The Fourth Annual Vardanants Day Armenian Lecture

The Imperial State and its Armenian Subjects

The key difference in early Ottoman society was religion, rather than ethnicity or language, which took on relevance only later. The millets, the various communities headed by religious leaders that were systematized only in the nineteenth century, were based on religion, rather than some idea of primal origin, language, or culture. The state ruled over the millets indirectly and interfered little, delegating much authority to the religious head of the millet. Certainly no effort was made to break down the boundaries of these communities and homogenize the population of the empire, or even Anatolia, around a single identity. There was no “making of Ottomans” or turning “peasants into Turks” in the Ottoman Empire, as there was to a degree in the absolute monarchies of Western Europe or the French state after the revolution of 1789. There was also no idea until the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century of equality under the law, a notion of equal citizenship for all members of Ottoman society.

Armenians in Anatolia were aware that they were a subject people, that the ruling elite was Turkish and Islamic, and that even their compatriots who succeeded in society and the state had to develop a particular Ottoman cultural competence to advance. Difference was not simply horizontal but vertical as well. It was the non-Muslim who dismounted from his horse when a Muslim approached. As I have written elsewhere,

Armenians and Turks coexisted in an unequal relationship, one of subordination and superordination, with the Muslims on top and the non-Muslims below. The sheer power and confidence of the ruling Muslims worked for centuries to maintain in the Armenians a pattern of personal and social behavior manifested in submissiveness, passivity, deference to authority, and the need to act in calculatedly devious and disguised ways. It was this deferential behavior that earned the Armenians the title “loyal millet” in an age when the Greeks and Slavs of the empire were striving to emancipate themselves through revolutionary action. The Armenians in contrast worked within the Ottoman system and accepted the burdens of Muslim administration without much protest until the second half of the nineteenth century.¹¹

For many Armenian writers of the last two centuries the whole history of the Armenians is one of the emerging nation, and earlier forms of collective identity are usually understood in terms of that nation. Yet if one takes seriously what Eric J. Hobsbawm would call a “protonationalist” sense of community, earlier notions of community should not be conflated with more modern notions. From the texts of the fifth century it is evident that Armenians conceived of themselves as a unique Christian community, with their own church set apart from the Constantinople-centered church. For over a millennium Armenia was not a single state; Armenian dynasties fought one another, allied with Arabs, Greeks, Turks, or Persians at times against other Armenian principalities. What linked this divided and dispersed people was a religious and linguistic affiliation rather than political ties. Yet a memory of Armenian political existence and of former glories was maintained by clerical scribes in a textual tradition envied and emulated by Armenia’s neighbors like the Georgians. The literary tradition became much more fragmented in the period after the Seljuk, Mongol, and Ottoman invasions and settlements, and when the last Armenian state of consequence fell in 1375, the Church remained as the principal focus of identification and preservation.

In the early modern period energetic Church leaders attempted sporadically to interest Western capitals in a crusade to liberate Armenians from their Islamic rulers, the Ottomans and the Persians, but with almost no results. Those sporadic Church-led diplomatic missions to Rome, the courts of the German states, France, and Russia have been integrated into a narrative of a “national-liberation movement” by later writers, and in Soviet Armenian historiography the efforts by the meliks of Karabakh or the self-appointed liberator Israel Ori have been fashioned into a “Russian orientation” that served as justification for the eventual tsarist conquest of eastern (Persian) Armenia and the inclusion of Caucasian Armenia within the Soviet Union. Most of the “liberationist” activity came from diaspora Armenians, merchants in Persia, Europe, and Madras, India, interested in the restoration of an Armenian state. The group of merchant activists in Madras wrote political tracts that shifted the blame for the Armenian condition from their own sinful past onto the despotism of foreign rulers. The adventurer Joseph Emin, who travelled widely to interest Europeans in the Armenian cause, indicted the Armenian clergy for their message of passive acceptance of Muslim rule. But what is often not emphasized in the histories of these efforts is their fragmentary nature, the fragility or absence of connection between them, and the different motivations and ambitions of the actors who have been homogenized into a single, coherent movement.

As a dispersed people living in three contiguous empires and scattered even further abroad by their mercantile interests, Armenians were much more divided than united, separated by politics, distance, dialects, and class differences. Linked primarily by religion and the Church, which nurtured a sense of a lost glorious past and ancient statehood, Armenians before the nineteenth century were a loose ethnoreligious community with no overwhelming, coherent sense of being a nation in the modern sense. Their clerical and merchant leadership in the Ottoman Empire preached the fostering of Armenian religiosity, remembrance of past glory, but enlightenment within the status quo, and deference to the rulers that God had imposed upon them. The literary and cultural revivalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, particularly the Mekhitarist monks of Venice, saw themselves as cultivating the national spirit through promotion of the language. Father Ghevond Alishan, who himself had never been to historic Armenia, wrote elegically about the landscape in which the ruins of ancient churches were the inspiration for a revived national feeling. But even as they promoted enlightenment and borrowed the idiom of the nation from the West, the generation of religious teachers rejected the more radical and democratic aspects of Western and East European nationalism that they observed.

For Ottoman Armenians the great divide in the millet was between the community in Constantinople and the bulk of Armenians, largely peasants and petty craftsmen, living in the eastern provinces. While the wealthy Armenians of the capital both influenced the patriarch and controlled the National Assembly that dealt with certain aspects of millet affairs, the provinces remained radically underrepresented. A frequent complaint from the east was that Constantinople Armenians, as the leaders of the community, were not fulfilling their obligation to care for the lower orders. This alienation from the center was highlighted by the work of bishop Mkrtich Khrimian, known widely as hairik (Little Father), in Van, the most Armenian of the towns of eastern Anatolia. Khrimian edited a journal, Ardziv Vaspurakani (The Eagle of Vaspurakan [the medieval Armenian name for the Van region]), in 1858, exposed the suffering of his parishioners, and spoke vaguely of Armenian self-defense. In 1869-1873 he served as Patriarch of Constantinople and came into conflict with the more conservative forces among the capital’s Armenians when he attempted to increase provincial representation in the National Assembly. The activist priest sent a report in 1871 to the Porte enumerating the abuses of Armenians by provincial authorities. His recommendation, in line with much of the thrust of the Tanzimat reforms, was to strengthen the role of the central authorities in the provinces, to rationalize the administration of justice, and to guarantee equality of treatment and tolerance of religious practices. Though he was supported by prominent liberal Armenians, like Grigor Otian, who earlier had been an advisor to Midhat Pasha and was president of the National Assembly, Khrimian could overcome neither the Ottoman government’s unwillingness to carry out reforms in the provinces nor the conservative Armenians indifference toward the provincial Armenians. In 1873 he resigned as Patriarch.

Appropriately for a dispersed people faced by three imperial authorities, the nationalism of many Armenian thinkers was not primarily territorial. Neither the clergy nor the powerful conservatives in the capital, who benefitted from their privileged positions within Ottoman society and close to the state, were interested in creating a territorial nation. More broadly, Armenian leaders in Turkey hoped for reform from above and spoke of their “benevolent government.” Until the end of the 1870s the sense of the nation for Ottoman Armenians was still largely of an ethnoreligious community that needed to work within the context of the empire to improve its difficult position. Encouraged by the Tanzimat reformers and the theorists of Ottomanism, liberal Armenians petitioned and pressured the Porte and tried occasionally to enlist foreign support for reform.

The situation changed radically with the coming to power of Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909), his abrogation of the Ottoman Constitution in 1876, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and the turn toward repression of the Armenians. As an Armenian national discourse took shape, the more liberal and radical elements focused on the eastern provinces and the poverty and oppression suffered by the Armenian peasantry. A sense of a “fatherland” (hairenik) developed among Armenian writers, and a distinction was drawn between azgasirutiun (love of nation), which heightened the sense of a cultural nation beyond a specific territory, and hairenasirutiun (love of fatherland), with emphasis on the people in Armenia (haiastantsiner). Men like Bishop Garegin Srvantstiants, who had long complained about the distance of Constantinople Armenians from the “fatherland,” and Arsen Tokhmakhian, who later turned to revolution, celebrated the Armenians of historic Armenians who had “preserved the faith and suffered because of it.”¹² Imbued with a deeply populist nationalism, centered on the peasants of eastern Anatolia, Armenian intellectuals travelled as teachers to the east in an effort characterized as depi Haiastan (To Armenia). The government responded by removing prominent teachers, like Mkrtich Portukalian in Van and Martiros Sareyan in Mush, from their home provinces and exiling Khrimian to Jerusalem.

Increasingly Turkish authorities interpreted any manifestation of cultural revival or resistance, however individual or local, as an act of national rebellion. The government restricted the powers of the Armenian National Assembly , accepting only takrirs (petitions) dealing with churches and monasteries. The state prohibited all forms of national expression, banning the word Haiastan (Armenia in Armenian) in print and forbidding the sale and possession of pictures of the last Armenian king, Levon V, who had lost his throne in 1375. Instead of being the “loyal millet,” Turkish officials and intellectuals began to look upon Armenians as unruly, subversive, alien elements who consorted with foreign powers. The conservative Muslim clergy, long alienated by the Frenchified reformist bureaucrats among the Turks, were offended by the behavior and wealth of the most visible Armenians, those merchants who lived in the capital, particularly lived in Europeanized districts like Galata, and affected Western manners or even took foreign citizenship.

Though the overwhelming majority of Armenian leaders wished to work within the Ottoman system, on a number of discrete occasions they made overtures to the Russians and the British. In 1872 merchants in Van requested that the Russian government send a consul to their city to guarantee “the safety of trade routes and protection of religion, lives, and goods of the down-trodden Chrisitian people of Vaspurakan.”¹³ Six years later, in the aftermath of the war with Russia, the Patriarch Nerses Varjabedian made contact with the Russians at San Stefano and sent Khrimian to Berlin to plead the Armenian case before the Great Powers. When the Russians were forced by Europe to retreat from their demands on Turkey, the Patriarch attempted to interpret the new role taken by Britain in the most positive light.

The self-narration by Armenian nationalists of the Armenian experience in the Ottoman Empire was of a people conquered by foreign invaders, made captive in their own ancient land, oppressed by unjust and cruel rulers, yet all the while maintaining their essential Armenian religious culture and yearning to be free. As with other nationalist constructions, Armenian writers emphasized the continuity of the national self moving through time, overcoming adversities, martyred for the faith, victimized by a government imposed upon them. As historians and novelists melded together discrete and disjointed events into a coherent story that was almost always about the nation, they argued that the empire was an illegitimate and archaic polity that prevented the full expression of the nation’s aspirations. Writers translated the defense of Christianity in the fifth century by Vartan Mamikonian against the Persians into a defense of nation and fatherland, so that the story was less about religious martyrdom and salvation after death and more about national resurrection in this life. Resistance by the local Armenians (sometimes in alliance with non-Armenians!) of Zeitun in Cilicia to protect tax exemptions granted more than 200 years earlier by the seventeenth-century Sultan Murad IV were scripted in a more modern idiom of rights and national oppression. The local was turned into the all-national. Social bandits and brigands, like Avo near Van or Arabo and Micho near Taron, became rebels and freedom-fighters.¹⁴ The very creation of a coherent national narrative that effaced the complexities of interethnic coexistence within the empire and stigmatized the kind of cosmopolitan adjustment to imperial life in which the Armenian merchants had flourished and Armenian Christianity had maintained its authority reinforced the sense of difference between Turks and Armenians. Distance between peoples increased; borders between them hardened; and sharing in the commonalities of Ottoman culture and life became suspect on both sides. By the late nineteenth century both the nationalists in their narration of the past and present, and the defenders of the Ottoman state interpreted events through the prism of the nation.

While Armenian clerics taught submission and deference and often allied with state authorities to persecute those modernizing intellectuals who attempted to bring Western enlightenment to young Armenians, the despotic Abdul Hamid II brought the reform period of the Tanzimat to an end and eliminated moderate and liberal alternatives within the system. By the 1880s a significant minority of Armenians conceived of revolution as the only means to protect and promote the Armenians. A new idea of the Armenian nation as secular, cultural, and based on language as well as shared history challenged the older clerical understanding of Armenians as an ethnoreligious community centered on faith and membership in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Faced by what they saw as the imminent danger of national disintegration, the Armenian radicals turned toward self-defense, the formation of revolutionary political parties, and political actions that would encourage Western or Russian intervention into Ottoman affairs. For the young nationalists revolution was the “logical conclusion” of the impossibility of significant reforms coming from the state.¹⁵

Small self-defense circles formed in the Armenian provincal communities in the 1880s --among them, Bashtban Hairenyats in Erzerum in 1881-1882 and Sev Khach in Van in 1882. Young people were inspired by Portugalian’s Armenia published in Marseilles in 1885, which called for Armenian independence, and two small parties, the Armenakans in Van and the Hnchaks, founded in Geneva, were influenced by his message. The movement involved dozens, sometimes hundreds of people in small, scattered groups. But the national revolutionary intellectuals, many of them from Russian Transcaucasia and influenced by Russian populism, found it extremely difficult to activate the Ottoman Armenian peasantry, their chosen constituency.¹⁶ Abdul Hamid’s alliance with Kurdish notables and the formation of the Hamidiye regiments in the eastern provinces made a bad situation worse for the Armenians. By the time a third -- and eventually dominant -- Armenian revolutionary party, the Hai Heghapoghakan Dashnaktsutiun, emerged in the 1890s, rather than equal subjects in an Ottoman state, Armenians had become the double victims of state authorities and local Kurdish lords. Rather than reform, repression became the government’s preferred strategy for maintaining the decaying imperial arrangement.

In 1894 clashes between Kurds and Armenians in Sassun led to the intervention of state troops and the killing of hundreds of Armenians. This violence would later be read by Armenians as the first stage of a series of massacres that would culminate in the genocide of 1915. But the massacres in eastern Anatolia in 1894-1896 can be seen as part of an effort by Abdul Hamid II to restore the old equilibrium in interethnic relations, in which the subject peoples accepted with little overt questioning the dominance of the Ottoman Muslim eleite. Yet the sultan’s own policies of centralization and bureaucratization, as well as his strategic alliance with Muslim Kurds against Christian Armenians, did as much (if not more) to undermine the customary system of imperial rule as did the emerging revisioning of nationality borrowed from the West.

The Sultan defended his actions to the British as necessary for maintaining order:

His Imperial Majesty treated the Armenians with justice and moderation, and, as long as they behaved properly, all toleration would be shown to them, but he had given orders that when they took to revolt or to brigandage the authorities were to deal with them as they dealt with the authorities.¹⁷

The Sultan’s language would be repeated by other officials and would echo in the justifications of the Young Turks and the apologist historians who would later attempt to reconceive of state-initiated massacres as “necessary,” figments of Armenian imagination, or a Muslim-Christian civil war. Yet the continuity between events should not obscure the difference between Abdul Hamid’s essentially conservative and restorationist policy toward unruly subjects and the Young Turks’ far more revolutionary attempt to remove surgically a major irritant. Though images of Armenians as subversive and alien, and habits of violence as a means to keep order, deeply affected Ottoman mentalities and practices, the subsequent Young Turk policy of systematic deportation and the attendant murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915 were not simply a continuation of earlier policies but a fundamentally more radical program of restructuring the empire in line with the hybrid ideological formulations then in play.

The revolutionary nationalism of the Armenian committees and parties was exaggerated by both the revolutionaries themselves and by their opponents. While they struggled to convince villagers of the “Armenian cause,” and threatened businessmen who refused to contribute to their movement, the Armenian nationalists were forced to rely on a handful of activists, many from Persia and Russia. Over time they succeeded in reshaping the understanding of the Armenian position in the empire. Their reading of the Armenians’ fate was more broadly accepted. Repression of revolutionary demonstrations in Istanbul or of peasants in the mid-1890s seemed to confirm the analysis of the nationalists. In the period after 1908 the Armenians elected nationalists to the Ottoman Parliament, where they collaborated with (and competed with) the Young Turks. Resented by the more conservative clerical and merchant leaders in Constantinople, the revolutionary nationalists became the de facto leaders of a nation that they had helped to create through their teaching, writing, and sacrifice.