preserving the link between Armenia and the west, and since the
beginning of the nineteenth century the bonds have been strengthened
by a Protestant strand. The American Missions in Turkey were founded
in 1831. Debarred by the Ottoman Government from entering into
relations with the Moslem population, they devoted themselves to the
Christian elements, and the Armenians availed themselves more
eagerly than any other Near Eastern nationality[214] of the gifts
which the Americans offered. Four generations of mission work have
produced a strong Protestant Armenian community, but proselytism has
not been the deliberate object of the missionaries. They have set
themselves to revive and not to convert the national Armenian
Church, and their schools and hospitals have been open to all who
would attend them, without distinction of creed. Their wide and
well-planned educational activity has always been the 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 chief provincial towns, with fine buildings and full
staffs of well-trained American and Armenian teachers. Due
acknowledgment must also be given to the educational work of the
Swiss Protestants and of the Jesuits; but it can hardly compare with
the work of the Americans in scale, and will scarcely play the same
part in Armenian history. There is little need here to speak in
praise of the American missionaries; their character will shine out
to anyone who reads the documents in this volume. Their religion
inspires their life and their work, and their utter sincerity has
given them an extraordinary influence over all with whom they come
in contact. The Ottoman Government has trusted and respected them,
because they are the only foreign residents in Turkey who are
entirely disinterested on political questions; the Gregorian Church
cooperates with them and feels no jealousy, and all sections of the
Armenian nation love them, because they come to give and not to get,
and their gifts are without guile[215]. America is exercising an
unobtrusive but incalculable influence over the Near East. In the
nineteenth century the missionaries came to its rescue from America;
in the twentieth century the return movement has set in, and the
Near Eastern people are migrating in thousands across the Atlantic.
The Armenians are participating in this movement at least as
actively as the Greeks, the Roumans, the Serbs, the Montenegrins and
the Slovaks, and one can already prophesy with assurance that their
two-fold contact with America is the beginning of a new chapter in
Armenian history.
Meanwhile the subjection of Armenia proper to the Mongol Ilkhans for
nearly two centuries, and subsequently to the Shahs of modern Persia
for certain transitory periods, produced a lesser, but not
unimportant, dispersion towards the east. In the seventeenth century
the skilled and cultured Armenian population of Djoulfa, on the
River Aras, was carried away captive to the Persian capital of
Ispahan, where the exiles started a printing press and established a
centre of Armenian civilisation. Ever since then the Armenian
element has been a factor in the politics and the social development
of Iran, and from this new centre they have spread over the Indian
Peninsula hand 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 adapting itself to every kind of alien environment[216].
The reverse side of the picture is the uprooting of the nation from
its native soil. The immigrant tribes from Central Asia did not make
a permanent lodgment in the Armenian homelands. Some of them drifted
back into Azerbaijan and the steppe country along the coast of the
Caspian and the lower courses of 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 Turkish language upon the
population of Central Anatolia. The Armenian plateau, entrenched
between Tigris, Euphrates and Aras, stood out like a rock, dividing
these two Turkish eddies. Nevertheless, the perpetual shock of the
Seljuk and the Mongol raids relaxed the hold of the Armenians on the
plateau. The people of the land were decimated by these invasions,
and when the invaders had passed on beyond or vanished away, the
terrible gaps in the ranks of the sedentary population of Armenia
proper were filled by nomadic Kurdish shepherds from the south-east,
who drifted into Old Armenia from the mountain girdle of Iran, just
as the Albanians drifted into the Kossovo Plain from their own less
desirable highlands, after the population of Old Serbia had been
similarly decimated by the constant passage of the Ottoman armies.
This Kurdish penetration of Armenia had begun already by the tenth
century A.D.; it was far advanced when the Osmanlis annexed the
country in 1514, and it was confirmed by the policy of the Ottoman
Government, which sought to secure its new territories by granting
privileges to the Kurdish intruders and inviting their influx in
greater numbers from their homelands in the sphere of influence of
the rival Persian Empire. The juxtaposition of nomad and cultivator,
dominant Moslem and subject Giaour, was henceforth an 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 year
1878, when it was fiendishly exploited by the Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid.
But before we examine the relations between the Armenian nation and
the Ottoman Government, it will be well to survey the distribution
of the Armenian element in the Ottoman Empire, as it had developed
during the four centuries of Ottoman rule that elapsed between the
campaign of Selim I. and the intervention of Turkey in the present
European War. The survey shall be brief, for it has been
anticipated, sometimes in greater detail, in the separate notes
prefixed to the different groups of documents in the volume.
A traveller entering Turkey by the Oriental Railway from Central
Europe would have begun to encounter Armenians at Philippopolis in
Bulgaria, and then at Adrianople, the first Ottoman city across the
frontier. Had he visited any of the lesser towns of Thrace, he would
have found much of the local trade and business in Armenian hands,
and when he arrived at Constantinople he would have become aware
that the Armenians were one of the most important elements in the
Ottoman Empire. He would have seen them as financiers, as export and
import merchants, as organisers of wholesale stores; and when he
crossed the Bosphorus and explored the suburban districts on the
Asiatic side, he might even have fancied that the Armenian
population in the Empire was numerically equal to the Turkish. The
coast of the Sea of Marmora was overlooked by flourishing Armenian
villages; at Armasha, above Ismid, there was a large Theological
Seminary of the Gregorian Church, and there were important Swiss and
American institutions at Bardizag (Baghtchedjik) and Adapazar. At
Adapazar alone the Armenian population numbered 25,000.
Beyond Adapazar, however, the Armenian element dwindled, and anyone
who followed the Anatolian Railway across Asia Minor to the
rail-head in the northern spurs of Taurus, would have felt that he
was travelling through an essentially Turkish land. There were
colonies of Armenian artisans and shopkeepers and business men 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
the Turks outnumbered them all. But once Taurus was crossed, the
Armenians came again to the fore. They were as much at home in the
Cilician plain and coastland as on the littoral of the Sea of
Marmora and the Bosphorus. Adana, Tarsus and Mersina, with their
Armenian churches and schools, had the same appearance of being
Armenian cities as Adapazar or Ismid: and if at this point the
traveller had left the beaten track and worked his way up
north-eastward into the Cilician highlands, he would have found
himself for the first time in an almost exclusively Armenian
country, and would have remarked a higher percentage of Armenians in
the population than in any other district of Turkey till he came to
Van. But this belt of Armenian villages, though thickly set, was
quickly passed, and when you emerged on the south-eastern side of it
and stepped out on to the rim of the Mesopotamian amphitheatre, you
had reached one of the boundaries of the Armenian Dispersion. There
were Armenian outposts in the cities of the fringe—Marash, Aintab,
Ourfa, Aleppo—but as soon as you plunged into the Mesopotamian
steppe or the Syrian desert you were in the Arabic world, and had
left Armenia behind[217].
The traveller would have seen more of the Armenians if he had turned
off from the Anatolian Railway at Eski Shehr, a few hours’ journey
south of Adapazar, and taken the branch line eastward to Angora. At
Angora the Armenians were again a conspicuous element, and the
further east you went from Angora the more they increased in social
and numerical importance. Beyond the Kizil Irmak (Halys), in the
Sandjak of Kaisaria and the Vilayet of Sivas, they constituted the
great majority of the urban middle class. The strongest centres of
Armenian national life in Turkey were towns like Marsovan, 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,
Turks in the country and Armenians in the town, and the proportions
were the same in the riviera zone along the Black Sea coast—Samsoun
and Kerasond and Trebizond—though here other racial elements were
intermingled—Lazes and 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 the terminus of that ancient caravan route which stretches
away across Persia into the far interior of the Asiatic continent.
Anyone who started to follow this highway across the mountains,
through Gumushkhané and Baibourt to Erzeroum, would have noticed
little change in these first stages of his journey from what he had
seen in the Vilayet of Sivas. There were the same Turkish
countryside and the same Armenian towns, with, perhaps, an
increasing Armenian element in the rural population, culminating in
an actual preponderance of Armenian villages when you reached the
plain of Erzeroum. With Erzeroum the second section of the caravan
road begins; it crosses from valley to valley among the headwaters
of the Aras and the Eastern Euphrates (Mourad Su), and winds away
eastward at the foot of Ararat in the direction of Bayazid and
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 forbidding than those he has traversed on his journey
from the coast, which stretch across the horizon both east and west.
This mountain barrier bears many names. It is called the Bingöl Dagh
where it faces Erzeroum; further westward it merges into the
ill-famed Dersim; but the whole range has a common character. Its
steeper slope is towards the north, and this slope is washed by the
waters of the Aras and the Kara Su (Western Euphrates), which flow
east and west in diametrically opposite directions, flanking the
foot of the mountain wall with a deep and continuous moat.
Whoever crosses this moat and penetrates the mountains passes at
once into a different world. The western part of Turkey, which we
have been describing so 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 between the Euphrates and Vienna.
The population is sedentary; it lives in agricultural villages and
open country towns. But when you cross the Euphrates, you enter a
land of insecurity and fear. The peasant and townsman live on
sufferance; the mastery is with the nomad; you are setting foot on
the domain of the Kurd.
This insecurity was the chronic condition of Armenia proper, and it
was not merely due to the unfortunate political experiences of the
land. In its geographical configuration, as well as in its
history, the Armenian plateau is a country of more accentuated
characteristics and violent contrasts than the Anatolian Peninsula
which adjoins it on the west. It contains vast stretches of rolling,
treeless down, where the climate is too bleak and the soil too thin
for cultivation; and, again, there are sudden depressions where the
soil is as rich and the climate as favourable as anywhere in the
world. There are the deep ravines of rivers, like the Mourad Su,
which carve their course haphazard across tableland and plain. There
are volcanic cones, like the Sipan and the Nimroud Dagh, and
lacustrine areas, like the basin of Lake Van. The geography of the
country has partitioned it eternally between the shepherd and the
cultivator—the comparatively dense and sedentary population of the
plains and the scattered and wandering inhabitants of the
highlands—between civilisation and development on the one hand and
an arrested state of barbarism on the other. The Kurd and the
Armenian are not merely different nationalities; they are also
antagonistic economic classes, and this antagonism existed in the
country before ever the Kurdish encroachments began. Most of the
nomadic tribes that frequent the Armenian plateau now pass for
Kurds, but many of them are only nominally so. In the Dersim
country, for instance, which coincides roughly with the peninsula
formed by the Western and Eastern branches of the Euphrates (Kara Su
and Mourad Su), the Kurds are strongly diluted with the Zazas, whose
language, as far as it has been investigated, bears at least as much
resemblance to Armenian as to Kurdish, and whose primitive paganism,
though it may have taken some colour from Christianity, is free to
this day from the slightest veneer of Islam.[218] These Zazas
represent an element which must have existed in the land from the
beginning and have harassed the national rulers of Mediæval and
Ancient Armenia as much as it harasses the modern Armenian townsman
and peasant or the local Ottoman authorities.
On the eve of the catastrophe of 1915, this region beyond the
Euphrates was a treasure-house of mingled populations and
diversified forms of social life. Its north-western bastion is the
Dersim, a no-man’s-land of winding valleys and tiny upland plains,
backing northwards on to the great mountain retaining-wall, with its
sheer fall to the Euphratean moat. In the Dersim innumerable 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
wide berth on his right and cross the peninsula at its neck, by the
headwaters of the Aras and the plain of Khnyss. He would strike the
course of the Mourad Su where it cuts successively through the
fertile, level plains of Melazkerd, Boulanik and Moush, and here he
would find himself again for a moment (or would have done so two
years ago) in peaceful, almost civilised surroundings—populous
country towns, with a girdle of agricultural villages and a
peasantry even more uniformly Armenian than the population of the
plain of Erzeroum. The plain of Moush is the meeting-place of all
the routes that traverse the plateau. If you ascend from its
south-eastern corner and mount the southern spurs of the Nimroud
volcano, you suddenly find yourself on the edge of the extensive
basin of Lake Van, and can follow a mountain road along its
precipitous southern shore; then you descend into the open valley of
Hayotz-Tzor, cross a final ridge with the pleasant village of
Artamid on its slopes, and arrive a few hours later in the city of
Van itself.
Van, again, before April, 1915, was the populous, civilised capital
of a province, with a picturesque citadel-rock overlooking the lake
and open garden suburbs spreading east of it across the plain. The
City of Van, with the surrounding lowlands that fringe the eastern
and north-eastern shores of the lake, was more thoroughly Armenian
than any part of the Ottoman Empire. In the Van Vilayet[219] alone
the Armenians not merely outnumbered each other racial element
singly, but were an absolute majority of the total population. These
Armenians of Van played a leading and 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 valley of the Zab and the basin of Lake Urmia were
jointly inhabited by Christian Syrians 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 northern shores 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
another rampart of mountains, which forms the southern wall of the
plateau and repeats with remarkable exactness the structure of that
northern wall which the traveller encounters when he turns south
from the plain of Erzeroum. This southern range, also, falls
precipitously towards the north, first into the plain of Moush, and,
further westward, into the waters of the Mourad Su, which wash it
like a moat all the way to their junction with the Kara Su, below
Harpout. And, like the northern range, again, the southern rampart
unfolds 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 bay of the great Mesopotamian steppe. These southern
highlands are known as the Sassoun; they are a physiographical
counterpart to the highlands of Dersim, and are likewise the harbour
of semi-independent mountaineers. But whereas the Dersimlis are
pagan Zazas or Moslem Kurds, and were at constant feud with their
Armenian neighbours, the Sassounlis were themselves Armenians, and
were in the closest intercourse with their kinsmen in the valley of
the Mourad Su and in the plains of Moush and Boulanik.
Sassoun was one of the most interesting Armenian communities in the
Ottoman Empire. It was a federation of about forty mountain
villages, which lived their own life in virtual independence of the
Ottoman authorities at Bitlis or Diyarbekir, and held their own
against the equally independent Kurdish tribes that ringed them
round. They were prosperous shepherds and laborious cultivators of
their mountain slopes—a perfect example of the cantonal phase of
economic development, requiring nothing from outside and even
manufacturing their own gunpowder. The Sassounli Armenians were in
the same social stage as the Scottish Highlanders before 1745; the
Armenians of Van, Sivas and Constantinople were people of the
twentieth century, engaged in the same activities and living much
the same life as the shopkeepers and business men of Vienna or
London or New York.
Only an enterprising traveller would have struck up into Sassoun if
he wished to make his way from Moush to Diyarbekir. The beaten track
takes a longer course to the south-eastern corner of the plain, and
then breasts the mountain wall to the south (where the branch-road
turns eastward to Lake Van). From Norshen, the last village of the
plain, an easy pass leads over a saddle and brings the traveller
unexpectedly to the important city of Bitlis, which lies under the
shadow of the ridge, immediately south of the watershed. Bitlis is
the capital of a vilayet, and before Djevdet Bey retreated upon it
in June, 1915, there was a numerous Armenian element in its
population. But Bitlis, again, was one of the limits of the Armenian
dispersion. The waters which rise round the city flow southward to
the Tigris, and the highroad winds down with them towards the
plains, which are inhabited by a confused population of
Jacobites[220] and Arabs, Turks and Kurds. If you had followed the
Tigris upstream across the levels to Diyarbekir, you would have
passed few Armenian villages on the road, even before June, 1915;
and at Diyarbekir itself, a considerable city, there was only a weak
Armenian colony—a feeble link in the chain of Armenian outposts on
the fringe of the Mesopotamian steppe. But Diyarbekir is on the line
of that Royal Road by which men have gone up from time immemorial
from Baghdad and beyond to the coasts of the Bosphorus and the
Ægean. The highway runs on north-west across the flats, passes
Arghana and Arghana Mines, climbs the southern escarpment of the
Armenian plateau up the valley of the Arghana Su, skirts the Göldjik
Lake on the watershed, and slopes down, still north-westwards, to
Harpout, near the course of the Mourad Su. Many convoys of Armenian
exiles traversed this road in the opposite direction during the
summer months of 1915, on their way from their native plateau to the
alien climate of the Arabian deserts. But our survey of the
Armenians in Turkey is complete, and we can travel back in
imagination from Harpout to 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 it
has made clear the extraordinary vitality and versatility of the
Armenian nation in the Ottoman Empire at the moment when its
extermination was planned and attempted by the established
Government of the country. The Government had been of little service
to any of its subjects; it had never initiated any social or
economic developments on its own part, and had invariably made
itself a clog upon the private enterprises of native or foreign
individuals. Yet, under this pall of stagnation and repression,
there were manifold stirrings of a new life. Wherever an opportunity
presented itself, wherever the Government omitted to intervene, the
Armenians were making indefatigable progress towards a better
civilization. They were raising the pastoral and agricultural
prosperity of their barren highlands and harassed plains; they were
deepening and extending their education at the American schools;
they were laying the foundation of local industries in the Vilayet
of Sivas; they were building up Ottoman 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 compare
their promise with the promise of the Greeks a century before. The
apologists of the Ottoman Government will seize with eagerness upon
this comparison. “The Greeks,” they will say, “revolted as soon as
they had fallen into this state of fermentation. The Young Turks did
more prudently than Sultan Mahmoud in forestalling future trouble.”
But if we examine the relations between the Ottoman Government and
the Armenian people we shall find that this argument recoils upon
its authors’ heads.
IV. THE ARMENIAN PEOPLE AND THE OTTOMAN GOVERNMENT.
When the Ottoman Government entered the European War in 1914, it had
ruled Armenia for just four hundred years, and still had for its
subjects a majority of the Armenian people. Anyone who inquires into
the relations between the Government and the governed during this
period of Near Eastern history will find the most contradictory
opinions expressed. On the one hand he will be told that the
Armenians, like the rest of the Christians in Turkey, were classed
as “Rayah” (cattle[221]) by the dominant race, and that this one
word sums up their irremediable position; that they were not treated
as citizens because they were not even treated as men. On the other
hand, he will hear that the Ottoman Empire has been more liberal to
its subject nationalities than many states in Western Europe; that
the Armenians have been perfectly free to live their own life under
a paternal government, and that the friction between the Government
and its subjects has been due to the native perversity and
instability of the Armenian character, or, worse still, to a
revolutionary poison instilled by some common enemy from without.
Both these extreme views are out of perspective, but each of them
represents a part of the truth.