Electronic version of  “ARMENIA: The Survival of a Nation”, revised second edition © 1990 Christopher J. Walker

 

<< Back                                                                   Home                                                                      Next >>

 

[Page 83]

 

PART II

 

The Realm of the Sultans

 

[Page 84 – blank]

 

[Page 85]

 

4 Empires in the West, from the Ottomans to the British

 

 

The Ottomans and Armenia

 

If the homeland of an empire is where it puts down its deepest roots during its formative years, then the homeland of the Ottoman empire was western Anatolia and the Balkans. The first lands which the Ottomans were granted were near Angora; from there they expanded westwards to Nicomedia and Nicaea, and later to the Gallipoli peninsula. A large part of the Balkans was in their hands by 1362, and in 1368 Adrianople (Edirne) became the Ottoman capital. None of Armenia was yet conquered by them.¹

            It was not until 150 years later that the Ottomans pushed far enough east to capture part of Armenia. At the battle of Chaldiran (north-east of lake Van) in 1514 Sultan Selim the Grim defeated Shah Ismail, and conquered about half of the Armenian plateau. Twenty years later Suleiman I, 'the Magnificent' or 'the Lawgiver', conquered much of the rest.² Armenia thereafter remained on the periphery of the empire – a marchland, first on the border with Persia, and latterly with Russia. Notions that Armenia was a central province of the empire were nineteenth-century contrivances, based on the idea that the Ottomans maintained a racial link with their central Asian forbears, which was not true.³

            When Armenia was conquered by the Ottoman Turks it was in a wretched state. The Mongols had wreaked devastation on it, destroying the settled society in order to create grazing land for their flocks and herds. The land had become more suitable for tribal communities than for civilised society. The Armenians themselves were either reduced to poverty, or had fled to new settlements in mountain fastnesses. In these circumstances, the Ottoman conquest was initially welcomed as bringing stability.

 

 

The Kurds

 

However, not long after Selim the Grim's conquest of Armenia there occurred an important and far-reaching shift of the population. Kurdish communities were settled in Armenia. The Kurds are an ancient people, Indo-European like the Armenians. They are mentioned by Xenophon. For many centuries they have been Muslim; probably since soon after the Muslim conquest of Syria and Mesopotamia. Most are Sunni Muslim, although religion has never been a matter which has troubled them deeply. Most too were until recently nomadic,

 

[Page 86]

 

although with the inevitable process of sendentarisation settled Kurdish communities were developing all the time. According to J. G. Taylor,⁴ British consul in Erzerum, it was Selim the Grim's chief minister Idrisi who

 

divided the Kurdish provinces around Diyarbekir, recently acquired from the Persians, into eight sanjaks (districts), and forced a greater part of the nomad Kurds, who then as now preyed to a great extent upon the peaceable agricultural population and villages, to emigrate to the southern portions of the Georgian districts, about Erivan, Azerbaijan, and northern Armenia, which with other possessions fell to the Turks consequent upon Selim's victory.

 

To make full use of this forced emigration (ordered so as to weaken the political power of the Kurds) Idrisi at the same time assured the Kurds of perpetual immunity from taxation, if they would act as a militia to guard the extensive frontier with Persia on which they were now located. And later on,

           

sultan Murad still further strengthened the Kurdish element, by sending additional families from the south to these same districts; at the same time he fully guaranteed the privileges originally granted by Selim.⁵

 

            With the settlement of the Kurds in their land, the prospect for the Armenians seriously dimmed.

 

 

The Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople

 

In 1453 sultan Mehmed II, installed in his new capital, had given the Greek Orthodox patriarch civil and ecclesiastical authority over all Orthodox Christians throughout the empire. Eight years later he summoned the Armenian archbishop of Brusa, Hovakim, to Constantinople, and with the title of 'patriarch' granted him similar authority over all the 'non-Orthodox' Christian peoples of the empire – who, of course, initially included many more than the Armenians. ( Each community was eventually granted its own leader.⁶)

            The Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople was thus a creation of the Ottoman authorities, not of the Armenian Church. Its jurisdiction overrode that of the establishments created by the Church itself – the catholicosates of Sis and Aghtamar, and the patriarchate of Jerusalem. It was a political appointment; but since the Ottoman empire was a theocracy, it was expressed in ecclesiastical terms.

 

 

The Millets

 

Each community (millet) was to a large extent self-governing, and permitted to keep its institutions; internal, personal matters were controlled within the community itself, with no outside Turkish interference. Marriage, inheritance, the

 

[Page 87]

 

founding of schools and hospitals, and everything to assure the smooth running of the community's day-to-day affairs were dealt with internally. The community even had its own prison. The Ottoman Turkish ruling class in effect only required of them that they pay their taxes and create no disturbance.⁷ No overt attempt was made to Turkise or Islamicise them, although social pressures were, as in any empire, exerted upon them for them to convert. The non-Muslim communities were known as rayahs, or flocks (derived form the Arabic ra'ã) not because they were 'human cattle', as some later commentators have held, but because they were the 'protected ones', as sheep by a shepherd, a fairly common image in the Middle East.⁸ The protection that they received, however was in practice closer to that of a racketeer than a biblical vision.

            The millet system has been sometimes praised as a model of just administration for a conqueror, sometimes criticised for being opportunistic. Certainly, as a method of administration for conquered peoples, it was morally ahead of anything to come out of Europe at the time or for some time after: compare the Spanish conquest of South America, or the behaviour of the Portuguese conqueror D'Albuquerque who, during his expedition of 1507 along the shores of the Persian Gulf, mutilated Muslim prisoners of both sexes with the object of inspiring terror.⁹ In terms of results, too, it was a cleverly contrived system, since the ruler soon drew the benefits that wary colonialists draw today by disturbing the status quo of their subjugated peoples as little as possible, while waiting for the districts to become profitable. But all such evaluations are out of place, since the principles on which the empire was based were absolute. These derived from two sources, the Muslim religion and the Ottoman dynasty; latter-day analyses in the context of an age of reason are irrelevant. Sultan Mehmed II, by making such provisions for non-Muslims, was acting in accordance with an Islamic tradition that went back to the Prophet Muhammad's early treaties.¹⁰ The model was already there for a Muslim ruler to draw upon.

 

 

Ottoman Law and the Armenians

 

Even at the early stage there were flaws in the Ottoman system, which were later to make the position of Armenians quite intolerable. Most serious was that Muslim law was inapplicable to non-Muslims. Non-Muslims had their own courts and prisons; they could judge civil cases among themselves, and be assured of a fair hearing. But in conflict with a Muslim this was not the case, for the Muslim could always apply to have his case heard in the religious court (the mehkémé), where non-Muslim testimony was forbidden. Later, non-Muslims were allowed to testify in cases involving Muslims, but their testimony was almost always disregarded. As an example of how the system operated, here is an incident observed by the admirable Dr Humphry Sandwith, recounted in his Narrative of the Siege of Kars (1856):¹¹

 

[Page 88]

 

            An Armenian tradesman, about to leave the town for another city, had been trying to change some paper-money into gold, the former not being current at the place of his destination. An officer, hearing of this, went and offered the Armenian gold for 5,000 piastres in paper (about £40), ten per cent agio being deducted. This offer the Armenian accepted, and gave the officer the paper-money, the latter promising to return immediately with the gold. Some time having elapsed, and the officer not having made his appearance, the Armenian went to look for him, and with much trouble succeeded in recovering, at various instalments, 4,060 piastres. The Armenian then applied to the Turk's commanding officer for the payment of the remainder, who recommended that the affair should be taken to the mejlis [civil court]. The Turk seeing that the proofs were rather strong against him, insisted on his right to be tried by the mehkémé, where he knew that the Koran would serve him in his need. Accordingly the Armenian and the Turk were confronted before this religious tribunal; and there the Turk, grown bold as a Mussulman, declared that, far from owing the Armenian anything, the latter wished to rob him; that he (the Turk) had placed the above-named sum in the hands of a third person to be changed into gold, and that the Armenian had taken it for that purpose, but that the gold was not forthcoming. 'Do you swear to this?' asked the president. 'I swear to it on the Koran,' answered the Turk. 'It is enough.' The Armenian had brought witnesses, but they were all Christians, their evidence was impossible; so the hapless Armenian was obliged to refund all the gold he had previously obtained and found himself a ruined man.^*

 

            On this occasion justice was later done due to the presence of the two Englishmen; but the general rule was that, in disputes concerning members of his family, his land and or his basic means of subsistence, justice did not exist for the Armenian.

            Besides this enormous general disadvantage, Armenians suffered from certain specific discriminations. As Christians, they were not permitted to bear arms, which laid them open to their predatory neighbours. Their religion did give them the benefit of exemption from military service (although it also meant that no officer class could emerge among them), since only a Muslim might draw his sword in the defence of Islam. Nevertheless Christians were subjected to the devshirme, or boy-collection, whereby officials used to take children from the Christian communities, educate them as Muslims and put them into the Ottoman civil service. By the end of the sixteenth century devshirme was an established practice in certain Armenian localities. (It did, however, die out by the mid-eighteenth century.¹²) As regards taxation, al Christians were required

 

                * Footnote to the original. This happened some months after the Firman accepting Christian evidence was issued.

 

[Page 89]

 

to pay poll-tax and, where relevant, property tax. These taxes were not collected in an orderly manner; more often it was a question of officials just extorting as much as they could from the people, who had no redress.

            One disability which the Armenians alone of the Christian peoples of the empire had to bear, and one that was resented most especially, was the obligation to provide free winter quarters (kishlak) to the nomadic Kurds and to their flocks, often for four to six months each year. Besides the disagreeable presence of squatters, they ran up large expenses in providing food and animal foodstuffs.¹³ The system was a degrading humiliation.

            All these factors led to the steady impoverishment of the Armenians. In every sphere they were reminded that they were inferior to Muslims, and were consequently reduced to frightened subservience.

 

 

The Capitulations

 

Rather more insidiously, the system of Capitulations which operated within the Ottoman empire served to endanger the position of Armenians. Capitulations were extra-territorial privileges granted by the Ottoman government to non-Ottoman subjects while they travelled or lived within Ottoman domains. The notion of them is an ancient one; its general features can be tracked back to Roman law. In the Ottoman context the system dated from 1535, when Suleiman I granted a wide range of privileges to François I of France. Throughout the following centuries European nations made great use and abuse of the Capitulations that they were granted.¹⁴

            The damaging effect of this system was twofold. In the first place it encouraged the European powers to get a paralysing hold on the political workings of the empire, reducing the overt masters of the empire, the Turks, to a bitter and vengeful xenophobia. It is ironic indeed that throughout the nineteenth century the powers tried to force Ottoman Turkey to reform, when, to the Ottoman ruling class, their own self-seeking interference had reduced the concept of law to something to abhor and avoid.

            Secondly, since Ottoman law gave no assurance of security to Armenians, the wealthier and more astute ones among them sought the protection of the foreign powers under the Capitulations, as the only way of ensuring that they lived a reasonably unmolested life. As a result such people, and members of their communities who had not sought such protection, were viewed with suspicion by the Ottoman government, which saw them as agents of a foreign power. So more and more turned to the foreign powers for restitution of their serious grievances, rather than to their own government (although, considering the oppression and indifference of that government to them, it is hard to call it 'their own'); and they also believed, disastrously as it turned out, that foreign governments would intervene on their behalf if conditions became unbearable.

 

[Page 90]

 

 

The Empire, the Powers and 'Reform'

 

Under the treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji (1774) Russia won the right to 'make, upon all occasions, representations, as well in favour of the new church in Constantinople … as on behalf of its officiating ministers'.¹⁵ From this text Catherine the Great assumed the right to protect all the Orthodox Christian members of the Ottoman empire. It was certainly a large assumption. Although Russia's protection appears to be blatant interference in the affairs of another state, the idea of extra-territorial privileges had already been sanctioned in the Capitulations. The Russian empress was merely extending, in a brilliantly opportunistic manner, a principle which already existed. Thereafter the other foreign powers, not to be outdone, extended their own privileges within Ottoman Turkey; while the Turks themselves, realising they were too weak to oppose the powers, retreated into a mood of sullen and obstinate reaction, which the activities of the various reformist sultans did little to dispel. Stonewalling the demands of the foreign powers became the most typical Ottoman policy; one observer noted that 'how not to do it is the perfection of Turkish diplomacy.'¹⁶ At the same time the Sublime Porte^* could always be sure that the powers would not turn their backs on Turkey for long, since she was so important to them for economic and strategic reasons. Economically, Ottoman Turkey was a mine of raw materials, and a vast market for the sale of surplus goods. Militarily, Turkey's geographical position assured her of the perpetual attentions of the powers, principally Austria and Russia, with their vast contiguous land masses, and Britain, with her fears for her Indian possessions.

            Despite their perennial quarrels over the Ottoman empire, all the powers agreed (except for rare periods) that she had to be maintained, for should she collapse their rivalries would provoke a conflict of incalculable proportions. However, if she had to be maintained, she had to be kept weak; for a powerful empire might destroy the fabric of interests, commercial and otherwise, that the powers wove out of the decline of the Ottoman state. Hence they came to her aid when she was seriously threatened in 1839 by the more vigorous dynasty of Mehemed Ali of Egypt.

            Of all the powers Britain was the most dedicated to the cause of Ottoman Turkey. Turkey prevented Russia from reaching the Mediterranean, and from gaining the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, which would (so Britain believed) enable her to threaten the Persian Gulf. At the same time Britain became Turkey's best customer in the early nineteenth century, Turkey, for her part, becoming Britain's third-best customer by 1850.¹⁷ So it is hardly surprising that the most ardent supporters of the Turks, and their most eager propagandists, came from the most conservative-minded members of the British political elite, who have never been able to resist a combination of

 

* The Sublime Porte (Bab 'Ãli), or the Porte, was the usual way that foreigners referred to the Ottoman government from the eighteenth century.

 

[Page 91]

 

imperial defence and commercial interest. Turkophiles seldom really cared for the Turks or Islam, except as a potential armed might to attack their imperial rival, Russia.

 

 

The Formalisation of Relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe

 

As the treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji established the pattern of Russo-Turkish relations which persisted until 1914, so the treaty of Paris (30 March 1856) formalised relations between the Ottoman empire and the wider 'concert' of major European powers. Ottoman Turkey was, after 1856, on a par with the other powers; legally and diplomatically she entered a new category – something of greater importance than the clauses in the treaty about territorial sovereignty, demilitarisation and so forth. But since the nations of Europe were Christian, in the sense that the mass of their subjects adhered to a variety of the Christian creed, and since discrimination against Christians was an everyday fact of life in Ottoman Turkey (as Dr Humphry Sandwith and many others had observed), the European powers insisted that article 9 of the Paris treaty read, in the hypocritical terminology typical of diplomatic instruments:

 

His imperial majesty the sultan having, in his constant solicitude for the welfare of his subjects, issued a firman [decree], which while ameliorating their condition without distinction of religion or of race, records his generous intentions towards the Christian population of his empire, and wishing to give further proof of his sentiments in that respect, has resolved to communicate to the contracting powers the said firman, emanating spontaneously from his sovereign will.¹⁸

 

European governments realised that their subjects were apt to pay dangerously close attention to such matters as misgovernment, oppression and, in the case of some of them, lack of liberty, instead of concentrating on such matters as natural resources, market potential and strategic position, hence the need to persuade Ottoman Turkey to end her wide-ranging discrimination against non-Muslims. Ottoman Turkey for her part realised that she would lose the financial and military support of Britain and France if she continued to grind the faces of her non-Muslim subjects; so both parties agreed that reform, or words about reform, were necessary.

            In the same manner, an earlier reform scheme had been proposed by the Ottoman foreign minister in 1839 in order to gain the support of Britain against Mehemed Ali. Neither this decree nor that of 1856 contained any measure for the enforcement of reform; and each time, after the foreigner's back was turned, almost all the measures were quietly dropped. In the provinces life continued as if they had never been.

 

[Page 92]

 

 

Ottoman Finance

 

Nothing explains better why Britain and France were, in the second half of the nineteenth century, so harnessed to Ottoman Turkey, and why their attempts to make it reform were at best palliatives and at worst hypocrisy, than the nature of their financial involvement in the Ottoman empire. Until the Crimean war, Ottoman government 'if very bad, was also very cheap' (The Times).¹⁹ Turkey possessed a 'barbarous state of finance' (The Times again).²⁰ If she had wanted to raise a loan, she had been able to do so internally. Borrowing from the bankers (sarrafs) of Galata, most of whom were Armenians.^* But by the 1850s larger loans were needed, specifically in 1854 to provide finance for the Crimean war. So a loan was floated on the European money markets for £3 million sterling, at 6 per cent. This was followed in the following year by another, for £5 million, at 4 per cent. The effective interest rate was often as high as 10 per cent,²¹ and in the period 1863–73 12–13 per cent.²² Thirteen more loans were raised until 1874, for the total of £191 million. Only 10 per cent of the total sum raised was used to increase the empire's economic strength; the rest was squandered.²³ To the mainly British and French investors the proposition was attractive: it offered (for the time) high rates of interest, and the investment was sanctioned by their governments. (The early loans were aimed at keeping the empire solvent during the Crimean war, and the later ones were in accordance with the governments' policy of upholding the empire.) Moreover the period was one of dynamic economic expansion for Europe, so that she was looking for outlets for her surplus capital; and it is possible, too, to see in the massive European investment in Turkey an intention to keep the Muslim empire backward and at the economic mercy of Europe. The Times commented on 20 February 1857:

 

But our capitalists and men of enterprise have gone to Turkey because they see in it a country of great capability, where money and industry judiciously invested may bring large returns. … The Turks have a fine territory and no money, energy or skill; we have all three, and they pour into Turkey as naturally as water finds its level.²⁴

 

The Times understood the political implications of what prima facie was a purely financial arrangement, pointing out that India was 'in the beginning conquered almost by private enterprise'.²⁵

            But money and industry were anything but judiciously invested. The Porte soon found it easier to negotiate new loans than to raise taxes. Confidence was shaken; so an 'Ottoman Bank' was founded in order to restore it, with a capital

 

* One should not overlook the point that the Armenian bankers in the capital were at this time devoid of any national spirit, and were themselves supporters of the extortions which the pashas used to inflict on the countryside.

 

[Page 93]

 

almost entirely British and French. (The bank was about as Ottoman as a foreign embassy.) Still financial profligacy continued; Nassau Senior (1858) quotes a Constantinople banker saying, 'It is monstrous that the finances of a great empire should be ruined by the fantastic desires of a fool [Sultan Abdul Medjid] who, already having fifty palaces, wants fifty more.'²⁶

            In the same year The Times's optimism had changed. On 15 September it wrote:

 

We cannot but feel that the Turks have suddenly acquired a strange relish for this borrowing. But a few short years since they were as much strangers to the European money-market as the inhabitants of Timbuktoo. The faults of the Mussulman are apathy, sloth and self-indulgence and if there is one thing more than another likely to encourage these vices, it is the too easy grant of funds which other men are to repay.²⁷

 

Of his own compatriots the anonymous writer added:

 

As a people we are always building towers of Babel or washing blackamoors white in expectation of a dividend of 6 per cent. And the sight of the edifice in ruins, or the pack of savages as dusky and impudent as ever, does not prevent us from hailing the new prospectus with the same confidence as any of the old ones.²⁸

 

            The enthusiasm of the Porte for borrowing was only matched by that of Europe for lending; the financial profligacy of the one was only paced by the greed for quick profits of the other. By the mid-1860s the Porte was 'systematically living beyond its means, borrowing money everywhere to gratify its extravagances, and borrowing again to pay the interest of the loans already raised.'²⁹

            The crash came in the autumn of 1875: on 6 October Turkey defaulted on payment of interest. Immediately there were howls of anger in London and Paris (and at least some of the execration heaped upon Turkey in the following year over the Bulgarian atrocities can be traced to the sulky rage of thwarted investors). In its issue of January 1877 the Edinburgh Review pointed out that among the most clamorous

 

there are those who are inflamed by the resentment of disappointed avarice, who lent their money by millions to support a government when it paid them 7 per cent, but who discover all its iniquities when the rate of interest is reduced to 3.³⁰

 

            The powers decided to seek settlement of the debt. They were held up by the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, and it was not until 20 October 1881 that the matter was resolved by the Decree of Muharram. (Muharram was the month in

 

[Page 94]

 

the Islamic calendar which corresponded to December in 1881.) The empire's indebtedness was reduced from £191 million to £106 million, and the Porte ceded 'absolutely and irrevocably … until the complete liquidation of the debt' certain revenues: the salt and tobacco monopolies; the stamp, spirits and fish taxes; the silk tithes in certain districts.³¹ A 'Public Debt Administration' (PDA) was set up, with a board of seven men, six of whom were representatives of the European bondholders. Turkey was thereafter reduced to a state of economic vassalage; and when in 1905 the PDA came into conflict with the Porte, it only needed a naval demonstration to make the government acquiesce.

            The Western powers' involvement in the finances of the Ottoman empire shows the hollowness of much of their rhetoric about 'reform'; for what was the Porte to make of powers which berated it for misbehaviour, and yet which baled out their own citizens when they had come unstuck in investing in it? Was not the whole point of reform not the condition of the subject peoples of the empire, but the rehabilitation of Turkish credit? It is noteworthy that in 1905, when the sultan's government was making meagre attempts to correct abuses in the tax-collecting system in Macedonia, it was opposed by the PDA, since the system proposed was less profitable.

 

 

Armenians in the Ottoman Empire

 

Before the emergence of the Armenian question as an international issue in 1878, the Armenian population of the empire was made up, broadly speaking, of four fairly distinct groups. There were the rich men in Constantinople or Smyrna, who sometimes had close ties with the Sublime Porte itself. The class was known as the amiras. At this stage they had little or no contact with their fellow nationals in Turkish Armenia, whom they described as kavaragan, or provincial. Secondly, there were the traders and artisans in the towns in the interior of the empire. It was this class that foreign travellers came into contact with most of all, and whom, with the haughty traveller's disdain for tradesmen, and admiration for warriors and horsemen, they were apt to despise, if not actively to detest. Sir Mark Sykes was the embodiment of such prejudices, according to the impressions that he has recorded in The Caliphs' Last Heritage, a source-book of pre-1914 snobbery in the Near East.³² Thirdly, there were the villagers – the peasantry who made a precarious living out of the soil and from their flocks (and who had done so for at least two millennia past); these men were frequently heavily in debt to local Turks or Kurdish beys. The peasantry are seldom discussed by travellers (except perceptive ones like H. F. B. Lynch), but of all classes they were much the largest. There were many entirely Armenian villages on the plains of Erzerum and Moush; indeed, British consul Brant comments, in a report of one of his journeys (1 June 1839) that 'in the whole plain of Moush there are not any Mohammedan peasantry

 

[Page 95]

 

intermingled with the Armenians, a fact which could clearly point out this country as belonging to Armenia rather than to Kurdistan.'³³ Finally, there were the mountaineers – men who had led a bold, semi-independent existence, untouched by the Ottoman empire and its tax-collectors. These included the inhabitants of Zeitun and Cilicia, and the inhabitants of the Sasun caza,^* a confederation of about 40 Armenian villages. The mountaineers were a hardy breed, tough and independent of spirit. In Zeitun they were masters of their own affairs; the district has been described as a 'miniature Montenegro'. In Sasun, though paying tribute to local Kurdish beys (lords), they were able to live without the insidious humiliations of the plainsmen. In both places they were armed, manufacturing the weapons themselves. They were un-Ottomanised, and virtually untouched by the central government and its functionaries.³⁴

            By the nineteenth century, the Armenian population in Turkish Armenia had become heavily intermingled with Kurds and Turks. Even before Sultan Selim introduced the Kurds, and appointed them semi-autonomous dynasts, numbers of Turcoman tribes and settlers had appeared in Armenia – since indeed the Seljuk Turks had made their conquest in the eleventh century. Taking Turkish Armenia as a whole, the Armenians were outnumbered by the combined populations of Kurds and Turks; but it is unwise to put the latter two peoples together, since their outlooks and aspirations were often very different. (In 1849 the Porte crushed a serious Kurdish revolt led by Bedr Khan.) In some places, such as the province of Van, sources agree that the Armenians constituted a majority over the combined total of the other peoples.³⁵

            There were no reliable population statistics in the Ottoman empire, and so one has to rely on the estimates of travellers. M. A. Ubicini (1854) estimated the Armenian population throughout the Ottoman empire at 2,400,000 (almost certainly somewhat on the high side), and said they constituted a majority in Erzerum province (which included Kars, Bayazid and Childer), and in Kurdistan (which included Van, Moush, Hakkiari and Diyarbekir).³⁶ Even allowing for the emigration which continually went on into Russian Armenia, these estimates, especially of the majority in Kurdistan, are doubtful; though there were certainly some large areas with an Armenian majority. The Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople issued figures in 1882 which put the total Armenian population in the empire at 2,660,000, of whom 1,630,000 lived in the 'six vilayets' (provinces) of Turkish Armenia, that is, the provinces of Sivas, Mamuret el-Aziz, Erzerum, Diyarbekir, Bitlis and Van. Thirty years later the patriarchate produced further figures, which put the total Armenian

 

*Ottoman administrative divisions were as follows, with their approximate translations, beginning with the largest:

vilayet (province),              governed by a vali

sanjak (district),                  governed by a mutessarif

caza (sub-district),             governed by a kaimakam

nahiye (parish),                   governed by a mudir

 

[Page 96]

 

population of the empire at 2,100,000, the reduction being due to massacre and the drift of the Armenians to Russian Armenia.³⁷ The 1912 figures also give statistics for Turks and Kurds in the same area: in percentage terms, these put the Turks at 25.5 per cent, the Kurds at 16.3 per cent, and the Armenians at 38.9 per cent.³⁸ (The remaining 19.3 per cent was made up of Assyrians, Greeks, Yezidis and so forth.) Even if these figures show partiality to Armenians, one can say with reasonable safety that for most of the nineteenth century the Armenians constituted about one-third of the total population of Turkish Armenia, and that in an area where all the peoples were minorities, they were the largest. (The adding together of the numbers of the Turks and the Kurds provides a phoney statistic, much used by Ismet Pasha at the Lausanne conference but of no significance beyond propaganda.)

Relations between Armenians and their Turkish and Kurdish Muslim neighbours differed in each locality, and there seems to have been no general pattern beyond the inferior position of Armenians. All the towns and many of the villages were mixed Muslim/Christian. Each community lived in its distinct quarter. The picture of life in and around Moush (to take one example) in the 1860s is of a Muslim ruling class and an Armenian merchant and entrepreneurial class. Armenians also; according to consul Taylor:

 

form the principal portion of the industrious inhabitants in the plain and near the city, supplying all agricultural labour and trade, while the Muslims, mostly pastoral, living on the slopes of the hills bordering the plain, occupy themselves simply with their flocks.³⁹

 

Muslims were found at the top and bottom places of the social scale, with Armenians precariously (because they were unarmed) in the middle. But merely because they were located in the middle, it would be wrong to see them as the economic masters of the land. Speaking of the Van district in the same report, consul Taylor points out that the Kurds were the monied class, 'the usurers of the country'.⁴⁰ They demanded an interest rate from their Christian debtors of between 3 and 4 per cent per month. Taylor comments, 'There is hardly one Christian not indebted to them for sums it will be impossible for him to pay without sacrificing his all.'⁴¹

            National feeling, in the sense of an awareness of a unity of interest, barely existed among Armenians throughout the empire until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Thus, the Armenians of Constantinople were involved in struggles from 1830 to 1860 which were in no way related to the oppression of the villagers in the eastern provinces. (The condition of the peasantry in the east was virtually forgotten in the capital until the election to the patriarchate in 1869 of Mëkërtich Khrimian, a leading educator and deep lover of his people; see below, pp. 102–4.) And when, in the 1890s, the sultan was organising massacres of Armenians in the east, and was being accused of doing so by the

 

[Page 97]

 

European ambassadors, he could plead his friendship with leading Constantinople Armenians.

            Despite the fact that government in imperial Turkey worked against Armenians, whether from the central policies of the sultan, the traditional oppressions of the pashas or the bully-boy extortions of the tax-gatherer, the Armenian people themselves made notable contributions to the public life of the empire.

            In the provinces, Armenians filled significant if lowly positions in the administration. Typical posts held by them were those of inspector of forestry, municipal engineer, provincial translator, and assistant to the deputy governor. When the telegraph was introduced, one frequently found an Armenian managing it. With the spread of elementary health care, Armenians often appeared as doctors and pharmacists. They were present in almost any venture which brought progress and improvement.⁴²

            But it was in the imperial capital that Armenians of the amira class distinguished themselves in a wide variety of activities, some of considerable importance in the running of the empire. From 1757 to 1880, with the exception of a thirteen-year gap, the Armenian family of Duzian (or Duzoglu) held the position of superintendent of the Ottoman mint. They dominated the office so completely that the records were kept in Armenian. Most of their employees were Armenian, too. The few factories which were established in the Ottoman empire before the Crimean war were almost all funded by Armenian capital; and in many cases the factory managers were Armenian. The leading family in this sector was that of Dadian. In 1795 Arakel Dadian was appointed manager of the gunpowder factory at San Stefano; his son Hovhannes became director of the imperial paper mill in 1820, and later established the imperial silk mill at Hereke and an iron smelting foundry as San Stefano. He was also an innovator in small-arms manufacture. Further enterprise was shown by him in establishing a tannery and two broadcloth factories, to mention but a few; a list of all his interests would be lengthy. Another Armenian family, that of Kavafian, built and managed a shipyard in Constantinople.⁴³

            Armenians did not, however, only hold positions requiring capital and commercial enterprise. Many were organised into trade guilds, or esnafs. At this end of the scale, the stevedores (hamals), of whom there were scores in Constantinople, men who used to carry enormous quantities of goods on their backs, were until 1896 almost invariably Armenians.

            In a quite different sphere, that of culture, Armenians were also prominent in the nineteenth century Ottoman capital, and their activities showed the way Turko-Armenian relations might have developed had they not been strangled by despotism and ideology. Armenians shone in two fields, those of architecture and the theatre. As the Duzians dominated the mint and the Dadians factory management, so the Balian family dominated Ottoman architecture.⁴⁴ The father of this dynasty, and the most distinguished member of it, was Krikor Balian (1764–1831), who was accorded the title 'architect of

 

[Page 98]

 

the empire'. His most important building is probably the Nusretiye mosque – graceful, elegant and stylish. Situated in the Top-khana district of the capital, it was ordered by Sultan Mahmud II to celebrate the 'auspicious event' of the destruction of the Janissaries in 1826. Krikor's son Garabed (1800–86) built the immense and ornate palace at Dolmabahche (1853), as well as one of the factories managed by the Dadians. Other sons of Krikor, Nigoghos and Sarkis, built the Chiragan palace (1874, now destroyed), amongst other imperial and public edifices. Members of the family also built the smaller and lighter Beylerbey palace, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus. Their taste in the later decades may have been questionable – Mr Michael Levey describes the style of the Dolmabahche palace as 'Hollywood-Oriental'⁴⁵ – but of their loyalty and service both to the private whims of the sultan and to the expansion and development of the capital there can be no doubt.

            The Turkish theatre was founded by an Armenian, one Hagop Vartovian, known to the Turks as 'Güllü Agop'.⁴⁶ His company, based at Gedikpasha, lasted from 1868 to 1882, critical years in the development of Ottoman political thought. Vartovian was a dedicated man of the theatre, inasmuch as he put on anything good that came his way; and it happened that, besides the adaptations of traditional romances and of light European novels that he put on, important and significant plays – landmarks in Turkish political awareness – figured among his productions. The most notable of these was Namik Kemal's Vatan yahut Silistre (Fatherland or Silistria; 1873), a historical play based on an episode in the Crimean war, imbued with Ottoman patriotism, and received with such enthusiasm that the government sent the author into provincial exile.⁴⁷

            Vartovian's theatre not only developed the political consciousness of the elite; from his activities there evolved the beginnings of a new Turkish language, at once popular and literary, which began to bridge the gap between the ornate official language and the vernacular of the man in the street. (Language reform is a matter which has concerned the Turks to this day, and Turkish scholars are beginning to evaluate the contribution of Vartovian's theatre.)

            The Gedikpasha venture also quite naturally led to the creation of a theatre-going public, which included Muslim women, and to establishing a tradition of stage-craft. When under Abdul Hamid the political climate forced the theatre to close, and the atmosphere became stifling and repressive, a number of the company went to Transcaucasia; there they strengthened the Tiflis Armenian theatre, which survives to this day, now named after Stepan Shahumian.

Confronted by a resurgence of intractable Ottoman despotism, echoing round the cold stones of the Seven Towers, theatrical and other manifestations of the beginnings of cultural freedom, of creation and of diversity, withered like flowers in the desert wind. Armenians had competently and unselfconsciously contributed to the development of the empire, and especially of the Ottoman capital; as we shall see, they received their recompense in the days following 26 August 1896.

 

[Page 99]

 

 

Internal Armenian Conflicts in Constantinople

 

In the brief period when political development seemed possible within the Ottoman empire, Armenians in the capital took the chance to organise their own internal affairs. The community passed through bitter strife until its conflicts were resolved. The issues related entirely to the community in the capital; there was nothing specifically Armenian about them, in the sense of pertaining to the land of Armenia.

            The growing wealth and prestige of the amira families – the Duzians, Dadians and others – led to their acquiring almost dictatorial powers within the community, and, most significantly, being able to control the patriarchate. Against them a movement developed made up partly of young men educated abroad (especially in Paris or Venice), who had become imbued with democratic ideas, and partly of members of the trade guilds, or esnafs. The struggle centred around control of the Armenian college in Scutari, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus. From 1838, when the esnafs first tried to gain control of this institution, they sought to weaken the power of the amira oligarchy. Their opponents were very reluctant to relinquish their power, and used every ruse to maintain it.⁴⁸

At the heart of the problem was the position of the patriarch himself: he was answerable to no one except the sultan; and whoever controlled the patriarch controlled the whole community. Hence the need came to be recognised for a written regulation of his election. Two drafts of such a document were drawn up in 1857 and 1859, but rejected by the amiras as too liberal. A third draft, considerably more restrictive, received the approval of all classes of Armenian society in the capital in 1860, and was ratified by the Porte three years later.⁴⁹

            The Armenian National Constitution is a liberal document. Its 99 articles are imbued with the principles of rights and duties. After its promulgation the internecine strife in Constantinople ceased. But it had absolutely no relevance to the conditions of Armenians outside Constantinople; to this extent it was a very inward-looking document. To take one example: articles 57 to 62 provide for the establishment of the General Assembly of the community, its supreme legislature. It was composed of 140 members made up as follows:

 

Ecclesiastics elected by the clergy of Constantinople                           20

Lay members from the capital and its suburbs                                     80

Lay members from the provinces                                                                    40

 

            But even if the Armenian National Constitution had paid more attention to the entire community, it is doubtful if it could have benefited the Armenians as a whole, and saved them from the disasters that were to come. For it took no account of the special conditions of the Ottoman empire – that the empire, being itself an autocracy without a comparable constitution, could lurch from an era of mild reformism to one of rigid reaction with the death of a sultan or his grand vizier. The Armenian National Constitution was based on the

 

[Page 100]

 

assumption that the era of Ottoman 'reform' (the tanzimat) would continue. When it ended in 1871 the bottom fell out of the Constitution; and against the new, profound and darkly sinister reaction and racism that the empire began to exhibit, the Constitution offered no protection at all. Thereafter it preserved the Armenian community in Constantinople from further disorder, but did nothing for the much more serious oppression of the Armenians in the provinces. Which, given its virtual ignoring of the Kavaragan agricultural peasantry, is not in any way surprising.

 

 

Zeitun

 

In Constantinople the Armenians attempted to work out a political future for themselves within the Ottoman framework. But 500 kilometres away, in Cilicia, another relationship was emerging between government and subjects. Zeitun (which cannot be found on the map today) was a town hidden among high mountains, the chief of which, Astvadzashen ('established by God') is perpetually snow-capped.⁵⁰ The town could only be reached with difficulty along narrow defiles. The population of the town was almost exclusively Armenian and had been so for hundreds of years. A number of the surrounding villages were Armenian too; others were Turkish. It was seldom visited by foreigners – indeed, they were not welcome in this fortress town. But the French scholar Victor Langlois was able to visit it in 1862, and describes its setting thus:

 

But when one pierces the mountainous region that girdles the plain of Tarsus and Adana like an impenetrable defensive wall, a rapid transformation takes place: the desert ends, grass grows, trees stretch forth their densely covered branches to the sky, and rocks disappear beneath a gracious mantle of turf and flowers. Nature, hitherto pale and wan, springs to life and decks itself out; the landscape appears all in magic splendour. A burning clear sky reddens the glaciers of the great peaks with blood-red streaks; torrents, rushing down, roar in the abysses, and from their spray silvery vapours escape, that dissolve at the breath of a breeze. Here and there one notices villages, and yaila or hamlets suspended like eagles' nests at the sides of the rocks, well-cultivated fields, vines bending beneath the weight of their grapes, goats and sheep wandering in their pastures, and mountaineers, at one and the same time shepherds and warriors, keeping an eye on harvest and herds. Such is the unexpected spectacle that unfolds before the eyes of a traveller.⁵¹

 

It is perhaps only fair to add that when British consul Chermside visited the town in 1879 he described it as 'the most unsuitable looking town I have seen

 

[Page 101]

 

in Turkey', commenting that at that time 'destitution, squalor and abject misery are its principal characteristics.'

            Although foreigners knew little or nothing of Zeitun, Armenians never forgot it, and for many it was the symbol of something that had endured. Gifts used to be sent there, as to Echmiadzin or Jerusalem. The town itself was divided into four districts, each of which was ruled by a baron, whose main preoccupation seems to have been intriguing against the other three.

            It is uncertain how the Zeituntzis arrived in their town. According to some, they fled there after the fall of the Bagratid monarchy in the eleventh century; others say they were the last of the Cilician Rupenids, who escaped there form the Mamluk onslaught in the late fourteenth century. Whatever its origins, Zeitun constituted a genuine survival of medieval Armenia. The people were proud, and independent of spirit; possession of arms meant that their spirit had never been crushed. They had used their arms to assist the Ottomans to assert their paramountcy over local Turkomen dynasts.⁵² In return for a fixed annual tribute, the semi-independence of Zeitun had been assured by a decree of Sultan Murad IV dating back to 1618.⁵³ With the decline of Ottoman power, and the formalisation of tyranny, the spirit of the Zeitun mountaineers remained alert. The government launched a number of expeditions against the town, but these were unsuccessful. The warrior spirit of its armed inhabitants, and its fortress-like setting, made Zeitun a natural focus for the attention of a nationalist or revolutionary, who had seen the success of the revolts in Greece and Serbia. Perhaps a similar success could be gained in Cilicia.

            An Armenian activist from Constantinople, Melikian Ardzruni Hovakim, visited Zeitun in 1853, and strengthened the town's defences. It is possible that he was preparing the town for some sort of uprising, especially in view of the fact that he was caught by the Ottoman authorities on his way to Russian Armenia the following year (during the Crimean war), and hanged as a spy at Erzerum.

            In the succeeding years the people of Zeitun showed a militant spirit towards the government: they challenged it when it seized some of their lands to settle Tatars from Russia, and they refused to pay the higher taxes that were demanded. In 1860 the governor of nearby Marash despatched an armed force to demand the higher taxes; to his consternation, it was forced to beat an ignoble retreat. Turkish soldiery was no match for the braves of Zeitun.

            In 1860–1 the Russian Armenian revolutionary thinker Mikayel Nalbandian was in Constantinople. His presence there was probably connected, in part, to preparing the groundwork for an insurrection in Zeitun.⁵⁴ While there he made contact with members of an organisation known as the Benevolent Union, which was, as its name implies, a charitable body, but also numbered revolutionary thinkers among its members. In early 1862 coded messages were exchanged between members of the Benevolent Union in Constantinople and Nalbandian in St Petersburg; one spoke of 'textbooks' to be delivered to a priest in Zeitun – perhaps a code-word for weapons and ammunition.⁵⁵

 

[Page 102]

 

            In July 1862 there was a small incident – a local dispute – which served as a pretext for Aziz Pasha, governor of Marash, to send a punitive expedition against the Zeituntzis. In early August the army moved against Zeitun, beginning by surrounding the entire district; more that 10,000 men were moved up, and two cannon. One or two outlying villages submitted. But the actions of the Turkish forces followed an old pattern, and one often to be repeated: they looted and burnt houses and churches, and raped any attractive girls. The behaviour of the Turkish forces, which was always a more powerful stimulus to defiance than the words of activists, had the expected effect, and the Zeituntzis mobilised and took up defensive positions.

            Battle was soon joined; and despite (or perhaps because of) the superior numbers of Aziz Pasha's forces, the confused Turkish soldiery soon fled in disarray. A second assault, from a nearby monastery which overlooked Zeitun, failed when the commander saw his shells fall short; he thereupon ordered a withdrawal to Marash.⁵⁶

            When news of the incident reached the capital, the Porte dismissed Aziz. Zeitun for its part sent out emissaries to state its case.⁵⁷ The four 'barons' and a priest went to Constantinople. Seeking foreign protection, a second delegation presented its case to Napoleon III in Paris.

            It seems that in the subsequent discussion this delegation went somewhat beyond its mandate, offering union of the Armenian and Roman churches, in order to interest the prince-emperor in a form of protection for Cilicia similar to the autonomy which France had sponsored for Lebanon in 1861. But France was not really interested, and all that she did was to persuade Sultan Abdul Aziz to call the army away from Zeitun, and to issue a decree, which acknowledged certain freedoms for the Zeituntzis but limited others: law enforcement and justice would continue to be administered locally, and tax-collecting would be regularised. Thus there would be no more battles with the tax-collector – but with them would go some of Zeitun's prized sense of independence. Ottoman government was moving in. It was to move in more decisively in 1878, when a Turkish garrison was introduced into the town.

            The pattern of the Zeitun rebellion was exceptional, because the inhabitants were conscious of their ancient privileges, which they were determined at all costs to uphold. They were exceptionally aware of Ottoman land theft and illegality; despite their internal feuds, their social cohesion was sufficient to make them defy the government, where others would have submitted. Their actions were to be increasingly copied. Government grew ever more corrupt and violent, and it needed only a few leaders to awaken a sense of defiance in the people; to persuade them to defend themselves, and not to submit to official assaults.

 

 

Van and Khrimian Hairik

 

At about the same time as the Zeitun battle there were small uprisings of Armenians in Van (in the spring of 1862) and in Moush (1863), but neither

 

[Page 103]

 

made as much impression as Zeitun. In the decade following, the new relationship of governed to government was developed. Societies were established dedicated to resisting the lawlessness and terror in the east, and to thwarting the 'birds of prey', as the Ottoman officials were known.⁵⁸ In March 1872 an organisation known as the Union of Salvation was formed at Van. In an introductory statement, one of its founders declared:

 

Gone is our honour; our churches have been violated; they have kidnapped our brides and youth; they take away our rights and try to exterminate our nation … let us try to find a way of salvation … if not, we will lose everything.⁵⁹

 

            The ancient town of Van, set amid an incomparably beautiful landscape of lake, mountains and fertile plains, was the native city of a man who laboured more than anyone else to change the relationship – Khrimian Hairik. His achievements were twin: he broke down the barriers between the different classes of Armenians, especially that between the Constantinople Armenians and the men of the provinces; and with his unswerving devotion to his people he criticised the government relentlessly for its lethargy, corruption, injustice and violence. Mëkërtich Khrimian was born in 1820, of well-to-do parents. When he was 21 he visited Echmiadzin and Ararat; and four years later he married. But his wife died in childbirth, and his daughter a few years afterwards. He travelled to Constantinople and became a teacher, making further journeys to Palestine and Cilicia. He entered the priesthood in 1854, and the following year began publication (in the capital) of Ardzvi Vaspurakan (Eagle of Vaspurakan, that is, the province of Van), a pioneering journal which made a deep impact upon young Armenian writers. In 1858 the press moved to the Monastery of Varak, near Van – an unprecedented move towards the people themselves. A sister journal, concerned with the region of Moush, was started up. Khrimian was elected patriarch of Constantinople in 1869, but was compelled by the government to resign four years later; it saw him awakening and strengthening the community, and was alarmed.⁶⁰

            While he was patriarch he started publishing details of the conditions of Armenians in the east (1871–6).⁶¹ The evidence was collected by sending out a circular to Armenian bishops throughout the empire, in which they were asked to explain the problems of the people, and to suggest remedies. The oppressions of the people fell under four main headings: those caused by unjust and exorbitant taxation, by the actions of corrupt officials, by non-acceptance of Christian testimony in the sharia courts (the mehkémé), and by the depradations of the nomadic Kurds.⁶² Simple remedies were suggested: in the field of taxation, direct collection was proposed, since at the time barely 50 per cent of the taxes collected by the multazims (tax-farmers) reached the treasury. On local corruption, the committee of 1871 noted.⁶³

 

The majority of officials being devoid of all knowledge of the laws and administrative science, themselves commit breaches of the law. …They

 

[Page 104]

 

profit by the ignorance of the inhabitants or connivance of the chorbadjis (Christian notables) to grind and oppress the people.

 

Thorough, cleansing reforms were needed. On the non-acceptance of Christian testimony there was a straightforward remedy.⁶⁴ 'Civil, commercial and criminal cases should come within the jurisdiction of the civil courts (nizamiye) instead of being tried by the sharia courts.'

Nevertheless, despite the efforts of Archbishop Khrimian, Armenian thinking in the Ottoman empire was still undeveloped by the time of the 'eastern crisis' of 1875–8. The groundwork for the establishment of political societies, and for resistance to the exactions of the Kurds and the government, had been made; yet with the exception of the Zeitun battle and the isolated instances in the east, there had been no armed encounters with the forces of the empire, as there had been in the Balkans. No nationalist spirit had developed throughout the Armenian community, to forge the people into a unity. The Armenians remained unwarlike; and so when the powers made their dispensation for the empire and its peoples, the pacific Armenians were almost completely overlooked, even though the treaty of Paris had referred without distinction to all Christian peoples of the empire. The powers were to confer liberty only on those in the Balkans, who raised the standard of armed revolt.

 

 

British Attitudes

 

Although no British army took to the field during the mid-1870s, Britain was without question one of the main contestants in the crisis. Her immense imperial power, and profound antagonism to Russia, meant that the conflicts were her conflicts too. This was especially true since the Conservatives governed; Disraeli had been returned to power in February 1874.

Three things made the Conservatives favour the Turks. All concerned prestige or money. The first and much the most important was imperial jealousy of Russia, and fear that she would either make a direct attack upon India, or impede Britain's communications with her possession. Secondly, there was the large British investment in Ottomans bonds, which, should Turkey be diminished or disappear, would go the same way too. Thirdly, there was the commercial value of the trade route which linked Trebizond with Tabriz via Erzerum and Bayazid. This route was the most important overland trade route to India; and it brought trade to Turkey (and hence to Britain) too. The journalist and pamphleteer Lucien Wolf gave the figure of £8,000,000 as the trade of Trebizond, £5,000,000 of which represented the imports, most of which went onwards through Erzerum.⁶⁵ (Wolf also quoted the figure of £2,000,000 as representing the proportion of British-made imports at Erzerum.) He describes the caravan routes as 'the only practicable road from the north into Central Asia which is not under Russian control'. This trade route, through the heartland of Armenia, was to figure in later negotiations.

 

[Page 105]

 

            With the Conservatives in power, the Ottoman government was assured of support by the one power whose Near Eastern policies were of supreme practical importance throughout this critical period for her – a period which also saw the emergence of the Armenian question as an international issue.

As Lord Stratford had been the most ardent supporter of the Turko–British alliance against Russia while he was British ambassador at Constantinople during the Crimean war, so, at this time, two British ambassadors articulated most clearly the reasons seen by the Conservatives for the continued British support of Turkey. Sir Henry Elliot wrote from Constantinople on 4 September 1876, in the turbulent period following the Ottoman government's proven implication in the Bulgarian atrocities:

 

To the accusation of being a blind partisan of the Turks, I will only answer that my conduct here has never been guided by any sentimental affection for them, but by a firm determination to uphold the interests of Great Britain to the utmost of my power; and that those interests are deeply engaged in preventing the disruption of the Turkish empire is a conviction which I share in common with the most eminent statesmen who have directed our foreign policy, but which now appears to be abandoned by shallow politicians or persons who have allowed their feelings of revolted humanity to make them forget the capital interests involved in the question. We may and we must feel indignant at the needless and monstrous severity with which the Bulgarian insurrection was put down, but the necessity which exists for England to prevent changes from occurring here which would be most detrimental to ourselves, is not affected by the question whether it was 10,000 or 20,000 persons who perished in the suppression. We have been upholding what we know to be a semi-civilised nation, liable under certain circumstances to be carried to fearful excesses: but the fact of this having just now been strikingly brought home to us all cannot be a sufficient reason for abandoning a policy which is the only one that can be followed with due regard to our own interests.⁶⁶

 

            Sixteen months later Sir Henry Layard wrote (2 January 1878):

 

It is the most monstrous piece of folly that we should be ready to sacrifice the most vital interests of our country, India, our position as a first-class power, the influence that we have hitherto exercised in the cause of human liberty and civilisation, rather than stand shoulder to shoulder with the Turks, because some bashibozuks [irregulars] have murdered some worthless and unfortunate Bulgarians.⁶⁷

 

            But the man whose policies and utterances showed the most cynical support for the Ottoman government – although he would never express himself with the vulgar forthrightness of Elliot or Layard – was Benjamin Disraeli, prime

 

[Page 106]

 

minister throughout the period of the crisis. Ottoman Turkey was for him a flight of steps to the garish triumphal arch which was his vision of imperial grandeur. Goaded by Queen Victoria, who translated her fears for her position in the east (she was created Empress of India in April 1876) into an unwavering devotion for the government in Constantinople, he brought Britain to the brink of war with Russia. He sought to re-impose the despotism of the sultan on the peoples of the Balkans when it had been cast off; and in Armenia his policies inspired the creation of a political structure from which we can trace the massacres of 1895–6, and the holocaust of 1915.

            The Liberals who opposed the crude imperialism of the Conservatives spoke a different language. Led by Gladstone, they sought to make moral values the starting-point of policy – something that was incomprehensible to their opponents, and indeed to themselves, when they were returned to power in 1880. Gladstone specifically held that Britain had undertaken certain responsibilities for the nature of Ottoman rule by her close association with Ottoman reform at the end of the Crimean war, and that support for Turkey right or wrong was to negate those responsibilities. Needless to say, the idea of having to uphold any such responsibilities was laughable to the Conservatives.

 

 

The Eastern Crisis

 

In the summer of 1875 the Christian peasantry of Bosnia and Herzegovina rose in revolt against their Muslim landlords. The revolt dragged on until the winter; the Porte appeared unable to control it. On 30 December 1875 Count Andrássy, Austro-Hungarian minister of foreign affairs, proposed in a note a fair system of government for the rebellious provinces, whereby a just solution could be found for the peasants' grievances.⁶⁸ All the great powers agreed to align themselves behind Andrássy except Britain which demurred, and, although eventually agreeing to Andrássy's proposals, made no attempt to persuade the Ottoman government to accept them.⁶⁹

            The note, like many other reform schemes forced on Ottoman Turkey and accepted by the Porte, had no practical result. Indeed the situation grew worse; consequently Andrássy and his Russian opposite number, the elderly Prince Gorchakov, met in Berlin and devised a memorandum which was along the same lines as the Andrássy note, but stronger.⁷⁰ It was accepted at once by France and Italy, but this time entirely rejected by Britain. Disraeli, in a phrase of silly hysteria, complained that the northern powers of Russia, Austria and Germany were 'asking us to sanction them in putting a knife to the throat of Turkey, whether we like it or not'.⁷¹

            The crisis intensified. There was a rising in Bulgaria in April 1876, which was cruelly put down by Ottoman irregulars, despatched on orders from Constantinople. Queen Victoria, apparently troubled by qualms of conscience, wrote of this incident:

 

[Page 107]

 

Hearing as we do all the undercurrent, and knowing as we do that Russia instigated this insurrection which caused the cruelty of the Turks, it ought to be brought home to Russia, and the world ought to know that on their shoulders and not on ours rests the blood of the murdered Bulgarians!⁷²

 

            In fact the rebellion had been organised by Bulgarian émigrés. In its suppression about sixty villages were destroyed and 12,000 to 15,000 massacred – men, women and children, old and young. In one notorious incident 1,200 people had gathered in a church for protection, and had been burnt alive there.⁷³

            Immense anti-Turkish agitation followed the publication of the facts of the atrocities (which Disraeli insisted on terming 'so-called atrocities'). The indignation would not die down, even though Disraeli tried to dismiss it as mere 'coffee-house babble'. Best remembered today of the expressions of revulsion for what the Turks had done in Bulgaria is Gladstone's pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, which called for the Turkish government to carry itself off bag and baggage. It did not appear until September 1876, after the publication of a British Embassy report⁷⁴ had persuaded Gladstone that the allegations were true. The pamphlet sold 200,000 copies in a month.

            The power of popular agitation over the Ottoman government's repression of the Bulgarian uprising was by the late summer of 1876 such as to persuade Disraeli that a conference was needed to discuss the ills of the Ottoman empire. These at this time were manifold: Serbia had declared war on Turkey in June, and Montenegro had joined her in early July.⁷⁵ Constantinople was in a state of political turmoil: earlier in the year the grand vizier and Sheikh ul-Islam (the supreme religious dignitary in the empire) had been driven from office; then Sultan Abdul Aziz himself was deposed (30 May). Two weeks later both the foreign and war ministers were murdered. At the end of August the new sultan, Murad, who had turned out to be feeble-minded, was deposed, and his half-brother, Abdul Hamid, was invested as sultan. 'Will he be a Solyman the Great?'⁷⁶ asked Disraeli of the man whose paranoia and cowardice were to be the main distinguishing feature of Near Eastern politics for the next thirty years.

            So Disraeli decided 'there must be a conference, tho' I hate it', adding 'I am quite confident we cd. have managed without it, had it not been for this Bulgarian bogey.'⁷⁷ Lord Salisbury was to be British delegate. The conference eventually met in December 1876 in Constantinople. Its agenda was wholly concerned with the administration of European Turkey;⁷⁸ Armenia had not yet come under the scrutiny of the powers.

            Then – the Turkish master-stroke: during the conference, on 23 December, the guns boomed out, and the Ottoman constitution was proclaimed, a liberal and democratic instrument.⁷⁹ The conference was now redundant, the presence of the powers superfluous: here was the easy way out that Disraeli and his

 

[Page 108]

 

ambassador, Elliot, had hoped for. The administrative reforms that the powers were seeking to impose on the Ottoman empire were now, apparently, being created by her own political institutions. The powers were disunited; even the British disagreed amongst themselves. Salisbury requested that the British fleet be sent to Constantinople to compel the sultan to introduce reforms; Disraeli refused.⁸⁰

            The conference broke up in late January 1877. Nothing had been achieved; and the Ottoman constitution, wheeled in at a critical moment, like a gigantic piece of stage scenery (depicting, perhaps, contented sunlit villages, fertile valleys) was wheeled out some months later, and the familiar Ottoman provincial backdrop was visible again, of local tyranny, extortion, oppression, wrecked homes, burnt fields, homeless refugees.

            The lesson of the Constantinople conference (which none of the powers drew) was that the Ottoman empire was still a sovereign power. However much Europe, through her capitulations, her 'spheres of influence' and her financial involvement might think she controlled Turkey, the Ottoman government could still over-trump the powers with her own laws and 'assurances', especially if a power such as Britain were only to make a show of insistence. Whether or not Turkey's laws were sham was at this stage irrelevant; all she had to do was to convince the powers until they departed. Once the foreigners had gone, the laws could be quietly dropped. The powers were enormously reluctant to draw the conclusion before their eyes about Ottoman Turkey: that the only way to reform the administration of a Turkish territory was to detach it from the sovereignty of Turkey. They would not see this, since they needed a large Turkey to contain their own jealous rivalries, and to produce as large a return on their investments as possible. The method that they chose, of trying to impose schemes of reform, was the worst possible, since it achieved nothing, and only left the wretched subject peoples more resented and hated by both central and provincial Ottoman rulers.

            Only one power was prepared to abandon vacuous diplomacy for action.

 

 

The Russo–Turkish War of 1877-8

 

Our faithful and beloved subjects know the lively interest which we have always devoted to the destinies of the oppressed Christian population of Turkey. … We made it pre-eminently our object to attain the amelioration of the condition of the Christians in the east by means of peaceful negotiations and concerted action with the great European powers, our allies and friends. During two years we have made incessant efforts to induce the Porte to adopt such reforms as would protect the Christians of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria from the arbitrary rule of the local authorities. The execution of these reforms followed, as a direct obligation, from the anterior engagements solemnly contracted by the Porte in the sight of all

 

[Page 109]

 

Europe. Our efforts, although supported by the joint diplomatic representations of other governments, have not attained the desired end. The Porte has remained immovable in its categorical refusal of every effectual guarantee for the security of its Christian subjects, and it rejected the demands of the conference of Constantinople. … Having exhausted our peaceful efforts, we are obliged by the haughty obstinacy of the Porte to proceed to more determined action, The sentiment of equity and that of our own dignity render it imperative. Turkey, by its refusal, places us under the necessity of having recourse to arms. … We expressed our intention of acting independently should we deem it necessary, and should the honour of Russia require it. Today, in invoking the blessing of God upon our valiant armies, we give them the order to cross the frontier of Turkey.⁸¹

 

            With these words Alexander II, the tsar-liberator, declared war on the Ottoman empire on 24 April 1877. All the Slav peoples looked to Russia for deliverance from Turkey. But among the Armenians there was not the same unanimity. Some genuinely feared that if they were annexed by Russia they would be swallowed by Orthodoxy, despite the statutes by which the Russians regulated the affairs of the Armenian Church. On the outbreak of the war, the Armenian patriarch Nerses Varzhabedian issued a pastoral letter calling on his flock to show loyalty to the Ottoman state, and to work and pray for an Ottoman victory.⁸² However, there is little doubt that in the east, at peasant level, the vast majority of the Armenian villagers wanted an end of the corrupt tyranny which ruled them. Arminius Vambéry, no lover of the Armenians, made his first journey east in 1862; stopping at a village near Diadin (a few kilometres west of Bayazid) he saw how downtrodden the Armenians were. On asking them

 

why they did not ask assistance of the governor of Erzerum, [I] was told in reply, 'that the governor himself was at the head of the thieves. God alone, and his representative on earth, the Russian tsar, can help us'. And the poor people were certainly right in this.⁸³

 

            The war was disastrous for Turkey. In Europe Russian forces reached the outskirts of Constantinople, and in Asia they reached Erzerum. Many observers believed that the Ottoman empire was on the point of collapse. Liberals wondered whether Britain was again going to be forced to shore up an antiquated despotism for dubious strategic and financial returns. They sought co-operation with Russia in bringing about an eastern solution.

            This, however, was the last thing that Disraeli and the Queen intended. Some of Disraeli's utterances bring to mind Trajan campaigning in Asia, driven by a mad passion for glory and prestige. 'The Empress of India should order her armies to clear Central Asia of the Muscovites, and drive them into the Caspian,' he wrote to his sovereign on 22 July 1877.⁸⁴ Three weeks later, at a

 

[Page 110]

 

Cabinet meeting, he observed that a British force could be sent to Batum, 'march without difficulty through Armenia, and menace the Asiatic possessions of Russia'.⁸⁵ It was clear that he would envisage no solution with Russia other than one based on maximum confrontation.

            He did, however, stop short of actually declaring war on Russia, thereby saving Britain from a fruitless replay of the Crimean war; though more than once he hinted to Turkey that there might be British help against Russia. Other than sending the fleet through the Dardanelles in January 1878 – and promptly having it ordered out again by the sultan, to the amusement of the statesmen of Europe – British support for Turkey was merely verbal and diplomatic.

 

 

The Armenians at the Close of the War

 

After the fall of Plevna (Bulgaria) on 11 December 1877, Russian troops advanced onward to the Ottoman capital; only an armistice, agreed on 27 January 1878 and signed on the 31st, halted them at Adrianople (Edirne). On the same day the 'preliminary bases of peace' between the parties were signed.⁸⁶ Bulgaria was to be autonomous, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia independent, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were to receive autonomous administrations. But there was no mention of Armenia, since the Armenians had not yet made any requests known.

            The Armenian leadership resolved to change this. Although they had been loyal to the Porte at the start of the war – a position which had served their own interests – circumstances had changed this. The principal factor was the behaviour of the Kurdish irregular cavalry, which was in the pay of the Turkish regular forces commanded by Ahmed Mukhtar Pasha. C. B. Norman, special correspondent for The Times, wrote on 26 July 1877 that between his camp at Sabatan and Köprüköy (respectively 25 kilometres east and 40 kilometres west of Kars),

 

I have not seen one Christian village which has not been abandoned in consequence of the cruelties committed on the inhabitants. All have been ransacked, many burnt, upwards of 5,000 Christians in the Van district have fled to Russian territory, and women and children are wandering about naked.⁸⁷

 

In other words the Kurds, far from aiding the Ottoman war effort, had gone on the rampage, looting and murdering Armenian villagers. (The incidental consequence for the Ottoman army was near starvation, since many of the Armenians' flocks and herds, as well as their stores of grain, were pillaged.)

            When these actions became known to the Armenian leaders in Constantinople – they were the subject of a debate in the Ottoman parliament just before it was disbanded by the sultan – attitudes shifted.⁸⁸ The Turkish govern-

 

[Page 111]

 

ment had permitted the destruction of numerous Armenian villages in the east; and the Turkish army was being defeated by the Russians. Hence the Armenian National Assembly authorised the patriarch to send a delegation to the Grand Duke Nicolas, at his headquarters in Adrianople. There, through the energetic mediation of Count Ignatyev, the leading pan-Slavist who was Russian ambassador to Constantinople, a clause was drawn up for inclusion in the forthcoming peace treaty, which read:

 

            For the purpose of preventing oppressions and atrocities that have taken place in Turkey's European and Asiatic provinces, the sultan guarantees, in agreement with the tsar, to grant administrative local self-government to the provinces inhabited by Armenians.⁸⁹

 

 

San Stefano and its Aftermath

 

But Ottoman Turkey refused to countenance local self-government. Throughout February 1878 great-power tension was at its height, and the likelihood of and Anglo–Russian clash of arms most acute. Turkey, although defeated in the war, could afford to say what was or was not acceptable; and to the Russians the matter was not sufficiently important for them to push it at all costs. A visit by the Armenian patriarch himself failed to convince the Russians of the need to insist on local self-government. Ultimately, Russia and Turkey agreed on the wording of the article. In the peace treaty, signed at San Stefano (the modern Yeshilköy, site of Istanbul's international airport) on 3 March 1878, article 16 reads:

 

            As the evacuation by the Russian troops of the territory which they occupy in Armenia, and which is to be restored to Turkey, might give rise to conflicts and complications detrimental to the maintenance of good relations between the two countries, the Sublime Porte engages to carry into effect, without further delay, the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by Armenians, and to guarantee their security from Kurds and Circassians.⁹⁰

 

Russian territorial acquisitions in Asia were extensive; in the south, Bayazid and the vale of Alashkert, as far west as Khorasan; the fortress town of Kars (captured by the Russians for the third time in 50 years), and Sarikamish (T.: 'yellow reed'); Olti, and in the north Artvin and the harbour town of Batum.⁹¹

            As soon as the British Cabinet received a copy of the treaty (23 March), it opposed it vigorously, though the Cabinet was far from united on the issues. Disraeli himself proposed declaring an emergency, putting a force into the field, and sending an expedition to occupy Cyprus and Alexandretta (Iskenderun) – specifically with the intention of counterbalancing the alleged effect of the Russian conquests in Armenia. But the first systematic attack on

 

[Page 112]

 

the treaty of San Stefano was made by Lord Salisbury in his circular of 1 April 1878, the day after he assumed the office of foreign secretary.⁹²

            Salisbury attacked every proposal of the treaty, and demanded that the issues be settled by a European congress. His opposition to the Russian territorial gains in Armenia was twofold:

 

            The acquisition of the strongholds of Armenia will place the population of the province under the immediate influence of the Power which holds them; while the extensive European trade which now passes from Trebizond to Persia will, in consequence of the cessions in Kurdistan, be liable to be arrested at the pleasure of the Russian government by the prohibitory barriers of their commercial system.⁹³

 

            In reply to Salisbury's circular Prince Gorchakov, his Russian opposite number, said that the Russian acquisitions in Armenia possessed only defensive value.⁹⁴ (Strategically speaking, this is undoubtedly correct.) Gorchakov admitted himself perplexed by the British view on the caravan route through the vale of Alashkert, saying that it was in contradiction to former British government assertions that Russian possession of even Erzerum or Trebizond would not constitute a danger to British interests. To affir