Armenians have derived certain benefits from the Ottoman
dispensation. The caste division between Moslem and Rayah, for
instance, may stamp the Ottoman “State Idea” as mediæval and
incapable of progress; but this has injured the state as a whole
more appreciably than the penalised section of it, for extreme
penalisation works both ways. The Government ruled out the
Christians so completely from the dominant Moslem commonwealth that
it suffered and even encouraged them to form communities of their
own. The “Rayah” became “Millets”—not yoke-oxen, but unshackled
herds.
These Christian Millets were instituted by Sultan Mohammed II, after
he had conquered Constantinople in 1453 and set himself to
reorganise the Ottoman State as the conscious heir of the East Roman
Empire. They are national corporations with written charters, often
of an elaborate kind. Each of them is presided over by a Patriarch,
who holds office at the discretion of the Government, but is elected
by the community and is the recognised intermediary between the two,
combining in his own person the headship of a voluntary “Rayah”
association and the status of an Ottoman official. The special
function thus assigned to the Patriarchates gives the Millets, as an
institution, an ecclesiastical character[222]; but in the Near East
a church is merely the foremost aspect of a nationality, and the
authority of the Patriarchates extends to the control of schools,
and even to the administration of certain branches of civil law. The
Millets, in fact, are practically autonomous bodies in all that
concerns religion, culture and social life; but it is a maimed
autonomy, for it is jealously debarred from any political
expression. The establishment of the Millets is a recognition, and a
palliation, of the pathological anomaly of the Near East—the
political disintegration of Near Eastern peoples and the tenacity
with which they have clung, in spite of it, to their corporate
spiritual life.
The organisation of the Millets was not a gain to all the
Christian nations that had been subjected by the Ottoman power.
Certain orthodox populations, like the Bulgars and the Serbs,
actually lost an ecclesiastical autonomy which they had enjoyed
before, and were merged in the Millet of the Greeks, under the
Orthodox Patriarch at Constantinople. The Armenians, on the other
hand, improved their position. As so-called schismatics, they had
hitherto existed on sufferance under Orthodox and Catholic
governments, but the Osmanlis viewed all varieties of Christian
with an impartial eye. Mohammed II. summoned the Gregorian Bishop
of the Armenian colony at Broussa, and raised him to the rank of
an Armenian Patriarch at Constantinople. The Ottoman conquest thus
left the Gregorian Armenians their religious individuality and put
them on a legal equality with their neighbours of the Orthodox
Faith, and the same privileges were extended in time to the
Armenians in communion with other churches. The Gregorian Millet
was chartered in 1462, the Millet of Armenian Catholics in 1830,
and the Millet of Armenian Protestants in the ’forties of the
nineteenth century, as a result of the foundation of the American
Missions.
The Armenians of the Dispersion, therefore, profited, in that
respect, by Ottoman rule, and even in the Armenian homeland the
account stood, on the whole, in the Ottoman Government’s favour. The
Osmanlis are often blamed for having given the Kurds a footing in
this region, as a political move in their struggle with Persia; but
the Kurds were not, originally, such a scourge to the Armenians as
the Seljuks, Mongols, or Kara Koyunli, who had harried the land
before, or as the Persians themselves, whom the Osmanlis and the
Kurds ejected from the country. The three centuries of Kurdish
feudalism under Ottoman suzerainty that followed Sultan Selim’s
campaign of 1514 were a less unhappy period for the Armenians than
the three centuries and more of anarchy that had preceded them. They
were a time of torpor before recuperation, and it was the Ottoman
Government again that, by a change in its Kurdish policy, enabled
this recuperation to set in. In the early part of the nineteenth
century a vigorous anti-feudal, centralising movement was initiated
by Sultan Mahmoud, a reformer who has become notorious for his
unsuccessful handling of the Greek and Serbian problems without
receiving the proper credit for his successes further east. He
turned his attention to the Kurdish chieftains in 1834, and by the
middle of the century his efforts had practically broken their
power. Petty feudalism was replaced by a bureaucracy centred in
Constantinople. The new officialdom was not ideal; it had new vices
of its own; but it was impartial, by comparison, towards the two
races whom it had to govern, for the class prejudice of the Moslem
against the well-behaved Rayah was balanced by the exasperation of
the professional administrator with the unconscionable Kurd. In any
case, this remodelling of the Ottoman State in the early decades of
the nineteenth century introduced a new epoch in the history of the
Armenian people. Coinciding, as it did, with the establishment of
the American Missions and the chartering of the Catholic and
Protestant Millets, it opened to the Armenians opportunities of
which they availed themselves to the full. An intellectual and
economic renaissance of Armenian life began, parallel in many
respects to the Greek renaissance a century before.
This comparison brings us back to the question: Was the Armenian
revival of the nineteenth century an inevitable menace to the
sovereignty and integrity of the Ottoman State? Is the disastrous
breach between Armenian and Turk, which has actually occurred,
simply the fruit of wrong-headed Armenian ambitions? That is the
Turkish contention; but here the Turkish case breaks down, and we
shall find the truth on the Armenian side.
The parallel with the Greek renaissance is misleading, if it implies
a parallel with the Greek revolution. The Greek movement towards
political separatism was, in a sense, the outcome of the general
spiritual movement that preceded it; but it was hardly an essential
consequence, and certainly not a fortunate one. The Greek War of
Independence liberated one fraction of the Greek race at the price
of exterminating most of the others and sacrificing the favoured
position which the Greek element had previously enjoyed throughout
the Ottoman Empire. It was not an encouraging precedent for the
Armenians, and the objections to following it in their own case were
more formidable still. As we have seen, no portion of Ottoman
territory was exclusively inhabited by them, and they were nowhere
even in an absolute majority, except in certain parts of the
Province of Van so that they had no natural rallying point for a
national revolt, such as the Greeks had in the Islands and the
Morea. They were scattered from one end to another of the Ottoman
Empire; the whole Empire was their heritage, and it was a heritage
that they must necessarily share with the Turks, who were in a
numerical majority and held the reins of political power. The
alternative to an Ottoman State was not an Armenian State, but a
partition among the Powers, which would have ended the ambitions of
Turk and Armenian alike. The Powers concerned were quite ready for a
partition, if only they could agree upon a division of the spoils.
This common inheritance of the Armenians and the Turks was
potentially one of the richest countries in the Old World, and one
of the few that had not yet been economically developed. Its native
inhabitants, still scanty, backward and divided against themselves,
were not yet capable of defending their title against spoilers from
without; they only maintained it at present by a fortuitous
combination in the balance of power, which might change at any
moment. The problem for the Armenians was not how to overthrow the
Ottoman Empire but how to preserve it, and their interest in its
preservation was even greater than that of their Turkish neighbours
and co-heirs. Our geographical survey has shown that talent and
temperament had brought most of the industry, commerce, finance and
skilled intellectual work of Turkey into, the Armenians’ hands. The
Greeks may still have competed with them on the Ægean fringe, and
the Sephardi Jews in the Balkans, but they had the whole interior of
the Empire to themselves, with no competition to fear from the
agricultural Turks or the pastoral Kurds. And if the Empire were
preserved by timely reforms from within, the position of the
Armenians would become still more favourable, for they were the only
native element capable of raising the Empire economically,
intellectually and morally to a European standard, by which alone
its existence could permanently be secured. The main effort must be
theirs, and they would reap the richest reward.
Thus, from the Armenian point of view, a national entente with the
Turks was an object of vital importance, to be pursued for its
ultimate results in spite of present difficulties and drawbacks.
About the middle of the nineteenth century there seemed every
likelihood of its being attained. The labours of Sultan Mahmoud and
the influence of Great Britain and France had begun to inoculate the
Turkish ruling class with liberal ideas. An admirable “Law of
Nationalities” was promulgated, and there was a project for a
parliamentary constitution. It looked, to an optimist, as if the old
mediæval caste-division of Moslem and Rayah might die away and allow
Armenian, Turk and Kurd to find their true relation to one
another—not as irreconcilable sects or races, but as different
social elements in the same community, whose mutual interest was to
co-operate for a common end.
This was the logical policy for the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
to pursue, and the logic of it was so clear that they have clung to
it through difficulties and drawbacks sufficient to banish logic
altogether—“difficulties” which amounted to a bankruptcy of
political sense in the Imperial Government, and “drawbacks” which
culminated in official massacres of the Armenian population. There
were two causes of this sinister turn of events: the external crisis
through which the Empire passed in the years 1875-8, and the
impression this crisis made upon Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid, who came to
the throne in 1876, when it was entering upon its gravest phase.
In these years the Empire had been brought to the verge of ruin by
the revolt of a subject Christian population, the Bosniak Serbs,
which spread to the other subject races in the Balkan provinces, and
by a momentary breakdown in the diplomatic mechanism of the European
balance of power, which enabled Russia to throw her military force
into the scales on the Balkan rebels’ behalf. The ruin was arrested
and partially repaired, when Turkey lay prostrate under Russia’s
heel, by a reassertion of the balance of power, which deprived
Russia of most of her gains and half the Balkan Christians of their
new-won liberties. Abd-ul-Hamid was clever enough to learn from
these experiences, but not, unfortunately, to learn aright, and he
devoted all his astuteness to carrying out a policy far more
injurious to the Empire than the troubles it was meant to avert. He
seems to have inferred from the war with Russia that Turkey was not
and never would be strong enough to hold its own against a
first-class power; it was not her internal strength that had saved
her, but the external readjustment of forces. Therefore, any attempt
to strengthen the Empire from within, by reconciling its racial
elements and developing its natural resources, was Utopian and
irrelevant to the problem. The only object of importance was to
insure against an attack by any single Power by keeping all the
Great Powers in a state of jealous equilibrium. Now the breakdown of
this equilibrium, in 1877, which had been so disastrous for Turkey,
had been directly caused by an antecedent disturbance of equilibrium
within the Empire itself. A subject Christian nationality had tried
to break away violently from the Ottoman body-politic. Here was the
root of the whole trouble, to Abd-ul-Hamid’s mind, and the primary
object of his policy must be to prevent such a thing from happening
again. The subject nationalities of the Empire were not for him
unrealised assets; they were potential destroyers of the State, more
formidable even than the foreign Powers. Their potentialities must
be neutralised, and the surest course, with them as with the Powers,
was to play them off against one another. In fine, the policy of
Abd-ul-Hamid was the exact antithesis of the instinctive Armenian
policy which we have indicated above; it was not to strengthen the
Empire by bringing the nationalities into harmony, but to weaken the
nationalities, at whatever cost to the Empire, by setting them to
cut each other’s throats. Abd-ul-Hamid applied this policy for forty
years. The Macedonians and the Armenians were his special victims,
but only the Armenians concern us here.
It was inevitable that the Armenians should be singled out by
Abd-ul-Hamid for repression. When Turkey sued for peace in 1878, the
Russian troops were in occupation of the greater part of the
Armenian plateau, and the Russian plenipotentiaries inserted an
Article (No. 16) in the Treaty of San Stefano making the evacuation
of these provinces conditional upon the previous introduction of
reforms in their administration by the Ottoman Government. A
concrete scheme for the reorganisation of the six vilayets in
question[223] had already been drawn up by a delegation of their
Armenian inhabitants. It provided for the creation of an Armenian
Governor-General, empowered to appoint and remove the officials
subordinate to him; a mixed gendarmerie of Armenians and the
sedentary elements in the Moslem population, to the exclusion of the
nomadic Kurds; a general assembly, consisting of Moslem and
Christian deputies in equal numbers; and equal rights for every
creed. The Ottoman Government had approved and even encouraged this
project of provincial autonomy when it feared that the alternative
was the cession of the provinces to Russia. As soon as it had made
certain of the Russian evacuation, its approval turned to
indifference; and when the European Congress met at Berlin to revise
the San Stefano Treaty, the Ottoman emissaries exerted themselves to
quash the project altogether. In this they were practically
successful, for the Treaty drawn up at Berlin by the Congress merely
engaged the Ottoman Government, in general terms[224], to introduce
“ameliorations” in the “provinces inhabited by Armenians,” without
demanding any guarantee at all[225]. The Russian troops were
withdrawn and the ameliorations were a dead letter. The Ottoman
Government was reminded of them, in 1880, by a collective Note from
the six Powers. But it left the Note unanswered, and after the
diplomatic démarches had dragged on for two years the question was
shelved, on Bismarck’s suggestion, because no Power except Great
Britain would press it.
The seed of the “Armenian Reforms” had thus fallen upon stony
ground, except in the mind of Abd-ul-Hamid, where it lodged and
rankled till it bore the fruit of the “Armenian Massacres.” The
project had not really been a menace to Ottoman sovereignty and
integrity. It was merely a proposal to apply in six vilayets that
elementary measure of “amelioration” which was urgently needed by
the Empire as a whole, and without which it could never begin
to develop its internal strength. But to Abd-ul-Hamid it
was unforgivable, for to him every concession to a subject
Christian nationality was suspect. He had seen the Bulgars given
ecclesiastical autonomy by the Ottoman Government in 1870 and then
raised by Russia, within eight years, into a semi-independent
political principality. Armenian autonomy had been averted for the
moment, but the parallel might still hold good, for Russia’s
influence over the Armenians had been increasing.
Russia had conquered the Armenian provinces of Persia in 1828[226],
and this had brought within her frontier the Monastery of
Etchmiadzin, in the Khanate of Erivan, which was the seat of the
Katholikos of All the Armenians. The power of this Katholikos was at
that time very much in abeyance. He was an ecclesiastical relic of
the ancient united Armenian Kingdom of Tigranes and Tiridates, which
had been out of existence for fourteen hundred years. There was
another Katholikos at Sis, a relic of the mediæval kingdom of
Cilicia, who did not acknowledge his supremacy, and he was
thrown into the shade altogether by the Armenian Patriarch at
Constantinople, who was the official head of the Armenian Millet in
the Ottoman Empire—at that time an overwhelming majority of the
Armenian people. But Russian diplomacy succeeded in reviving the
Katholikos of Etchmiadzin’s authority. In the ’forties of the
nineteenth century, when Russian influence at Constantinople was at
its height and Russian protection seemed the only recourse for
Turkey against the ambition of Mehemet Ali, the ecclesiastical
supremacy of Etchmiadzin over Constantinople and Sis was definitely
established, and the Katholikos of Etchmiadzin, a resident in
Russian territory, became once more the actual as well as the
titular head of the whole Gregorian Church. Russia had thus acquired
an influence over the Armenians as a nation, and individual
Armenians were acquiring a reciprocal influence in Russia. They had
risen to eminence, not only in commerce, but in the public service
and in the army. They had distinguished themselves particularly in
the war of 1877. Loris Melikov, Lazarev and Tergoukasev, three of
the most successful generals on the Russian side, were of Armenian
nationality. Melikov had taken the fortress of Kars, and the Treaty
of Berlin left his conquest in Russia’s possession with a zone of
territory that rounded off the districts ceded by Persia fifty years
before. The Russian frontier was thus pushed forward on to the
Armenian plateau, and now included an important Armenian
population—important enough to make its mark on the general life of
the Russian Empire[227] and to serve as a national rallying-point
for the Armenians who still remained on the Ottoman side of the
line.
Such considerations outweighed all others in Abd-ul-Hamid’s mind.
His Armenian subjects must be deprived of their formidable vitality,
and he decided to crush them by resuscitating the Kurds. From 1878
onwards he encouraged their lawlessness, and in 1891 he deliberately
undid the work of his predecessor, Mahmoud. The Kurdish chieftains
were taken again into favour and decorated with Ottoman military
rank; their tribes were enrolled as squadrons of territorial
cavalry; regimental badges and modern rifles were served out to them
from the Government stores, and their retaining fee was a free hand
to use their official status and their official weapons as they
pleased against their Armenian neighbours. At the same time the
latter were systematically disarmed; the only retaliation open to
them was the formation of secret revolutionary societies, and this
fitted in entirely with Abd-ul-Hamid’s plans, for it made a racial
conflict inevitable. The disturbances began in 1893 with the posting
up of revolutionary placards in Yozgad and Marsov an. This was soon
followed by an open breach between Moslem and Christian in the
districts of Moush and Sassoun, and there was a rapid concentration
of troops—some of them Turkish regulars, but most of them Hamidié
Kurds. Sassoun was besieged for several months, and fell in 1894.
The Sassounlis—men, women and children—were savagely massacred by
the Turks and Kurds, and the attention of Great Britain was aroused.
In the winter of 1894-5 Great Britain persuaded France and Russia to
join her in reminding the Ottoman Government of its pledge to
introduce provincial reforms, and in the spring they presented a
concrete programme for the administration of the Six Vilayets. In
its final form it was a perfunctory project, and the counter-project
which the Ottoman Government announced its intention of applying in
its stead was more illusory still. It was promulgated in 1895, but
the first of a new series of organised massacres had already taken
place a few days earlier, at Trebizond, and in the following months
the slaughter was extended to one after another of the principal
towns of the Empire. These atrocities were nearly all committed
against peaceful, unarmed urban populations. The only place that
resisted was Zeitoun, which held out for six months against a
Turkish army, and was finally amnestied by the mediation of the
Powers. The anti-Armenian outbreaks were instigated and controlled
by the Central Government, and were crowned, in August, 1896, by the
great massacre at Constantinople, where for two days the Armenians,
at the Government’s bidding, were killed indiscriminately in the
streets, until the death-roll amounted to many thousands. Then
Abd-ul-Hamid held his hand. He had been feeling the pulse of public
opinion, both abroad and at home, and he saw that he had gone far
enough[228]. In all more than 100,000 men, women and children had
perished, and for the moment he had sufficiently crippled the
Armenian element in his Empire.
Yet this Macchiavellian policy was ultimately as futile as it was
wicked. In the period after the massacres the Armenian population in
Turkey was certainly reduced, partly by the actual slaughter and
partly by emigration abroad. But this only weakened the Empire
without permanently paralysing the Armenian race. The emigrants
struck new roots in the United States and in the Russian Caucasus,
acquired new resources, enlisted new sympathies; and Russia was the
greatest gainer of all. The Armenians had little reason, at the
time, to look towards Russia with special sympathy or hope. In
Russia, as in Turkey, the war of 1877-8 had been followed by a
political reaction, which was aggravated by the assassination of the
Tsar, Alexander II., in 1881; and the Armenians, as an energetic,
intellectual, progressive element in the Russian Empire, were
classed by the police with the revolutionaries, and came under their
heavy hand. Yet once an Armenian was on the Russian side of the
frontier his life and property at least were safe. He could be sure
of reaping the fruits of his labour, and had not to fear sudden
death in the streets. During the quarter of a century that followed
the Treaty of Berlin, the Armenian population of the Russian
provinces increased remarkably in prosperity and numbers, and now,
after the massacres, they were reinforced by a constant stream of
Ottoman refugees. The centre of gravity of the Armenian race was
shifting more and more from Ottoman to Russian territory. Russia has
profited by the crimes of her neighbours. The Hamidian régime lasted
from 1878 to 1908, and did all that any policy could do to widen the
breach between the Ottoman State and the Armenian people. Yet the
natural community of interest was so strong that even thirty years
of repression did not make the Armenians despair of Ottoman
regeneration.
Nothing is more significant than the conduct of the Armenians in
1908, when Abd-ul-Hamid was overthrown by the Young Turkish
Revolution, and there was a momentary possibility that the Empire
might be reformed and preserved by the initiative of the Turks
themselves. At this crisis the real attitude of the different
nationalities in the Empire was revealed. The Kurds put up a fight
for Abd-ul-Hamid, because they rejoiced in the old dispensation. The
Macedonians—Greek, Bulgar and Serb—who had been the Armenians’
principal fellow-victims in the days of oppression, paid the
Constitution lip-homage and secretly prepared to strike. They were
irreconcilable irredentists, and saw in the reform of the Empire
simply an obstacle to their secession from it. They took counsel
with their kinsmen in the independent national States of Serbia,
Bulgaria and Greece, and, four years later, the Balkan League
attacked Turkey and tore away her Macedonian provinces by force.