The Hamidian massacres[2] also called the Armenian massacres, were massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-1890s. Estimated casualties ranged from 100,000[3] to 300,000,[4] resulting in 50,000 orphaned children.[5] The massacres are named after SultanAbdul Hamid II, who, in his efforts to maintain the imperial domain of the declining Ottoman Empire, reasserted pan-Islamism as a state ideology.[6] Although the massacres were aimed mainly at the Armenians, in some cases they turned into indiscriminate anti-Christian pogroms, including the Diyarbekir massacres, where, at least according to one contemporary source, up to 25,000 Assyrians were also killed.[7]
The massacres began in the Ottoman interior in 1894, before they became more widespread in the following years. The majority of the murders took place between 1894 and 1896. The massacres began to taper off in 1897, following international condemnation of Abdul Hamid. The harshest measures were directed against the long persecuted Armenian community as its calls for civil reform and better treatment were ignored by the government. The Ottomans made no allowances for the victims on account of their age or gender, and as a result, they massacred all of the victims with brutal force.[8]
The telegraph spread news of the massacres around the world, leading to a significant amount of coverage of them in the media of Western Europe, Russian Empire and North America.[9]
The origins of the hostility towards the Armenians lay in the increasingly precarious position in which the Ottoman Empire found itself in the last quarter of the 19th century. The end of Ottoman domination of the Balkans was ushered in by an era of European nationalism and an insistence on self-determination by the inhabitants of many territories which had been ruled by the Ottomans for an extremely long period of time. The Armenians of the empire, who were always considered second-class citizens, had begun to ask for civil reforms and better treatment by the government in the mid-1860s and early 1870s. They pressed for an end to the usurpation of their land, "the looting and murder in Armenian towns by Kurds and Circassians, improprieties during tax collection, criminal behavior by government officials and the refusal to accept Christians as witnesses in trial."[10] These requests went unheeded by the central government. When a nascent form of nationalism spread among the Armenians of Anatolia, including demands for equal rights and a push for autonomy, the Ottoman leadership believed that the empire's Islamic character and even its very existence were threatened.
The chief dragoman (Turkish interpreter) of the British embassy wrote that the reason the Ottomans committed these atrocities was because they were "guided in their general action by the prescriptions of Sheri [Sharia] Law. That law prescribes that if the 'rayah' [subject] Christian attempts, by having recourse to foreign powers, to overstep the limits of privileges allowed to them by their Mussulman masters, and free themselves from their bondage, their lives and property are to be forfeited, and are at the mercy of the Mussulmans. To the Turkish mind, the Armenians had tried to overstep these limits by appealing to foreign powers, especially England. They, therefore, considered it their religious duty and a righteous thing to destroy and seize the lives and property of the Armenians."[11]
The combination of Russian military success in the recent Russo-Turkish War, the clear weakening of the Ottoman Empire in various spheres including financial spheres (from 1873, the Ottoman Empire suffered greatly from the Panic of 1873), territorial (mentioned above), and the hope among some Armenians that one day all of the Armenian territory might be ruled by Russia, led to a new restiveness among Armenians who were living inside the Ottoman Empire. The Armenians sent a delegation which was led by Mkrtich Khrimian to the 1878 Congress of Berlin to lobby the European powers to include proper safeguards for their kinsmen in the eventual peace agreement.[citation needed]
But the sultan was not prepared to relinquish any of his power. Abdul Hamid believed that the woes of the Ottoman Empire stemmed from "the endless persecutions and hostilities of the Christian world."[12]
He perceived that the Ottoman Armenians were an extension of foreign hostility, a means by which Europe could "get at our most vital places and tear out our very guts."[13] Turkish historian and Abdul Hamid biographer Osman Nuri observed, "The mere mention of the word 'reform' irritated him [Abdul Hamid], inciting his criminal instincts."[14] Upon hearing of the Armenian delegation's visit to Berlin in 1878, he bitterly remarked, "Such great impudence ... Such great treachery toward religion and state ... May they be cursed upon by God."[15]
While he admitted that some of their complaints were well-founded, he likened the Armenians to "hired female mourners [pleureuses] who simulate a pain which they do not feel; they are an effeminate and cowardly people who hide behind the clothes of the great powers and raise an outcry for the smallest of causes."[16]
The Hamidiye
An Armenian woman and her children who were refugees of the massacres and sought help from missionaries by walking great distances.
The provisions for reform in the Armenian provinces embodied in Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin (1878) were ultimately not enforced and were followed instead by further repression. On January 2, 1881, collective notes sent by the European powers reminding the sultan of the promises of reform failed to prod him into action. The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire were historically insecure;[17] the Kurdish rebels attacked the inhabitants of towns and villages with impunity.[18]
In 1890–91, at a time when the empire was either too weak and disorganized or reluctant to halt them, Sultan Abdul Hamid gave semi-official status to the Kurdish bandits. Made up mainly of Kurdish tribes, but also of Turks, Yörüks, Arabs, Turkmens and Circassians, and armed by the state, they came to be called the Hamidiye Alaylari ("Hamidian Regiments").[19] The Hamidiye and Kurdish brigands were given free rein to attack Armenians, confiscating stores of grain, foodstuffs, and driving off livestock, confident of escaping punishment as they were subjects of military courts only.[20]
In 1894 the sultan began to target the Armenian people in a precursor to the Hamidian massacres. This persecution strengthened nationalistic sentiment among Armenians. The first notable battle in the Armenian resistance took place in Sasun. Hunchak activists, such as Mihran Damadian, Hampartsoum Boyadjian, and Hrayr Dzhoghk, encouraged resistance against double taxation and Ottoman persecution. The ARF armed the people of the region. The Armenians confronted the Ottoman army and Kurdish irregulars at Sasun, finally succumbing to superior numbers and to Turkish assurances of amnesty, which never materialized.[22]
In response to the resistance at Sasun, the governor of Mush responded by inciting the local Muslims against the Armenians. Historian Lord Kinross wrote that massacres of this kind were often achieved by gathering Muslims in a local mosque and claiming the Armenians had the aim of "striking at Islam".[23]
Sultan Abdul Hamid sent the Ottoman army into the area and also armed groups of Kurdish irregulars. The violence spread and affected most of the Armenian towns in the Ottoman Empire.[24][clarification needed]
An 1896 depiction of fanatical "Softas" massacring Armenians.
The Great Powers (Britain, France, Russia) forced Hamid to sign a new reform package designed to curtail the powers of the Hamidiye in October 1895 which, like the Berlin treaty, was never implemented. On October 1, 1895, two thousand Armenians assembled in Constantinople (now Istanbul) to petition for the implementation of the reforms, but Ottoman police units converged on the rally and violently broke it up.[26] Upon receiving the reform package, the sultan is said to have remarked, "This business will end in blood."[27]
Soon massacres of Armenians broke out in Constantinople and then engulfed the rest of the Armenian-populated vilayets of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Erzurum, Mamuret-ul-Aziz, Sivas, Trebizond and Van. Thousands were killed at the hands of their Muslim neighbours and government soldiers, and many more died during the cold winter of 1895–96. William Sachtleben, an American journalist who happened to be in Erzurum after the massacre there in 1895, recounted the grisly scene he came across in a lengthy letter to The Times:
What I myself saw this Friday afternoon [November 1] is forever engraven on my mind as the most horrible sight a man can see. I went with one of the cavasses of the English Legation, a soldier, my interpreter, and a photographer (Armenian) to the Gregorian [i.e., Armenian Apostolic] Cemetery ....Along the wall on the north, in a row 20ft (6m) wide and 150ft (46m) long, lay 321 dead bodies of the massacred Armenians. Many were fearfully mangled and mutilated. I saw one with his face completely smashed in with a blow of some heavy weapon after he was killed. I saw some with their own necks almost severed by a sword cut. One I saw whose whole chest had been skinned, his fore-arms were cut off, while the upper arm was skinned of flesh. I asked if the dogs had done this. "No, the Turks did it with their knives." A dozen bodies were half burned. All the corpses had been rifled of all their clothes except a cotton undergarment or two....To be killed in battle by brave men is one thing; to be butchered by cowardly armed soldiers in cold blood and utterly defenseless is another thing.[28]
The French vice consul of Diyarbakır, Gustave Meyrier, recounted to Ambassador Paul Cambon stories of Armenian women and children being assaulted and killed and described the attackers "as cowardly as they were cruel. They refused to attack where people defended themselves and instead concentrated on defenseless districts."[29] The worst atrocity took place in Urfa, where Ottoman troops burned the Armenian cathedral, in which 3,000 Armenians had taken refuge, and shot at anyone who tried to escape.[30]
Abdul Hamid's private first secretary wrote in his memoirs about Abdul Hamid that he "decided to pursue a policy of severity and terror against the Armenians, and in order to succeed in this respect he elected the method of dealing them an economic blow... he ordered that they absolutely avoid negotiating or discussing anything with the Armenians and that they inflict upon them a decisive strike to settle scores."[31]
The killings continued until 1897. In that last year, Sultan Hamid declared the Armenian Question closed.[episodeneeded] Many Armenian revolutionaries had either been killed or escaped to Russia. The Ottoman government closed Armenian societies and restricted Armenian political movements.
Some non-Armenian groups were also attacked during the massacres. The French diplomatic correspondence shows that the Hamidiye carried out massacres not only of Armenians but also of Assyrians living in Diyarbakir, Hasankeyf, Sivas and other parts of Anatolia.[32][33]
A letter sent by an Ottoman soldier to his brother and parents in November 23, 1895 says:[34]
My brother, if you want news from here we have killed 1,200 Armenians, all of them as food for the dogs... Mother, I am safe and sound. Father, 20 days ago we made war on the Armenian unbelievers. Through God's grace no harm befell us... .There is a rumour afoot that our Batallion will be ordered to your part of the world—if so, we will kill all the Armenians there. Besides, 511 Armenians were wounded, one or two perish every day. If you ask after the soldiers and bashi bozouks [wild irregulars], not one of their noses has bled... May God bless you....
I killed [the Armenians] like dogs... .If you ask news in this manner, we slew 2,500 Armenians and looted their goods
Death toll
Armenian victims of the massacres being buried in a mass grave at Erzerum cemetery.
It is impossible to ascertain how many Armenians were killed, although the figures cited by historians have ranged from 80,000 to 300,000.[4]
The German pastor Johannes Lepsius meticulously collected data on the destruction and in his calculations, counted the deaths of 88,243 Armenians, the destitution of 546,000, the destruction of 2,493 villages, the residents of 646 of which were forcibly converted to Islam,[36] and the desecration of 645 churches and monasteries, of which 328 were converted into mosques.[37][38] He also estimated the additional deaths of 100,000 Armenians due to famine and disease totalling a number of approximately 200,000.[39]
In contrast the ambassador of Britain estimated 100,000 were killed up until early December 1895.[40] However, the period of massacres spread well into 1896. German foreign ministry operative and TurkologistErnst Jäckh claimed that 200,000 Armenians were killed and 50,000 were expelled and a million pillaged and plundered.[40][41] A similar figure is cited by the French diplomatic historian Pierre Renouvin who claimed that 250,000 Armenians died based on authenticated documents while serving his duty.[40][42]
In addition to the death toll many Armenians converted to Islam in an attempt to escape the violence.[43] While Ottoman officials claimed that these conversions were voluntary modern scholars, including Selim Deringil, have argued that the conversions were either directly forced or acts of desperation. Deringil notes that many Armenian men shifted swiftly from Christianity to Islam, seeking out circumcision and becoming prominent attendees of their local mosques, attending prayer multiple times each day.[43] Women converted as well, and many chose to remain within Islam even after the violence ended – some Armenian women who were tracked down following the violence indicated that they preferred to remain with their Muslim husbands, many of whom had captured them during the raids and violence, rather than return and face shame within their communities.[43]
International reaction
Sultan Abdul Hamid II
News of the Armenian massacres in the empire were widely reported in Europe and the United States and drew strong responses from foreign governments, humanitarian organizations, and the press alike.[44] British print and illustrated newspapers regularly covered the massacres, with the popular weekly Punch publishing dozens of cartoons depicting the carnage.[45] Further, historian Leslie Rogne Schumacher notes that the massacres "reflected and impacted the changing world of European international relations" in the years before the First World War, weakening Britain's relationship with the Ottoman Empire and bolstering British ties to Russia.[46]
The French ambassador described Turkey as "literally in flames," with "massacres everywhere" and all Christians being murdered "without distinction."[47][48] A French vice consul declared that the Ottoman Empire was "gradually annihilating the Christian element" by "giving the Kurdish chieftains carte blanche to do whatever they please, to enrich themselves at the Christians' expense and to satisfy their men's whims."[49]
One headline in a September 1895 article by The New York Times ran "Armenian Holocaust," while the Catholic World declared, "Not all the perfume of Arabia can wash the hand of Turkey clean enough to be suffered any longer to hold the reins of power over one inch of Christian territory."[50] The rest of the American press called for action to help the Armenians and to remove, "if not by political action then by resort to the knife... the fever spot of the Turkish Empire."[50] King Leopold II of Belgium told British Prime Minister Salisbury that he was prepared to send his CongoleseForce Publique to "invade and occupy" Armenia.[51] The massacres were an important item on the agenda of the United States President Grover Cleveland, and in his presidential platform for 1896, Republican candidate William McKinley listed the saving of the Armenians as one of his top priorities in foreign policy.[50][52] Americans in the Ottoman Empire, such as George Washburn, then-president of the Constantinople-based Robert College, pressured their government to take concrete action. In December 1900, the battleship USS Kentucky called at the port of Smyrna, where its captain, "Red Bill" Kirkland, delivered the following warning, somewhat softened by his translator, to its governor: "If these massacres continue I'll be swuzzled if I won't someday forget my order… and find some pretext to hammer a few Turkish towns… I'd keel-haul every blithering mother's son of a Turk that wears hair."[53] Americans on the mainland, such as Julia Ward Howe, David Josiah Brewer, and John D. Rockefeller, donated and raised large amounts of money and organized relief aid that was channeled to the Armenians via the newly established American Red Cross.[54] Other humanitarian groups and the Red Cross helped by sending aid to the remaining survivors who were dying of disease and hunger.[55]
Child victims of a massacre awaiting burial in an Armenian cemetery in Erzurum, 1895
At the height of the massacres, in 1896, Abdul Hamid tried to limit the flow of information coming out of Turkey (Harper's Weekly was banned by Ottoman censors for its extensive coverage of the massacres) and counteract the negative press by enlisting the help of sympathetic Western activists and journalists.
Theodor Herzl responded enthusiastically to Abdul Hamid's personal request to harness "Jewish power" to undermine the widespread sympathy felt for Armenians in Europe. Herzl viewed the arrangement with the Abdul Hamid as temporary, and his services were in exchange for bringing about a more favorable Ottoman attitude toward Zionism. Through his contacts, he supported the publication of favorable impressions of the Ottoman Empire in European newspapers and magazines, while himself attempting (unsuccessfully) to mediate between the Sultan and Armenian party activists in France, Britain, Austria and elsewhere. "Under no circumstances," he wrote to Max Nordau, "are the Armenians to learn that we want to use them in order to erect a Jewish state."[56] Herzl's courting the Sultan's favor was protested by other Zionists. Bernard Lazare published an open letter critical of Herzl and resigned from the Zionist Action Committee in 1899. The one fellow leader Herzl sought to enlist, Max Nordau, replied with a one-word telegram: 'No'.[57]
Despite the great public sympathy that was felt for the Armenians in Europe, none of the European powers took concrete action to alleviate their plight.[58] Frustrated with their indifference and failure to take action, Armenians from the ARF seized the European-managed Ottoman Bank on August 26, 1896 to bring the massacres to their full attention.[59] The action resulted in the deaths of ten of the Armenian militants, Ottoman soldiers and the massacre of 6,000 Armenian civilians living in Constantinople by Ottomans.[60] According to the foreign diplomats in Constantinople, Ottoman central authorities instructed the mob "to start killing Armenians, irrespective of age and gender, for the duration of 48 hours." The killings stopped only when the mob was ordered to desist from such activity by Sultan Hamid.[61] Though their demands were rejected and new massacres broke out in Constantinople, the act was lauded by the European and American press, which vilified Hamid and painted him as the "great assassin" and "bloody Sultan."[62] The Great Powers vowed to take action and enforce new reforms, although these never came to fruition due to conflicting political and economic interests.[63]
Inaccurate reporting by the Ottoman government
Haji Agha, a Muslim, chose to stand guard at an Aintab hospital to protect it from an anti-Armenian pogrom in 1895.
After George Hepworth, a preeminent journalist of the late 19th century, traveled through Ottoman Armenia in 1897, he wrote Through Armenia on Horseback, which discusses the causes and effects of the recent massacres. In one chapter Hepworth describes the disparity between the reality of the Massacre in Bitlis and the official reports that were sent to the Porte. After retelling the Ottoman version of events, which places the blame solely on the Armenians of Bitlis, Hepworth writes:
…That is the account of the affair which was sent to Yildiz, and that story contains all that the Sultan has any means of knowing about it. It is a most remarkable story, and the discrepancies are as thick as leaves in Valambrosa. On the face of it, it cannot be true, and before a jury it would hardly have any weight as evidence. It is extremely important, however, because it is probably a fair representation of the occurrences of the last few years. That it is a misrepresentation, so much so that it can fairly be called fabrication, becomes clear when you look at it a second time... and yet it is from an official document which the future historian will read when he wishes to compile the facts concerning those massacres.[65]
Official Ottoman sources downplayed or misrepresented the death toll numbers.[40] The attempt of deliberately misrepresenting the numbers were noted by British Ambassador Phillip Currie in a letter to Prime Minister Lord Salisbury:
The Sultan lately sent to me, in common with my colleagues, an urgent message inviting the six Representatives to visit the military and municipal hospitals to see for themselves the number of Turkish soldiers and civilians who had been wounded during the recent disturbances.
I accordingly requested Surgeon Tomlinson, of Her Majesty's ship "Imogene", to make the round of the hospitals in company with Mr. Blech, of Her Majesty's Embassy...
The hospital authorities made attempts to pass off wounded Christians as Mussulmans. Thus, the 112 in the Stamboul [old city of Constantinople] prison were represented as being Muslims, and it was only discovered by accident that 109 were Christians.[40]
↑ Dadrian, Vahakn N. (1995). The History of the Armenian genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. Oxford: Berghahn Books, p. 163. ISBN1-57181-666-6.
↑ Quoted in Stephan Astourian, "On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict, Sultan Abdülhamid, and the Armenian Massacres," Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 21 (2012), p. 185.
↑ Quoted in Astourian, "On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict," p. 195.
↑ See (in Armenian) Azat S. Hambaryan (1981), "Hoghayin haraberut'yunner: Harkern u parhaknere" [Land relations: Taxes and services] in Hay Zhoghovrdi Patmutyun [History of the Armenian People], ed. Tsatur Aghayan et al. Yerevan: Armenian Academy of Sciences, vol. 6, pp. 49–54.
↑ Astourian, Stepan (2011). "The Silence of the Land: Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity, and Power," in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman Naimark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 58–61, 63–67.
↑ Klein, Janet (2011). The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 21–34.
↑ McDowall, David (2004). A Modern History of the Kurds, 3rd rev. and updated ed. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 60–62.
↑ Nalbandian, Louise (1963). The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
↑ Kurdoghlian, Mihran (1996). Պատմութիւն Հայոց[History of Armenia] (in Armenian). Vol.III. Athens: Council of National Education Publishing. pp.42–44.
↑ Lord Kinross (1977). The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire. New York: Morrow, p. 559.
↑ Salt, Jeremy (1993). Imperialism, evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians: 1878-1896. London u.a.: Cass. p.88. ISBN0714634484.
↑ Quoted in Gia Aivazian (2003), "The W. L. Sachtleben Papers on Erzerum in the 1890s" in Armenian Karin/Erzerum, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian. UCLA Armenian History and Culture Series: Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces, 4. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, pp. 246–47.
↑ Quoted in Claire Mouradian (2006), "Gustave Meyrier and the Turmoil in Diarbekir, 1894–1896," in Armenian Tigranakert/Diarbekir and Edessa/Urfa, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian. UCLA Armenian History and Culture Series: Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces, 6. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, p. 219.
↑ Kieser, Hans-Lucas. "Ottoman Urfa and its Missionary Witnesses" in Armenian Tigranakert/Diarbekir and Edessa/Urfa, p. 406.
↑ Dadrian. History of the Armenian genocide, p. 161.
↑ De Courtois, Forgotten Genocide, pp. 137, 144, 145.
↑ Forsythe, David P., ed. (2009). Encyclopedia of human rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0195334029.
1 2 3 4 5 Dadrian. The History of the Armenian genocide, p. 155.
↑ (in German) Jäckh, Ernst. Der Aufsteugende Halbmond, 6th ed. (Berlin, 1916), p. 139.
↑ (in French) P. Renouvin, E. Preclin, G. Hardy, L'Epoque contemporaine. La paix armee et la Grande Guerre. 2nd ed. Paris, 1947, p. 176.
1 2 3 Sharkey, Heather J. (2017). A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. p.268. ISBN978-0-521-18687-2.
↑ Gary J. Bass, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008; Balakian, The Burning Tigris.
↑ Schumacher, Leslie Rogne (2020), "Outrage and Imperialism, Confusion and Indifference: Punch and the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896," in Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, p. 306
↑ Schumacher, "Outrage and Imperialism, Confusion and Indifference," p. 326
↑ (in French)Cambon, Paul (1940). Correspondance, 1870–1924, vol. 1: L'établissement de la République – Le Protectorat Tunisien – La régence en Espagne – La Turquie d'Abd Ul Hamid, (1870–1908). Paris: Grasset, p. 395.
↑ De Courtois, Sébastien (2004). The Forgotten Genocide: The Eastern Christians, the Last Arameans. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, pp. 106–10.
↑ For a study on the American response to the massacres, see Ralph Elliot Cook (1957), "The United States and the Armenian Question, 1894–1924," Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Tufts University.
↑ Edhem Eldem, "26 Ağustos 1896 'Banka Vakası' ve 1896 'Ermeni Olayları,'" Tarih ve Toplum 5 (2007): pp. 13–46.
↑ Hovannisian. "The Armenian Question in the Ottoman Empire," pp. 224–26.
↑ Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of The Ottoman Armenians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 53. ISBN0-19-927356-1
↑ Rodogno, Davide. Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 185–211.
↑ Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.
↑ For a brief discussion on continuity, see Richard G. Hovannisian (2007), "The Armenian Genocide: Wartime Radicalization or Premeditated Continuum?" in The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 9–11. ISBN1-4128-0619-4.
Astourian, Stephan. On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict, Sultan Abdülhamid, and the Armenian Massacres, Vol. 21 (2012): 168-208.
Rodogno, Davide. Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Schumacher, Leslie Rogne. "Outrage and Imperialism, Confusion and Indifference: Punch and the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896." In Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art, edited by Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava, 305–333. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.
Sipahi, Ali (2020). "Deception and Violence in the Ottoman Empire: The People's Theory of Crowd Behavior during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 62 (4): 810–835. doi:10.1017/S0010417520000298. S2CID224856533.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. (2018). The Hamidian Massacres, 1894-1897: Disinterring a Buried History. Études arméniennes contemporaines, 11, 125-134.
Études arméniennes contemporaines special issues (2018): Global Narratives and Local Approaches, Perceptions and Perspectives
The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children.
The Young Turks formed as a constitutionalist broad opposition-movement in the late Ottoman Empire against the absolutist régime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The most powerful organization of the movement, and the most conflated, was the Committee of Union and Progress, though its goals, strategies, and membership continuously morphed throughout Abdul Hamid's reign. By the 1890s, the Young Turks were mainly a loose and contentious network of exiled intelligentsia who made a living by selling their newspapers to secret subscribers.
In the late 18th century, the Ottoman Empire faced threats on numerous frontiers from multiple industrialised European powers. In response, the empire initiated a period of internal reform, attempting to bring itself into competition with the expanding West. The period of these reforms is known as the Tanzimat, and led to the end of the Old Regime period. Despite the Ottoman empire's precarious international position, the central state was significantly strengthened. The process of reforming and modernization in the empire began with the declaration of the Nizam-I Cedid during the reign of Sultan Selim III and was punctuated by several reform decrees, such as the Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane in 1839 and the Hatt-ı Hümayun in 1856. Over the course of the 19th century, the Ottoman state became increasingly powerful and rationalized, exercising a greater degree of influence over its population than in any previous era.
The Adana massacres occurred in the Adana Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire in April of 1909. Many Armenians were slain by Ottoman Muslims in the city of Adana as the Ottoman countercoup of 1909 triggered a series of pogroms throughout the province. Around 20,000 to 25,000 ethnic Armenians were killed and tortured in Adana and surrounding towns, it was reported that about 1,300 Assyrians were also killed during the massacres. Unlike the previous Hamidian massacres, the events were not officially organized by the central government, but culturally instigated via local officials, Islamic clerics, and supporters of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).
Armenian revolutionary songs are patriotic songs that promote Armenian patriotism. The origins of these songs lay largely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Armenian political parties were established to struggle for the political and civil rights of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire.
The Armenian national awakening paralleled the rise of nationalism among other non-Turkish ethnic groups during the late Ottoman Empire. Ottoman statesmen sought to counter Armenian nationalism during the Tanzimat era, initially through the promotion of Ottomanism and later by transforming the empire into a constitutional monarchy during the First Constitutional Era. However, the reorganization of the millets—the legal courts for confessional communities—exacerbated the issue of dualism within the Ottoman state.
Fedayi, also known as the Armenian irregular units, Armenian militia, or Armenian Hayduks were Armenian civilians who voluntarily left their families to form self-defense units and irregular armed-bands in reaction to the mass murder of Armenians and the pillage of Armenian villages by criminals, Turkish and Kurdish gangs, Ottoman forces, and Hamidian guards during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II in late-19th and early-20th centuries, known as the Hamidian massacres. Their ultimate goal was always to gain Armenian autonomy or independence - depending on their ideology and the degree of oppression visited on Armenians.
The Armenian national movement included social, cultural, but primarily political and military movements that reached their height during World War I and the following years, initially seeking improved status for Armenians in the Ottoman and Russian Empires but eventually attempting to achieve an Armenian state.
The Sasun rebellion of 1894, also known as the First Sasun resistance, was the conflict between Ottoman Empire's Hamidiye forces and the Armenian fedayi belonging to the Armenian national movement's Hunchakian party in the Sasun region.
Armenians were a significant minority in the Ottoman Empire. They belonged to either the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Armenian Catholic Church, or the Armenian Protestant Church, each church serving as the basis of a millet. They played a crucial role in Ottoman industry and commerce, and Armenian communities existed in almost every major city of the empire. The majority of the Armenian population made up a reaya, or peasant, class, in Eastern Anatolia. The Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century sought to manifest the doctrine of equality before the law. Despite their importance, Armenians were persecuted by the Ottoman authorities, especially from the latter half of the 19th century, culminating in the Armenian Genocide.
The Zeitun rebellion or Second Zeitun Resistance took place in the winter of 1895–1896, during the Hamidian massacres, when the Armenians of Zeitun, fearing the prospect of massacre, took up arms to defend themselves from Ottoman troops.
Abdulhamid II or Abdul Hamid II was the 34th sultan of the Ottoman Empire, from 1876 to 1909, and the last sultan to exert effective control over the fracturing state. He oversaw a period of decline with rebellions, and presided over an unsuccessful war with the Russian Empire (1877–78), the loss of Egypt and Cyprus from Ottoman control, followed by a successful war against the Kingdom of Greece in 1897, though Ottoman gains were tempered by subsequent Western European intervention.
The Hamidiye regiments were well-armed, irregular, mainly Sunni Kurdish but also Turkish, Circassian, Turkmen, Yörük, and Arab cavalry formations that operated in the south eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Established by and named after Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1891, they were intended to be modeled after the Cossacks and were supposedly tasked to patrol the Russo-Ottoman frontier. However, the Hamidiye were more often used by the Ottoman authorities to harass and assault Armenians living in Eastern Provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
Ignatius Shoukrallah Maloyan, ICPB was the Armenian Catholic Archbishop of Mardin between 1911–15, when he was murdered during the Armenian Genocide, which was organized in Diyarbekir Vilayet by Dr. Mehmed Reshid. Maloyan was beatified by Pope John Paul II as a martyr in 2001.
Selanikli Mehmed Nâzım Bey also known as Doktor Nazım was a Turkish physician, politician, and revolutionary. Nazım Bey was a founding member of the Committee of Union and Progress, and served on its central committee for over ten years. He played a significant role in the Armenian genocide and the expulsion of Greeks in Western Anatolia. He was convicted for allegedly conspiring to assassinate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in İzmir and was hanged in Ankara on 26 August 1926. He also served as the chairman of the Turkish sports club Fenerbahçe S.K. between 1916 and 1918.
Massacres of Diyarbakır were massacres that took place in the Diyarbekir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire between the years of 1894 and 1896 by Muslims, a majority of whom were ethnic Kurds. The events were part of the Hamidian massacres and targeted the vilayet's Christian population – mostly Armenians and Assyrians.
The Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress was a revolutionary group, secret society, and political party, active between 1889 and 1926 in the Ottoman Empire and in the Republic of Turkey. The foremost faction of the Young Turks, the CUP instigated the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, which ended absolute monarchy and began the Second Constitutional Era. After an ideological transformation, from 1913 to 1918, the CUP ruled the empire as a dictatorship and committed genocides against the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian peoples as part of a broader policy of ethnic erasure during the late Ottoman period. The CUP and its members have often been referred to as "Young Turks", although the Young Turk movement produced other Ottoman political parties as well. Within the Ottoman Empire its members were known as İttihadcılar ('Unionists') or Komiteciler ('Committeemen').
The late Ottoman genocides is a historiographical theory which sees the concurrent Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides that occurred during the 1910s–1920s as parts of a single event rather than separate events, which were initiated by the Young Turks. Although some sources, including The Thirty-Year Genocide (2019) written by the historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi, characterize this event as a genocide of Christians, others such as those written by the historians Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer contend that such an approach "ignores the Young Turks' massive violence against non-Christians", in particular against Muslim Kurds.
Differing views of what caused the Armenian genocide include explanations focusing on nationalism, religion, and wartime radicalization and continue to be debated among scholars. In the twenty-first century, focus has shifted to multicausal explanations. Most historians agree that the genocide was not premeditated before World War I, but the role of contingency, ideology, and long-term structural factors in causing the genocide continues to be discussed.
Ottoman Kurds were ethnic Kurds who lived in the Ottoman Empire. At its peak, the Ottoman Empire ruled North Kurdistan, South Kurdistan, West Kurdistan, and a small part of East Kurdistan. These parts of Greater Kurdistan ruled by the Ottomans are collectively known as Ottoman Kurdistan.
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