Armenians In The Ottoman Empire Essay ⋆ History Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

After the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II captured Constantinople on May 26, 1453, a new policy regarding minorities was initiated. The Ottomans organized each non-Muslim religious minority, mainly Christians and Jews, into a separate national administration, called a millet (pl. milletler). The head of each millet was its highest religious authority residing in the Ottoman Empire. For Christians there were at first three milletler: one for the group of Byzantine (Greek) Orthodox, one for the Armenian Orthodox, and one for the Assyrian Church of the East. By the time of the fall of the Ottoman Empire there were no fewer than eight Christian milletler. The ideology behind this principle of organization was a liminal concept of “clean” versus “defiled.” Expressed in sociological terms, the “clean” Muslim Ottoman Turks did not wish to come into contact with “unclean” Christians. Furthermore, by substituting the Christian idea of “church” with the Islamic idea of an ethnic and religious nation in which the Armenian clergy were also civil and judicial administrators of the Armenian people, the Ottomans sought to destroy the spiritual power of the churches by forcing the bishops and other clergy to be embroiled in secular administration.

In the Ottoman system, the civil head of each Christian minority millet was a patriarch. The duty of the patriarch was to administer the internal civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs of his millet. The patriarch’s chief responsibility was the collection of taxes on behalf of the Ottoman government, and the patriarch was the sole representative of his nation to the sultan. The patriarch also was responsible for education, hospitals, family law, and permission to travel within the Ottoman Empire.

The millet system offered some advantages for the minority groups themselves. It was illegal to convert Armenians to Islam, although this took place with significant frequency when it behooved the Ottoman government. Armenians were also nominally protected from intermarriage, and thus the homogeneity of each millet was largely preserved. For other minorities who were Muslim, principally the Kurds, their fate was worse: As Muslims they were not accorded a distinct national identity.

National Self-Concept

For Armenians the church was the foundation of their national self-concept. Most Armenians were ignorant theologically. While many, especially in the rural areas of eastern Anatolia, were not formally religious, they were strongly pious. The major festivals of the church were celebrated even in the poorest homes. Even the simplest folk understood that the church was fundamental to their national survival, and Armenians supported their church as much as they could.

In the last three decades of the 19th century, like many other minorities in the Ottoman Empire, Armenians were faced with a precarious existence. Armenians in eastern Anatolia, who were forbidden to keep firearms, were at the mercy of marauding Kurds and Turks. Although some Armenians loyal to the Ottoman government rose to positions of power in the state, overall they were second-class citizens, faced with corruption both within and outside of their own community, unfairly taxed, and who, despite their industriousness and hard work, began immigrating to the United States, Canada, South America, and Australia in large numbers.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 marked the beginning of a new and bloody chapter for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The wars with Russia brought Armenians in Turkey into close quarters with their brethren in Russia, who enjoyed a much higher standard of living and greater autonomy. As a result the national revival of Armenians advanced much faster in Russian Caucasia than in Turkey. The Great Concert of European powers produced the Treaty of Berlin (July 1878), which blocked Russia’s attempt to force the sultan to improve the lives of Armenians. The situation of Armenians in Anatolia became worse in the 1880s, as Kurds and other Muslim minorities attacked Armenians without interference from the Turkish governors.

The result was that Armenians formed political organizations to force the Ottomans to deal with these and other problems. By the 1890s Armenian paramilitary organizations emerged with the intention of organizing a defense of Armenians and Armenian interests. The most important of these was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which sought greater autonomy for Armenians while ruling out political independence, and the Social Democratic Hnchag (“Clarion”) Party, which sought complete independence for Armenia.

In 1894 the matter came to a head when Hnchag leaders sought to stir the international community to action through a planned act of rebellion. The response of the Ottoman government was very much disproportionate to the threat posed by the act: The Kurds and the Turkish military exterminated many villages that did not participate in the rebellion. In the course of 1894–96 in a planned and systematic fashion, Sultan Abdul Hamid I sought to solve the Armenian question through reduction of the number of Armenians through massacres. European powers did not intervene largely out of fear of Russia, and American president Grover Cleveland refused to intervene. The massacres essentially ended the Armenian revolutionary drive for independence and even led to a rejection of revolution from some of its most prominent Armenian supporters.

However, after 1904 renewed Armenian guerrilla activity in eastern Anatolia resulted in further punitive massacres similar to those in 1894–96. Further attacks followed in Adana and in Syria in 1908 with the participation of the Young Turks, who had seized power that same year. The tense situation between Armenian political organizations and the government of the Young Turks continued. The problem was compounded by the intervention of Western powers in Turkish governance and their open hostility to the Turkish regime. The start of World War I, which pitted Turkey against many of its former enemies, particularly Russia, resulted in a cataclysm of death for Armenian civilians. The policy of brutally suppressing Armenian cries for safety from murder and pillage under the Ottomans continued. The government of the Ottoman Empire, led by the Young Turks, began a policy of massacre that was concentrated in 1915 but continued in the new Turkish Republic until 1922. Claiming that the Armenians and other Christians were collaborating with the Russian army, the Turks set out to systematically eliminate, or at least to reduce to an insignificant number, the Armenians and other Christians from eastern Anatolia.

Along with this violence came the transfer of the wealth of these groups into Kurdish and Turkish hands. Although most of this activity was conducted at the hands of Kurds and prisoners released for the massacres, the Turkish army provided support, and the Turkish government was responsible for sanctioning and in some cases actively planning the removal of Armenians from eastern Anatolia. As many as 1.5 million Armenians, along with hundreds of thousands of Suryani and Assyrian Christians, were killed or died as a result of forced marches southward through the desert or in concentration camps.

The Turkish government in the early 21st century vehemently denied that the government of the Young Turks (who also were the founders of the modern Turkish Republic) engaged in a planned and systematic elimination of all Armenians from Anatolia. Instead, the Turkish Republic claimed that most of the casualties were Armenians who fought with the invading Russian army against the Ottomans, and that the number of these battle casualties for Armenians was 600,000. Currently, a reassessment of the Turkish participation in the slaughter of the Armenians is occurring among intellectuals and historians in Turkey, and even the government is promoting restoration and cultural expressions of the Armenians and other minorities as it lobbies to join the European Union.

Bibliography:

Bartov, Omer, and Phyllis Mack, eds. In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century. Studies on War and Genocide 4. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001;
Mirak, Robert. Torn Between Two Lands. Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I. Harvard Armenian Texts and Studies 7. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

This example Armenians In The Ottoman Empire Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.