism on the other. The Kurd and the Armenian arenot merely different nationalities ; they are also antagonistic economicclasses, and this antagonism existed in the country before ever the Kurdishencroachments began. Most of the nomadic tribes that frequent the Armenianplateau now pass for Kurds, but many of them are only nominally so. In theDersim country, for instance, which coincides roughly with the peninsulaformed by the Western and Eastern branches of the Euphrates (Kara. Su andMourad Su), the Kurds are strongly diluted with the Zazas, whose language,as far as it has been investigated, bears at least as much resemblance toArmenian as to Kurdish, and whose primitive paganism, though it may havetaken some colour from Christianity, is free to this day from the slightestveneer of Islam.(216) These Zazas representan element which must have existed in the land from the beginning and haveharassed the national rulers of Medieval and Ancient Armenia as much asit harasses the modern Armenian townsman and peasant or the local Ottomanauthorities.
On the eve of the catastrophe of 1915, this region beyond the Euphrateswas a treasure-house of mingled populations and diversified forms of sociallife. Its north-western bastion is the Dersim, a no-man's-land of windingvalleys and tiny upland plains, backing northwards on to the great mountainretaining-wall, with its sheer fall to the Euphratean moat. In the Dersiminnumerable little clans of Zazas and Kurds lived, and continue to live,their pastoral, brigand life, secluded from the arm of Ottoman authority.A traveller proceeding south from Erzeroum would give the Dersim a wideberth on his right and cross the peninsula at its neck, by the headwatersof the Aras and the plain of Khnyss . He would strike the course of theMourad Su where it cuts successively through the fertile, level plains ofMelazkerd, Boulanik and Moush, and here he would find himself again fora moment (or would have done so two years ago) in peaceful, almost civilisedsurroundings---populous country towns, with a girdle of agricultural villagesand a peasantry even more uniformly Armenian than the population of theplain of Erzeroum. The plain of Moush is the meeting-place of all the routesthat traverse the plateau. If you ascend from its south-eastern corner andmount the southern spurs of the Nimroud volcano, you suddenly find yourselfon the edge of the extensive basin of Lake Van, and can follow a mountainroad along its precipitous southern shore ; then you descend into theopen valley of Hayotz-Tzor, cross a final ridge with the pleasant villageof Artamid on its slopes, and arrive a few hours later in the city of Vanitself.
Van, again, before April, 1915, was the populous, civilised capital ofa province, with a picturesque citadel-rock overlooking the lake and opengarden suburbs spreading east of it across the plain. The City of Van, withthe surrounding lowlands that fringe the eastern and north-eastern shoresof the lake, was more thoroughly Armenian than any part of the Ottoman Empire.In the Van Vilayet(217) alone the Armeniansnot merely outnumbered each other racial element singly, but were an absolutemajority of the total population. These Armenians of Van played a leadingand a valiant part in the events of 1915.
Yet Van, though a stronghold of Armenian nationality, was also the extremity,in this direction, of Armenian territory; south-east of Van the upper valleyof the Zab and the basin of Lake Urmia were jointly inhabited by ChristianSyrians and Moslem Kurds, until the Syrians, too, were involved in the Armenians'fate. To complete our survey, we have to retrace our steps round the northernshores of Lake Van till we arrive once more in the plain of Moush.
The plain of Moush is closed in on the south and south-west by anotherrampart of mountains, which forms the southern wall of the plateau and repeatswith remarkable exactness the structure of that northern wall which thetraveller encounters when he turns south from the plain of Erzeroum. Thissouthern range, also, falls precipitously towards the north, first intothe plain of Moush, and, further westward, into the waters of the MouradSu, which wash it like a moat all the way to their junction with the KaraSu, below Harpout. And, like the northern range, again, the southern rampartunfolds itself to the south in a maze of high hills and tangled valleys,which only sink by degrees into the plains of Diyarbekir---a detached bayof the great Mesopotamian steppe. These southern highlands are known asthe Sassoun ; they are a physiographical counterpart to the highlandsof Dersim, and are likewise the harbour of semi-independent mountaineers.But whereas the Dersimlis are pagan Zazas or Moslem Kurds, and were at constantfeud with their Armenian neighbours, the Sassounlis were themselves Armenians,and were in the closest intercourse with their kinsmen in the valley ofthe Mourad Su and in the plains of Moush and Boulanik.
Sassoun was one of the most interesting Armenian communities in the OttomanEmpire. It was a federation of about forty mountain villages, which livedtheir own life in virtual independence of the Ottoman authorities at Bitlisor Diyarbekir, and held their own against the equally independent Kurdishtribes that ringed them round. They were prosperous shepherds and laboriouscultivators of their mountain slopes---a perfect example of the cantonalphase of economic development, requiring nothing from outside and even manufacturingtheir own gunpowder. The Sassounli Armenians were in the same social stageas the Scottish Highlanders before 1745 ; the Armenians of Van, Sivasand Constantinople were people of the twentieth century, engaged in thesame activities and living much the same life as the shopkeepers and businessmen of Vienna or London or New York.
Only an enterprising traveller would have struck up into Sassoun if hewished to make his way from Moush to Diyarbekir. The beaten track takesa longer course to the south-eastern corner of the plain, and then breaststhe mountain wall to the south (where the branch-road turns eastward toLake. Van). From Norshen, the last village of the plain, an easy pass leadsover a saddle and brings the traveller unexpectedly to the important cityof Bitlis, which lies under the shadow of the ridge, immediately south ofthe watershed. Bitlis is the capital of a vilayet, and before Djevdet Beyretreated upon it in June, 1915, there was a numerous Armenian element inits population. But Bitlis, again, was one of the limits of the Armeniandispersion. The waters which rise round the city flow southward to the Tigris,and the highroad winds down with them towards the plains, which are inhabitedby a confused population of Jacobites(218)and Arabs, Turks and Kurds. If you had followed the Tigris upstream acrossthe levels to Diyarbekir, you would have passed few Armenian villages onthe road, even before June, 1915 ; and at Diyarbekir itself, a considerablecity, there was only a weak Armenian colony---a feeble link in the chainof Armenian outposts on the fringe of the Mesopotamian steppe. But Diyarbekiris on the line of that Royal Road by which men have gone up from time immemorialfrom Baghdad and beyond to the coasts of the Bosphorus and the Egean. Thehighway runs on north-west across the flats, passes Arghana and ArghanaMines, climbs the southern escarpment of the Armenian plateau up the valleyof the Arghana Su, skirts the Göldjik Lake on the watershed, and slopesdown, still north-westwards, to Harpout, near the course of the Mourad Su.Many convoys of Armenian exiles traversed this road in the opposite directionduring the summer months of 1915, on their way from their native plateauto the alien climate of the Arabian deserts. But our survey of the Armeniansin Turkey is complete, and we can travel back in imagination from Harpoutto Malatia, from Malatia to Sivas, and so on continually north-westward,till we return again to the point from which we started out.
This somewhat elaborate itinerary will have served its purpose if ithas made clear the extraordinary vitality and versatility of the Armeniannation in the Ottoman Empire at the moment when its extermination was plannedand attempted by the established Government of the country. The Governmenthad been of little service to any of its subjects ; it had never initiatedany social or economic developments on its own part, and had invariablymade itself a clog upon the private enterprises of native or foreign individuals.Yet, under this pall of stagnation and repression, there were manifold stirringsof a new life. Wherever an opportunity presented itself, wherever the Governmentomitted to intervene, the Armenians were making indefatigable progress towardsa better civilization. They were raising the pastoral and agricultural prosperityof their barren highlands and harassed plains; they were deepening and extendingtheir education at the American schools ; they were laying the foundationof local industries in the Vilayet of Sivas ; they were building upOttoman banking and shipping and finance at Trebizond and Adana and Constantinople.They were kindling the essential spark of energy in the Ottoman Empire,and anyone acquainted with Near Eastern history will inevitably comparetheir promise with the promise of the Greeks a century before. The apologistsof the Ottoman Government will seize with eagerness upon this comparison."The Greeks," they will say, "revolted as soon as they hadfallen into this state of fermentation. The Young Turks did more prudentlythan Sultan Mahmoud in forestalling future trouble." But if we examinethe relations between the Ottoman Government and the Armenian people weshall find that this argument recoils upon its authors' heads.
.
When the Ottoman Government entered the European War in 1914 it had ruledArmenia for just four hundred years, and still had for its subjects a majorityof the Armenian people. Anyone who inquires into the relations between theGovernment and the governed during this period of Near Eastern history willfind the most contradictory opinions expressed. On the one hand he willbe told that the Armenians, like the rest of the Christians in Turkey, wereclassed as "Rayah " (cattle[219])by the dominant race, and that this one word sums up their irremediableposition ; that they were not treated as citizens because they werenot even treated as men. On the other hand, he will hear that the OttomanEmpire has been more liberal to its subject nationalities than many statesin Western Europe ; that the Armenians have been perfectly free tolive their own life under a paternal government, and that the friction betweenthe Government and its subjects has been due to the native perversity andinstability of the Armenian character, or, worse still, to a revolutionarypoison instilled by some common enemy from without. Both these extreme viewsare out of perspective, but each of them represents a part of the truth.
It is undoubtedly true (to take the Turkish case first) that the Armenianshave derived certain benefits from the Ottoman dispensation. The caste divisionbetween Moslem and Rayah, for instance, may stamp the Ottoman "StateIdea" as mediaeval and incapable of progress ; but this has injuredthe state as a whole more appreciably than the penalised section of it,for extreme penalisation works both ways. The Government ruled out the Christiansso completely from the dominant Moslem commonwealth that it suffered andeven encouraged them to form communities of their own. The "Rayah"became "Millets"---not yoke-oxen, but unshackled herds.
These Christian Millets were instituted by Sultan Mohammed II, afterhe had conquered Constantinople in 1453 and set himself to reorganise theOttoman State as the conscious heir of the East Roman Empire. They are nationalcorporations with written charters, often of an elaborate kind. Each ofthem is presided over by a Patriarch, who holds office at the discretionof the Government, but is elected by the community and is the recognisedintermediary between the two, combining in his own person the headship ofa voluntary "Rayah" association and the status of an Ottoman official.The special function thus assigned to the Patriarchates gives the Millets,as an institution, an ecclesiastical character(220) ;but in the Near East a church is merely the foremost aspect of a nationality,and the authority of the Patriarchates extends to the control of schools,and even to the administration of certain branches of civil law. The Millets,in fact, are practically autonomous bodies in all that concerns religion,culture and social life ; but it is a maimed autonomy, for it is jealouslydebarred from any political expression. The establishment of the Milletsis a recognition, and a palliation, of the pathological anomaly of the NearEast---the political disintegration of Near Eastern peoples and the tenacitywith which they have clung, in spite of it, to their corporate spirituallife.
The organisation of the Millets was not a gain to all the Christian nationsthat had been subjected by the Ottoman power. Certain orthodox populations,like the Bulgars and the Serbs, actually lost an ecclesiastical autonomywhich they had enjoyed before, and were merged in the Millet of the Greeks,under the Orthodox Patriarch at Constantinople. The Armenians, on the otherhand, improved their position. As so-called schismatics, they had hithertoexisted on sufferance under Orthodox and Catholic governments, but the Osmanlisviewed all varieties of Christian with an impartial eye. Mohammed II. summonedthe Gregorian Bishop of the Armenian colony at Broussa, and raised him tothe rank of an Armenian Patriarch at Constantinople. The Ottoman conquestthus left the Gregorian Armenians their religious individuality and putthem on a legal equality with their neighbours of the Orthodox Faith, andthe same privileges were extended in time to the Armenians in communionwith other churches. The Gregorian Millet was chartered in 1462, the Milletof Armenian Catholics in 1830, and the Millet of Armenian Protestants inthe 'forties of the nineteenth century, as a result of the foundation ofthe American Missions.
The Armenians of the Dispersion, therefore, profited, in that respect,by Ottoman rule, and even in the Armenian homeland the account stood, onthe whole, in the Ottoman Government's favour. The Osmanlis are often blamedfor having given the Kurds a footing in this region, as a political movein their struggle with Persia; but the Kurds were not, originally, sucha scourge to the Armenians as the Seljuks, Mongols, or Kara Koyunli, whohad harried the land before, or as the Persians themselves, whom the Osmanlisand the Kurds ejected from the country. The three centuries of Kurdish feudalismunder Ottoman suzerainty that followed Sultan Selim's campaign of 1514 werea less unhappy period for the Armenians than the three centuries and moreof anarchy that had preceded them. They were a time of torpor before recuperation,and it was the Ottoman Government again that, by a change in its Kurdishpolicy, enabled this recuperation to set in. In the early part of the nineteenthcentury a vigorous anti-feudal, centralising movement was initiated by SultanMahmoud, a reformer who has become notorious for his unsuccessful handlingof the Greek and Serbian problems without receiving the proper credit forhis successes further east. He turned his attention to the Kurdish chieftainsin 1834, and by the middle of the century his efforts had practically brokentheir power. Petty feudalism was replaced by a bureaucracy centred in Constantinople.The new officialdom was not ideal; it had new vices of its own ; butit was impartial, by comparison, towards the two races whom it had to govern,for the class prejudice of the Moslem against the well-behaved Rayah wasbalanced by the exasperation of the professional administrator with theunconscionable Kurd. In any case, this remodelling of the Ottoman Statein the early decades of the nineteenth century introduced a new epoch inthe history of the Armenian people. Coinciding, as it did, with the establishmentof the American Missions and the chartering of the Catholic and ProtestantMillets, it opened to the Armenians opportunities of which they availedthemselves to the full. An intellectual and economic renaissance of Armenianlife began, parallel in many respects to the Greek renaissance a centurybefore.
This comparison brings us back to the question: Was the Armenian revivalof the nineteenth century an inevitable menace to the sovereignty and integrityof the Ottoman State ? Is the disastrous breach between Armenian andTurk, which has actually occurred, simply the fruit of wrong-headed Armenianambitions ? That is the Turkish contention; but here the Turkish casebreaks down, and we shall find the truth on the Armenian side.
The parallel with the Greek renaissance is misleading, if it impliesa parallel with the Greek revolution. The Greek movement towards politicalseparatism was, in a sense, the outcome of the general spiritual movementthat preceded it; but it was hardly an essential consequence, and certainlynot a fortunate one. The Greek War of Independence liberated one fractionof the Greek race at the price of exterminating most of the others and sacrificingthe favoured position which the Greek element had previously enjoyed throughoutthe Ottoman Empire. It was not an encouraging precedent for the Armenians,and the objections to following it in their own case were more formidablestill. As we have seen, no portion of Ottoman territory was exclusivelyinhabited by them, and they were nowhere even in an absolute majority, exceptin certain parts of the Province of Van, so that they had no natural rallyingpoint for a national revolt, such as the Greeks had in the Islands and theMorea. They were scattered from one end to another of the Ottoman Empire;the whole Empire was their heritage, and it was a heritage that they mustnecessarily share with the Turks, who were in a numerical majority and heldthe reins of political power. The alternative to an Ottoman State was notan Armenian State, but a partition among the Powers, which would have endedthe ambitions of Turk and Armenian alike. The Powers concerned were quiteready for a partition, if only they could agree upon a division of the spoils.This common inheritance of the Armenians and the Turks was potentially oneof the richest countries in the Old World, and one of the few that had notyet been economically developed. Its native inhabitants, still scanty, backwardand divided against themselves, were not yet capable of defending theirtitle against spoilers from without ; they only maintained it at presentby a fortuitous combination in the balance of power, which might changeat any moment. The problem for the Armenians was not how to overthrow theOttoman Empire but how to preserve it, and their interest in its preservationwas even greater than that of their Turkish neighbours and co-heirs. Ourgeographical survey has shown that talent and temperament had brought mostof the industry, commerce, finance and skilled intellectual work of Turkeyinto the Armenians' hands. The Greeks may still have competed with themon the Ægean fringe, and the Sephardi Jews in the Balkans, but theyhad the whole interior of the Empire to themselves, with no competitionto fear from the agricultural Turks or the pastoral Kurds. And if the Empirewere preserved by timely reforms from within, the position of the Armenianswould become still more favourable, for they were the only native elementcapable of raising the Empire economically, intellectually and morally toa European standard, by which alone its existence could permanently be secured.The main effort must be theirs, and they would reap the richest reward.
Thus, from the Armenian point of view, a national entente with the Turkswas an object of vital importance, to be pursued for its ultimate resultsin spite of present difficulties and drawbacks. About the middle of thenineteenth century there seemed every likelihood of its being attained.The labours of Sultan Mahmoud and the influence of Great Britain and Francehad begun to inoculate the Turkish ruling class with liberal ideas. An admirable"Law of Nationalities" was promulgated, and there was a projectfor a parliamentary constitution. It looked, to an optimist, as if the oldmediaeval caste-division of Moslem and Rayah might die away and allow Armenian,Turk and Kurd to find their true relation to one another---not as irreconcilablesects or races, but as different social elements in the same community,whose mutual interest was to co-operate for a common end.
This was the logical policy for the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire topursue, and the logic of it was so clear that they have clung to it throughdifficulties and drawbacks sufficient to banish logic altogether ---"difficulties" which amounted to a bankruptcy of political sense inthe Imperial Government, and "drawbacks" which culminated in officialmassacres of the Armenian population. There were two causes of this sinisterturn of events: the external crisis through which the Empire passed in theyears 1875-8, and the impression this crisis made upon Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid,who came to the throne in 1876, when it was entering upon its gravest phase.
In these years the Empire had been brought to the verge of ruin by therevolt of a subject Christian population, the Bosniak Serbs, which spreadto the other subject races in the Balkan provinces, and by a momentary breakdownin the diplomatic mechanism of the European balance of power, which enabledRussia to throw her military force into the scales on the Balkan rebels'behalf. The ruin was arrested and partially repaired, when Turkey lay prostrateunder Russia's heel, by a reassertion of the balance of power, which deprivedRussia of most of her gains and half the Balkan Christians of their new-wonliberties. Abd-ul-Hamid was clever enough to learn from these experiences,but not, unfortunately, to learn aright, and he devoted all his astutenessto carrying out a policy far more injurious to the Empire than the troublesit was meant to avert. He seems to have inferred from the war with Russiathat Turkey was not and never would be strong enough to hold its own againsta first-class power ; it was not her internal strength that had savedher, but the external readjustment of forces. Therefore, any attempt tostrengthen the Empire from within, by reconciling its racial elements anddeveloping its natural resources, was Utopian and irrelevant to the problem.The only object of importance was to insure against an attack by any singlePower by keeping all the Great Powers in a state of jealous equilibrium.Now the breakdown of this equilibrium, in 1877, which had been so disastrousfor Turkey, had been directly caused by an antecedent disturbance of equilibriumwithin the Empire itself. A subject Christian nationality had tried to breakaway violently from the Ottoman body-politic. Here was the root of the wholetrouble, to Abd-ul-Hamid's mind, and the primary object of his policy mustbe to prevent such a thing from happening again. The subject nationalitiesof the Empire were not for him unrealised assets; they were potential destroyersof the State, more formidable even than the foreign Powers. Their potentialitiesmust be neutralised, and the surest course, with them as with the Powers,was to play them off against one another. In fine, the policy of Abd-ul-Hamidwas the exact antithesis of the instinctive Armenian policy which we haveindicated above; it was not to strengthen the Empire by bringing the nationalitiesinto harmony, but to weaken the nationalities, at whatever cost to the Empire,by setting them to cut each other's throats. Abd-ul-Hamid applied this policyfor forty years. The Macedonians and the Armenians were his special victims,but only the Armenians concern us here.
It was inevitable that the Armenians should be singled out by Abd-ul-Hamidfor repression. When Turkey sued for peace in 1878, the Russian troops werein occupation of the greater part of the Armenian plateau, and the Russianplenipotentiaries inserted an Article (No. 16) in the Treaty of San Stefanomaking the evacuation of these provinces conditional upon the previous introductionof reforms in their administration by the Ottoman Government. A concretescheme for the reorganisation of the six vilayets in question(221)had already been drawn up by a delegation of their Armenian inhabitants.It provided for the creation of an Armenian Governor-General, empoweredto appoint and remove the officials subordinate to him; a mixed gendarmerieof Armenians and the sedentary elements in the Moslem population, to theexclusion of the nomadic Kurds; a general assembly, consisting of Moslemand Christian deputies in equal numbers; and equal rights for every creed.The Ottoman Government had approved and even encouraged this project ofprovincial autonomy when it feared that the alternative was the cessionof the provinces to Russia. As soon as it had made certain of the Russianevacuation, its approval turned to indifference; and when the European Congressmet at Berlin to revise the San Stefano Treaty, the Ottoman emissaries exertedthemselves to quash the project altogether. In this they were practicallysuccessful, for the Treaty drawn up at Berlin by the Congress merely engagedthe Ottoman Government, in general terms(222),to introduce "ameliorations" in the " provinces inhabitedby Armenians," without demanding any guarantee at all(223).The Russian troops were withdrawn and the ameliorations were a dead letter.The Ottoman Government was reminded of them, in 1880, by a collective Notefrom the six Powers. But it left the Note unanswered, and after the diplomaticdémarches had dragged on for two years the question was shelved,on Bismarck's suggestion, because no Power except Great Britain would pressit.
The seed of the "Armenian Reforms" had thus fallen upon stonyground, except in the mind of Abd-ul-Hamid, where it lodged and rankledtill it bore the fruit of the "Armenian Massacres." The projecthad not really been a menace to Ottoman sovereignty and integrity. It wasmerely a proposal to apply in, six vilayets that elementary measure of "amelioration"which was urgently needed by the Empire as a whole, and without, which itcould never begin to develop its internal strength. But, to Abd-ul-Hamidit was unforgivable, for to him every concession to a subject Christiannationality was suspect. He had seen the Bulgars given ecclesiastical autonomyby the Ottoman Government in 1870 and then raised by Russia, within eightyears, into a semi-independent political principality. Armenian autonomyhad been averted for the moment, but the parallel might still hold good,for Russia's influence over the Armenians had been increasing.
Russia had conquered the Armenian provinces of Persia in 1828(224), and this had brought within her frontier theMonastery of Etchmiadzin, in the Khanate of Erivan, which was the seat ofthe Katholikos of All the Armenians. The power of this Katholikos was atthat time very much in abeyance. He was an ecclesiastical relic of, theancient united Armenian Kingdom of Tigranes and Tiridates, which had beenout of existence for fourteen hundred years. There was another Katholikosat Sis, a relic of the mediaeval kingdom of Cilicia, who did not acknowledgehis supremacy, and he was thrown into the shade altogether by the ArmenianPatriarch at Constantinople, who was the official head of the Armenian Milletin the Ottoman Empire---at that time an overwhelming majority of the Armenianpeople.
But Russian diplomacy succeeded in reviving the Katholikos of Etchmiadzin'sauthority. In the 'forties of the nineteenth century, when Russian influenceat Constantinople was at its height and Russian protection seemed the onlyrecourse for Turkey against the ambition of Mehemet Ali, the ecclesiasticalsupremacy of Etchmiadzin over Constantinople and Sis was definitely established,and the Katholikos of Etchmiadzin, a resident in Russian territory, becameonce more the actual as well as the titular head of the whole GregorianChurch. Russia had thus acquired an influence over the Armenians as a nation,and individual Armenians were acquiring a reciprocal influence in Russia.They had risen to eminence, not only in commerce, but in the public serviceand in the army. They had distinguished themselves particularly in the warof 1877. Loris Melikov, Lazarev and Tergoukasev, three of, the most successfulgenerals on the Russian side, were of Armenian nationality. Melikov hadtaken the fortress of Kars, and the Treaty of Berlin left his conquest inRussia's possession with a zone of territory that rounded off the districtsceded by Persia fifty years before. The Russian frontier was thus pushedforward on to the Armenian plateau, and now included an important Armenianpopulation---important enough to make its mark on the general life of theRussian Empire(225) and to serve as a nationalrallying-point for the Armenians who still remained on the Ottoman sideof the line.
Such considerations outweighed all others in Abd-ul-Hamid's mind. HisArmenian subjects must be deprived of their formidable vitality, and hedecided to crush them by resuscitating the Kurds. From 1878 onwards he encouragedtheir lawlessness, and in 1891 he deliberately undid the work of his predecessor,Mahmoud. The Kurdish chieftains were taken again into favour and decoratedwith Ottoman military rank; their tribes were enrolled as squadrons of territorialcavalry ; regimental badges and modern rifles were served out to themfrom the Government stores, and their retaining fee was a free hand to usetheir official status and their official weapons as they pleased againsttheir Armenian neighbours. At the same time the latter were systematicallydisarmed ; the only retaliation open to them was the formation of secretrevolutionary societies, and this fitted in entirely with Abd-ul-Hamid'splans, for it made a racial conflict inevitable. The disturbances beganin 1893 with the posting up of revolutionary placards in Yozgad and Marsovan.This was soon followed by an open breach between Moslem and Christian inthe. districts of Moush and Sassoun, and there was a rapid concentrationof troops---some of them Turkish regulars, but most of them HamidiéKurds. Sassoun was besieged for several months, and fell in 1894. The Sassounlis---men,women and children---were savagely massacred by the Turks and Kurds, andthe attention of Great Britain was aroused. In the winter of 1894-5 GreatBritain persuaded France and Russia to join her in reminding the OttomanGovernment of its pledge to introduce provincial reforms, and in the springthey presented a concrete programme for the administration of the Six Vilayets.In its final form it was a perfunctory project, and the counter-projectwhich the Ottoman Government announced its intention of applying in itsstead was more illusory still. It was promulgated in 1895, but the firstof a new series of organised massacres had already taken place a few daysearlier, at Trebizond, and in the following months the slaughter was extendedto one after another of the principal towns of the Empire. These atrocitieswere nearly all committed against peaceful, unarmed urban populations. Theonly place that resisted was Zeitoun, which held out. for six months againsta Turkish army, and was finally amnestied by the mediation of the Powers.The anti-Armenian outbreaks were instigated and controlled by the CentralGovernment, and were crowned, in August, 1896, by the great massacre atConstantinople, where for two days the Armenians, at the Government's bidding,were killed indiscriminately in the streets, until the death-roll amountedto many thousands. Then Abd-ul-Hamid held his hand. He had been feelingthe pulse of public opinion, both abroad and at home, and he saw that hehad gone far enough(226). In all more than100,000 men, women and children had perished, and for the moment he hadsufficiently crippled the Armenian element in his Empire.
Yet this Macchiavellian policy was ultimately as futile as it was wicked.In the period after the massacres the Armenian population in Turkey wascertainly reduced, partly by the actual slaughter and partly by emigrationabroad. But this only weakened the Empire without permanently paralysingthe Armenian race. The emigrants struck new roots in the United States andin the Russian Caucasus, acquired new resources, enlisted new sympathies ;and Russia was the greatest gainer of all. The Armenians had little reason,at the time, to look towards Russia with special sympathy or hope. In Russia,as in Turkey, the war of 1877-8 had been followed by a political reaction,which was aggravated by the assassination of the Tsar, Alexander II., in1881 ; and the Armenians, as an energetic, intellectual, progressiveelement in the Russian Empire, were classed by the police with the revolutionaries,and came under their heavy hand. Yet once an Armenian was on the Russianside of the frontier his life and property at least were safe. He couldbe sure of reaping the fruits of his labour, and had not to fear suddendeath in the streets. During the quarter of a century that followed theTreaty of Berlin, the Armenian population of the Russian provinces increasedremarkably in prosperity and numbers, and now, after the massacres, theywere reinforced by a constant stream of Ottoman refugees. The centre ofgravity of the Armenian race was shifting more and more from Ottoman toRussian territory. Russia has profited by the crimes of her neighbours.The Hamidian régime lasted from 1878 to 1908, and did all that anypolicy could do to widen the breach between the Ottoman State and the Armenianpeople. Yet the natural community of interest was so strong that even thirtyyears of repression did not make the Armenians despair of Ottoman regeneration.
Nothing is more significant than the conduct of the Armenians in 1908,when Abd-ul-Hamid was overthrown by the Young Turkish Revolution, and therewas a momentary possibility that the Empire might be reformed and preservedby the initiative of the Turks themselves. At this crisis the real attitudeof the different nationalities in the Empire was revealed. The Kurds putup a fight for Abd-ul-Hamid, because they rejoiced in the old dispensation.The Macedonians---Greek, Bulgar and Serb---who had been the Armenians' principalfellow-victims in the days of oppression, paid the Constitution lip-homageand secretly prepared to strike. They were irreconcilable irredentists,and saw in the reform of the Empire simply an obstacle to their secessionfrom it. They took counsel with their kinsmen in the independent nationalStates of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, and, four years later, the BalkanLeague attacked Turkey and tore away her Macedonian provinces by force.
The Armenians, on the other hand, threw themselves wholeheartedly intothe service of the new régime. As soon as the Ottoman Constitutionwas restored, the Armenian political parties abandoned their revolutionaryprogramme in favour of parliamentary action, and co-operated in Parliamentwith the Young Turkish bloc so long as Young Turkish policy remained inany degree liberal or democratic. The terrible Adana massacres, which occurredless than a year after the Constitution had been proclaimed, might havedamped the Armenians' enthusiasm (though at first the proof that the YoungTurks were implicated in them was not so clear as it has since become).Yet they showed their loyalty in 1912, when the Turks were fighting fortheir existence. It was only under the new laws that the privilege and dutyof military service had been extended to the Christian as well as the Moslemcitizens of the Empire, and the disastrous Balkan Campaign was the firstopportunity that Armenian soldiers were given of doing battle for theircommon heritage. But they bore themselves so well in this ordeal that theywere publicly commended by their Turkish commanders. Thus, in war and peace,in the Army and in Parliament, the Armenians worked for the salvation ofthe Ottoman Commonwealth, from the accession of the Young Turks in 1908till their intervention in the European War in 1914. It is impossible toreconcile with this fact the Turkish contention that in 1914 they suddenlyreversed their policy and began treacherously to plot for the Ottoman Empire'sdestruction.
