Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims (1821-1922) - PDF

-iii. Page Number: iii. Copyright © 1995 by Justin McCarthy. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior per...

-iii. Page Number: iii. Copyright © 1995 by Justin McCarthy. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCarthy, Justin. *Death and exile : the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims*. 1821-1922 / by Justin McCarthy. P. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87850-094-4: \$35.00 1. Muslims \-- Relocation \-- History. 2. Turks \-- Relocation \-- History. 3. Muslims \-- Balkan Peninsula \-- Relocation. 4. Muslims \-- Caucasus-Relocation. 5. Muslims \-- Ukraine \-- Crimes \-- Relocation. 6. Turkey-Emigration and immigration \-- History \-- 19th century. 7. Turkey-Emigration and immigration \-- History \-- 20th century. 8. Muslims \--Crimes against. I. Title. DR27.M87M33 1995 949.61\'015\-- dc20 95-1282 CIP The paper in this book is acid-free neutral pH stock and meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. ∞ Printed in the United States of America. Third printing,1999 -iv. Page Number: iv. To Carolyn Beth -v. Page Number: v. **CONTENTS** **Maps and Tables Spelling and Pronounciation Acknowledgments** ixxixiii ----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- **Introduction** xv **Chapter One: The Land To Be Lost** 1 **Chapter Two: Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus** 23 **Chapter Three: Bulgaria** 59 **Chapter Four: The East, 1878 to 1914** 109 **Chapter Five: The Balkan Wars** 135 **Chapter Six: The Final War in the East** 179 **Chapter Seven: The Final War in the West** 255 **Chapter Eight: The End of the Muslim Land** 333 **Appendix: Methodology and Calculations** 341 **Bibliography** 347 **Index** 359 -vii. Page Number: vii. **MAPS** **Ottoman Europe and Anatolia in 1800** 4 **Ottoman Europe in 1800** 9 **Eastern Anatolia in 1856** 24 **Ottoman Europe in 1877** 63 **Ottoman Balkans in 1912** 137 **Eastern Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus in 1914** 181 **Cilicia** 203 **Western Anatolia and Eastern Thrace in 1914** 257 **TABLES** 1\. **Mortality Due to Disease in Trabzon, 1 December** **1863** **to 17 February 1864** 38 2\. **Population of the Kaza of Çar**≽**amba, ca. 1880** 48 3\. **Turkish Refugees as Estimated in Various Sources** **(1877-80)** 88 -89 4\. **Muslim Population of Bulgaria, 1877** 89 5\. **Surviving Turkish Refugees from Bulgaria in 1879** 90 6\. **Calculation of Muslim Losses in Bulgaria, 1877-79** 91 7\. **The Population of Ottoman Europe, 1911, by** **Province** **and Religion** 135 8\. **Ottoman Europe in 1911. Percentage Population** **by Millet** 136 9\. **Muslim Refugee Numbers** 159 10\. **Muslim Refugees from the Balkans, 1912-20,** **with Areas of Settlement** 161 11\. **Regions of the Ottoman Empire Taken by** **the Balkan Allies** 162 12\. **Population after the Wars** 163 13\. **Muslims in Ottoman Areas Taken by Greece,** **Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia and Muslims Remaining** **in those Countries** 164 14\. **Population of Kars Province in 1897, by Religion** 212 -ix. Page Number: ix. 15\. **Turks in Erivan Province, 1914 and 1926** 217 16\. **Refugees in the Kars Area** 220 17\. **Surviving Muslim Refugees from the Russian Empire** **in Northeastern and Eastern Anatolia in 1922** 221 18\. **Eastern Anatolian Muslim Refugees Receiving** **Assistance, to October 1916** 223 19\. **Destruction in the Cities of Van and Bitlis** 226 20\. **Villages in Van Vilâyeti and Bayazit Sancaγi, Before and After the War and Armenian Occupation** 227 21\. **Muslim Population loss in the Ottoman Eastern** **Provinces, 1912-22** 229 22\. **Turkish and Muslim Population Loss in the** **Transcaucasian Region** 230 23\. **The Population of Ottoman Western Anatolian** **Provinces, 1912** 256 24\. **Jews in Western Anatolia, 1912 and 1922** 284 25\. **Greek Refugees from Turkey** 287 26\. **The Number of Animals Lost in the Occupied** **Territories** 295 27\. **Buildings Destroyed in Western Anatolian Cities** 296 -97 28\. **Buildings Destroyed in the Countryside** 297 29\. **Loss of Muslims in Western Anatolia, 1912-1922** 305 30\. **Mortality and Migration of Muslims** 339 31\. **Recorded Population of Bulgaria in 1285 (1868-** **1869)** **and 1288 (1871-1872)** 342 32\. **The Population of Bulgaria in 1887, by Religious** **Groups** 342 -x. Page Number: x. **SPELLING AND** **PRONUNCIATION** There are always difficulties in reproducing Turkish words in English. Some of the sounds, such as the undotted i (ı), are unknown in English, and some letters sound different, such as the c (hard j, as in \"jump\"). If the words are transliterated close to their English sounds, reference to Turkish works is difficult. Gümühane, for example, becomes Guemueshhane. Therefore, most Turkish words have been reproduced here as they are written in modern Turkish. Ottoman Turkish, which was written with a modified Arabic script, has been transliterated into modern Turkish. The sounds are approximately as follows: a as in father or hah e as in wait or great i as in beet or meet 1 a soft i, as in cushion or curtain o as in home or bone ö as in German u as in moon or June ü as in German ay as in by or why ey as in may or pay c as in jam or jump ç as in child or chimney j as in the French gendarme or passage ş as in ship or shore ğ lengthens previous vowel only. For example, \"ağaç\" is pronounced \"aa-ach.\" -xi. Page Number: xi. Bs and Ps and Ts and Ds are not quite interchangeable in Turkish, but they often seem to be, so the same name often appears in sources spelled in two ways: įzmit and įzmid and Üsküb and Üsküp will both often be seen in print, as will Mehmed and Mehmet, Murat and Murad, and many other proper names. Names in quotations, archival references, and the like have been retained in their original form. Some proper names also appear as they are commonly used in English: \"Ottoman Empire\" not \"Osmanl1 įmparatorluşu,\" \"Istanbul\" not \"įstanbul,\" \"Cilicia\" not \"Kilikya,\" etc. -xii. Page Number: xii. **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS** I wish to thank the persons, agencies, and institutions whose support was essential to the writing of *Death and Exile*. Research on the book was funded by grants from the United States National Endowment for the Humanities (for research on World War I and its aftermath), the Institute of Turkish Studies (for research into mortality and migrations of the Turks), and the University of Louisville. Technical assistance was provided by the University of Louisville, particularly the overwhelmingly competent staffs of the Department of History and the Inter-Library Loan Office. Special thanks are due to Rita Hettinger, Rita Jones, Ljilja Kuftinec, Barbara Winsper, and Debbie Jordan. Librarians and archivists of the U.S. National Archives, the British Public Record Office, the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Atatürk Kitaplş were always helpful. Boşaziçi Üniversitesi and the School of Oriental and African Studies provided gracious support and affiliation while I undertook research in Istanbul and London, respectively. The book was read in manuscript by Alan Fisher, Paul Henze, Heath Lowry, and Stanford Shaw, all of whom provided citations, copies of manuscripts, articles, and books, and sometimes painful, but accurate, corrections. Much of the book has benefitted from their wisdom. Of course, errors and opinions are my own. -xiii. Page Number: xiii. **INTRODUCTION** I came to this study of Muslim mortality and migration from research on the population of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. My interest at the time lay simply in ascertaining how many Muslims had lived in Anatolia and how their population had changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The results of the study amazed me, for nothing in my previous readings on Ottoman history had prepared me for the great mortality of the period. The statistics said that one-fourth of the Muslim population had been lost. I could not believe that such loss had been glossed over in the histories, but checking and rechecking the data left the same conclusion. Not only during World War I, but all through the nineteenth century, the Muslim peoples of Anatolia, the Crimea, the Balkans, and the Caucasus had suffered overwhelming mortality. Their losses were worthy of further research. This volume is the result of that research \-- a history of the mortality and forced migration of the Muslim peoples. It puts forward Muslim losses in detail, but it would be a mistake to treat Muslim losses as if they occurred in a vacuum. Past avoidance of any mention of Muslim losses in most histories does not excuse any corresponding pretense that Christians did not suffer as well. Many of the horrors and sufferings catalogued here took place in wars in which all sides suffered. The losses of Muslims were often accompanied by those of Christians. Whenever possible I have mentioned the fate of Christians who were in conflict with Muslims. This is not, however, a general history of the Ottoman peoples, nor even a history of all wartime mortality in one region. It is a history of Muslim suffering, not because Muslims alone suffered, but because a corrective is needed to the traditional one-sided view of the history of the Turks and the Muslims of these regions. I believe it is also a history that can legitimately stand alone. It is the story of massive mortality and one of history\'s great migrations. -xv. Page Number: xv. **CHAPTER ONE** **THE LAND TO BE LOST** IN 1800, A VAST Muslim Land existed in Anatolia, the Balkans, and southern Russia. It was not only a land in which Muslims ruled, but a land in which Muslims were the majority or, in much of the Balkans and part of the Caucasus, a sizeable minority. It included the Crimea and its hinterlands, most of the Caucasus region, eastern as well as western Anatolia, and southeastern Europe from Albania and Bosnia to the Black Sea, almost all of which was within the Ottoman Empire. Attached to it geographically were regions in Romania and southern Russia in which Muslims were a plurality among different peoples. By 1923, only Anatolia, eastern Thrace, and a section of the southeastern Caucasus remained to the Muslim land. The Balkan Muslims were largely gone, dead or forced to migrate, the remainder living in pockets of settlement in Greece, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. The same fate had overcome the Muslims of the Crimea, the northern Caucasus, and Russian Armenia \-- they were simply gone. Millions of Muslims, most of them Turks, had died; millions more had fled to what is today Turkey. Between 1821 and 1922, more than five million Muslims were driven from their lands. Five and one-half million Muslims died, some of them killed in wars, others perishing as refugees from starvation and disease. Much of the history of the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus cannot properly be understood without consideration of the Muslim refugees and the Muslim dead. This is particularly true of the history of nationalism and imperialism. The contemporary map of the Balkans and the southern Caucasus displays countries with fairly homogenous populations, countries that were created in the wars and revolutions that separated them from the Ottoman Empire. Their ethnic and religious unity was accomplished through the expulsion of their Muslim population. In other words, the new states were founded on the suffering of their departed inhabitants. Similarly, Russian imperialism, still too often portrayed as the -1- Page Number: 1. \"civilizing\" march of European culture, brought with it the deaths of millions of Circassians, Abhazians, Laz, and Turks. Nationalism and imperialism appear in a much worse light when their victims take the stage. The Muslim loss is an important part of the history of the Turks. It was they who most felt the consequences of nationalism and imperialism. At a time when the Ottoman Empire was struggling to reform itself and survive as a modern state, it was first forced to drain its limited resources to defend its people from slaughter by its enemies, then to try to care for the refugees who streamed into the empire when those enemies triumphed. After the Ottoman Empire was destroyed in World War I, the Turks of what today is Turkey faced the same problems \-- invasion, refugees, and mortality. The Turks survived, but their nation was greatly affected by the events of the past century. The new Turkish Republic was a nation of immigrants whose citizens came from Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Like the Ottoman Empire before it, Turkey faced all the difficulties of integrating an immigrant population and coping with massive wartime destruction while it was trying to modernize and survive. The challenges of that struggle shaped the character of the Turkish Republic. Despite the historical importance of Muslim losses, it is not to be found in textbooks. Textbooks and histories that describe massacres of Bulgarians, Armenians, and Greeks have not mentioned corresponding massacres of Turks. The exile and mortality of the Muslims is not known. This goes against modern practice in other areas of history. It has rightly become unthinkable today to write of American expansion without consideration of the brutality shown to Native Americans. The carnage of the Thirty Years\' War must be a part of any history of religious change in Europe. Historians cannot write of imperialism without mention of slaughter of Africans in the Congo or of Chinese in the Opium Wars. Yet, in the West, the history of the suffering of the Balkan, Caucasian, and Anatolian Muslims has never been written or understood. The history of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia has been written without mention of one of its main protagonists, the Muslim population. The \"traditional\" view of the history of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia is less than complete, if not misleading, because the histories of the Ottoman minority groups are taken out of context. A major part of that context is the suffering of Muslims, -2- Page Number: 2. which took place in the same regions and at the same time as the sufferings of Christians, and often transcended them. The few who have attempted to alter the traditional view have been derided as \"revisionists,\" as if revision were an academic sin and contextual historical accuracy irrelevant. In fact, revising one-sided history and changing deficient traditional wisdom is the business of the historian, and in few areas of history is revision so needed as in the history of the Ottoman peoples. The history that results from the process of revision is an unsettling one, for it tells the story of Turks as victims, and this is not the role in which they are usually cast. It does not present the traditional image of the Turk as victimizer, never victim, that has continued in the histories of America and Europe long after it should have been discarded with other artifacts of nineteenth-century racism. **THE MUSLIMS** The subjects of this volume were of many ethnic groups, but they were joined together by religion, as Muslims. The majority were Turkish-speakers. However, it is often not possible to identify to which ethnic group many of the Muslims belonged. Ethnic divisions among its people were not officially recognized by the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman nationals were listed in the census, subjected to military conscription, and taxed according to their religious group. An Ottoman Muslim might be a member of any one of many linguistic groups, but was officially identified only by his or her declaration that Muhammad was the Prophet of God. In the same way, a Greek was a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, no matter his ethnic or linguistic identity, as was an Armenian a Gregorian Armenian or a Catholic Armenian. Popular identification was also made according to religion. Until very recent times Turks, Albanians, Bosnians, and all other Muslim groups would call themselves simply \"Muslims.\" Because of this identification by religion, it is not at all unusual to write of Muslims as a cohesive group. The people under study here identified themselves as Muslims, were classified as \"Muslim\" by their government, and were persecuted because they were Muslim. Nevertheless, ethnic origin is not an unimportant consideration. -3- Page Number: 3. Muslim Turks and Muslim Albanians had different experiences in their wars with Greeks and Serbs. Pomaks, as Bulgarian-speaking Muslims are known, were subjected to special treatment by Bulgarian Christians. Exiled Circassians who were settled in Anatolia were ethnically different from the resident Turks. And Kurdish activities in the Ottoman East cannot be properly analyzed unless Kurds are considered as such. It is, therefore, necessary to identify the inhabitants of the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus as \"Muslims,\" but sometimes to consider them by ethnic group as well. Much nonsense has been written on the ethnic groups of the Middle East and the Balkans. The various ethnic groups have all too often been called \"races,\" as if some mark in the blood or on the soul branded them forever as Greek, Albanian, Turkish, or Armenian. When these ethnic groups are considered here they are labelled by language. \"Albanians\" spoke Albanian. \"Pomaks\" were Bulgarian-speaking Muslims. \"Turks,\" including those often called Tatars or Tartars, spoke Turkish. The only exception comes for those, such as Turkophone Armenians, who demonstrably identified themselves as part of another group. **CAUSES OF CHANGE** Like other historical events, the political causes of change among these Muslims were a combination of political processes. Three primary factors came together to decide the fate of the Muslims of Ottoman Europe, the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Anatoliathe military and economic weakness of the Ottoman Empire, nationalism among Ottoman Christian peoples, and Russian imperial expansion. **Ottoman Weakness.** Had the Ottomans been able to properly defend their empire, the mortality and migration of the Muslims surely would not have occurred. There is no consensus among historians as to the causes of Ottoman weakness. The slow degradation of the traditional Ottoman administrative system surely contributed to internal weakness, just as market changes adversely affected the Ottoman economy. Like peoples in most of the world, the Ottomans participated only marginally in the intellectual, scientific, and industrial revolutions that reshaped and empowered -5- Page Number: 5. Europe. When they perceived their weakness, the Ottomans were without the financial wherewithal and administrative power to change quickly. Although constant military pressure from their enemies made rapid change imperative, the Ottomans were unable to emulate in a few generations what had taken Europe five hundred years to achieve. By 1800, the government of the Ottoman Empire was internally weak, unable to finance and control even the traditional Ottoman military system, much less a modern army and navy capable of standing against the empire\'s enemies. Nineteenth-century reforms built up the Ottoman forces to a level that enabled the Ottomans to subjugate internal enemies and expand centralized control of the empire, but the Ottomans could not stand against their external enemies. The armies of the European Powers were better trained, had better weapons, and in far greater numbers than the Ottoman forces. Beset by strong opponents, the Ottomans had no \"breathing space\" to put their house in order. Time was needed to build a modern state and army. Time was needed to create the industrialized economy that was the base of a strong state. The Ottomans\' enemies, particularly Russia, allowed them no time. The Ottoman armies fought wars in 1806-12, 1828-29, 1832-33, 1839-40, 185356, 1877-78, 1897, 1911-13, 1914-18, and 1919-23, and in major insurrections in 1804, 1815-17, 1821- 30, 1866-68, 1875, 1876, and 1896-97. Armies that should have been in training were continually forced to fight unprepared and were decimated again and again. State finances needed for modernization were expended in wars that ended in loss of territory and a corresponding loss of revenue. In short, Ottoman weakness caused Ottoman losses, and the losses kept the Ottomans too weak to rebound. It was Ottoman weakness that allowed the other two factors \-- the nationalism of the Ottoman minority groups and Russian expansionism \-- to come into play. **NATIONALISM AND** **REBELLION** Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire was unquestionably a philosophical import from Western Europe, but its development in the empire was unique. Its first manifestations were more tied to the Ottoman idea of a religiously defined nation (millet) than to -6- Page Number: 6. ethnic nationalism as seen in the West. Since the beginning of their empire, the Ottomans had allowed the existence of Christian denominations and, through the millet system of limited self-government, had allowed and even fostered separateness based on religion. Each religious community, or millet, was allowed a great deal of autonomy. Courts, schools, and welfare systems were in the hands of religious officials. The legal separation was reflected in the daily life of members of the millets, who often lived and worked together to the exclusion of other religious groups. To the early Ottomans, this policy was not only an observance of the Prophet Muhammad\'s rule of tolerance for Christians and Jews \-- it was a practical matter of \"divide and rule.\" The result was an empire in which the rulers belonged to one religion, Islam, but in which other religions remained and retained a strong separate identity. No particular attempt was made to integrate the members of each religion into a \"nation.\" Given the depth of religious feeling and the importance of religion to personal and group identity, it probably would have been impossible to unite the disparate groups without forced religious conversion, and the Ottomans did not pursue such a policy. Through the centuries of Ottoman rule many converted to Islam, but conversion was not fostered, and forced conversion was almost nonexistent (the special case of the Janissaries notwithstanding). In the millet system, the Ottomans had accepted the existence of a subject class with no inherent loyalty to the state. Under the millet system, loyalty to the state was not expected and was usually not given. As long as civil order was kept and taxes paid, the Ottomans were little concerned with personal feelings toward the government. The real repository of loyalty was one\'s own religious community. \"Ottoman\" was traditionally a description of the rulers of the state \-- a member of the bureaucracy or a military leader \-- not a nationality. When latter-day reformers tried to create an Ottoman nationality, it was far too late. The old habits of primary identification as Greek or Armenian, now nationalities as well as religions, were frozen. As the nineteenth century advanced and \"national\" consciousness grew among Ottoman Christians, nationalism of the Ottoman minorities took on the \"racial\" character seen in Italian or German nationalism, but the strong tie to religion never died. Much, perhaps most, of the national consciousness of the Greeks, Bulgars, and Armenians was founded on religious identification. This was not -7- Page Number: 7. odd, since Christian churches had for centuries been the primary repository of the separate cultures of each Christian group. Christians might cat the same foods, live in the same-style dwellings, even speak the same language as the Muslim Turks, but they worshipped and believed separately. The Ottomans received little credit for their long and unique tradition of religious toleration. Ironically, they paid a heavy price for it. Foreigners used the excuse of protection of the Christian millets and Christian brotherhoods as pretexts for intervention in Ottoman internal affairs. Members of Christian millets drew upon this sense of religious separation to create an antiOttoman nationalism. Nineteenth-century economic and social change within the Ottoman Empire gave Christians a sense of superiority and deepened their resentment of their Muslim rulers. Bolstered by ties with the Christian powers of Europe and a superior educational system, Christians were able to gain disproportionate benefit from nineteenth-century economic advances. Missionaries and others taught them a sense of superiority and of community with the European imperial powers. As many Christians advanced economically, they naturally desired to match economic success with political power. This was denied them. The Ottoman Empire was a Muslim empire in which Christians were allowed to live. Demographically and politically, Muslims were dominant. Resentment of the political situation must have been a strong force in the nationalism of Christian ethnic groups. As Christians advanced economically, Christian pride met traditional Muslim pride, which also assumed superiority based on religion and centuries of dominance. When the chance arose to turn the tables, it was readily taken. The religious element in the nationalism of the minorities was significant in two ways: First, it fed the uncompromising intensity and clearness of purpose of the nationalists. Enemies riot only stood against national aspirations, they stood against God. This made attacks on those perceived as enemies of one\'s people all the easier. Religious nationalism also allowed easy identification of the enemy. As will be seen, Muslims as such were viewed as national enemies by each nationalist group. They were not to be tolerated as part of the nation, because they were not ethnic brothers, and, moreover, they were \"infidels.\" This was one root cause of the forced expulsion of Muslims that accompanied each national revolution. -8- Page Number: 8. Ottoman Europe in 1800. In the nineteenth century, the story of Muslim losses to the new nationalism began with the Greek Revolution of 1821. The Serbs had rebelled earlier, but their rebellion, which was primarily aimed at the misrule of the Janissaries in Serbia, had few of the marks of the national uprisings that were to occur for the next century. The Greek rebellion was the first of the movements that identified themselves by the murder and expulsion of Muslims from -9- Page Number: 9. their land. The Greek revolution set a pattern later followed by other national revolts against the Ottomans. **THE GREEK WAR OF** **INDEPENDENCE** In 1861, the historian George Finlay wrote, In the month of April 1821, a Muslim population, amounting to upwards of twenty thousand souls, was living, dispersed in Greece, employed in agriculture. Before two months had elapsed the greater part was slain \-- men, women, and children were murdered without mercy or remorse. Old men still point to the heaps of stones, and tell the traveller, \"There stood the pyrgos (tower) of Ali Aga, and there we slew him, his harem, and his slaves;\" and the old man walks calmly on to plow the fields which once belonged to Ali Aga, without a thought that any vengeful fury can attend his path. The crime was a nation\'s crime, and whatever perturbations it may produce must be in a nation\'s conscience, as the deeds by which it can be expiated must be the acts of a nation. 1 The Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire began in March of 1821 with the murder of a number of Ottoman government officials, especially tax-collectors. A general attack on the Turks of the Morea in southern Greece followed in April, in which Greek guerrillas and villagers simply murdered every Turk they found. Turkish and Albanian Ottoman soldiers were set upon and killed. Some, such as the Muslims of Kalavryta and Kalamata, surrendered to the Greeks upon receiving promises of safety. They, too, were killed. Many who had fled, such as the Turks of Laconia, were massacred on the roads. 2 In the meantime the Christian population had attacked and murdered the Mussulman population in every part of the peninsula. The towers and country homes of the Mussulmans were burned down, and their property was destroyed, in order to render the return of those who had escaped into the fortresses hopeless. From the 26th of March until Easter Sunday, which fell, in the year 1821, on the 22nd of April, it is supposed that fifteen thousand \[Muslim\] souls perished in cold blood and that about three thousand farmhouses or Turkish dwellings were laid waste. 3 -10- Page Number: 10. The patriotic cry of the revolution, proclaimed by the Greek Archbishop Germanos, was \"Peace to the Christians! Respect to the Consuls! Death to the Turks!\" 4 The only Turks who survived were those who were able to take refuge in strongholds. They fled with their families into the few areas, such as the Acropolis of Athens, which were held by Ottoman garrison troops. There they were either besieged and ultimately killed or, in rare cases, rescued by Ottoman forces. As the Greek Revolution continued, new areas came under attack and the massacres of Muslims were repeated. In Missolonghi, most Muslims were murdered quickly, but Turkish women were taken as slaves of rich Greek families. The Muslims of Vrachori were tortured to death. Jews, who were also perceived as infidels by the Greeks, were killed as readily as were Muslims. 5 Similar events had taken place in primarily Greek Orthodox Romania, where Greek rebels under Alexander Ypsilantes attempted to begin a revolt against the Ottomans that might spread throughout the Balkans ( March 1821). Relying on presumed assistance from Russia, Ypsilantes and his supporters took Galatz and Yassy. In both places, \"Turks of every rank, merchants, sailors, soldiers, were surprised and massacred in cold blood.\" 6 Murders of Ottoman officials, soldiers, and local Turks followed in cities and in the mountains. However, the Russians, perhaps motivated by the antirevolutionary spirit of the Congress of Vienna, refused to militarily support Ypsilantes, and the Ottomans quickly reacted to the massacres. Ypsilantes was forced to flee, his revolution a failure. 7 The only \"success\" of his uprising was the massacre of Turks. The deaths of Turks in Greece were not the mortality of wartime casualties. All the Turks taken by Greek bands, including women and children, were killed, the only exception being small numbers of women and children taken into slavery. Sometimes the Turks were killed immediately, in the hot blood of revolt and the joy of seeing old masters lain low, but often the murders were calculated and in cold blood. Entire Turkish populations of cities and towns were collected and marched out of town to convenient places, where they were slaughtered. 8 For example, in Tripolitza: For three days the miserable \[Turkish\] inhabitants were given over to the lust and cruelty of a mob of savages. Neither sex nor age was spared. Women and children were tortured before being put to death. So great was the slaughter that \[guerrilla leader\] Kolokotrones himself says that, -11- Page Number: 11. when he entered the town, from the gate of the citadel his horse\'s hoofs never touched the ground. His path of triumph was carpeted with corpses. At the end of two days, the wretched remnant of the Mussulmans were deliberately collected, to the number of some two thousand souls, of every age and sex, but principally women and children, were led out to a ravine in the neighboring mountains, and there butchered like cattle. 9 The murders were thus calculated political acts, not simply an outpouring of hatred. The Turks of Greece were seen as standing in the way of a purely Greek and independent Greece. The revolutionaries correctly assumed that the loyalties of the Turks of Greece were toward the Ottoman Empire, not to the \"New Greece.\" A Turkish minority would always be a rallying point for future proOttoman sentiment and perhaps a future Ottoman attack to come to the aid of the Turks of Greece. The Turks would unquestionably be a fifth column against the Greek Revolution. The answer to these problems was extermination. When the European Powers finally forced the Ottomans to create a Greek kingdom in the Morea (the London Protocol of 1830), it was a Greek kingdom devoid of the Turks who had lived there for centuries. 10 Although estimates of mortality are imprecise, it seems that more than 25,000 Muslims had been killed by the Greek revolutionaries. 11 The Greek revolution set a pattern for future revolutions in the Balkans. The policy of ridding regions of their Turkish population in the name of national independence was seen again in the wars of 1877-78, 1912-13, and 1919- 23. In the later wars, the intention was the same as that of the Greek revolutionaries in 1821 -to create unified nations by destroying the ethnic and religious group that stood in the way. Hatred of the Turks was a real factor in the killings, but it was a factor channelled into the aims of independence and nationalism. The desire to take possession of Turkish farms and property was, of course, a factor not to be ignored. **NATIONALISM AND THE** **MUSLIMS** The initial motives of the Greek revolution cannot be called truly nationalistic. Already in 1821 and before, many Greeks considered themselves to be a \"people.\" The history and greatness of -12- Page Number: 12. the ancient Greeks uniquely taught the Greeks a sense of separateness. Most of the impetus behind the revolution, however, was religious. The revolutionaries felt that the Greek Orthodox Romanians would join in their rebellion and, presumably, their new state. Bishops and priests were at the forefront of the revolution, and it is doubtful if the revolt could have seen much success unless the common people felt that they were acting in the name of God. Nevertheless, the blood of the revolution and its ultimate success did act to create a Greek nationalism. Its guiding principles were redemption of the \"unredeemed\" territories still held by the Turks and the creation of a Greater Greece with its capital at Constantinople \-- a rebirth of the Byzantine Empire. The majority of the inhabitants of much of the land claimed for the new empire were Muslims, particularly in Thrace and western Anatolia. The call of nationalism required that those Muslims be removed. As will be seen, creating a nation by expelling Turks and other Muslims was a principle that was to be followed by Bulgarians, Russians, and Armenians. It was the misfortune of the Muslim communities of the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus that they lay in the path of the new nationalisms. Their misfortune was compounded by the fact that the power upon which they depended, the Ottoman Empire, did not have the strength to defend them. Their sufferings were ironic, because, had the Turks in their days of power been nationalists of the Greek sort, it would have been the Christians who were driven out, leaving lands that were purely Muslim Turkish. Instead, the Ottomans had suffered the Christians to remain. They had often treated the Christians well, often poorly, but they had allowed them to exist and to keep their languages, traditions, and religions. They were right to do so, but if fifteenthcentury Turks had not been tolerant, nineteenth-century Turks might have survived in their homes. **RUSSIAN EXPANSION** Despite its weakness, the Ottoman Empire did not constrict or collapse from internal revolution. Whether it would have collapsed from such internal pressures as the desire for political reform or unaided nationalism of its peoples may be an interesting specu- -13- Page Number: 13. lation, but the empire was in fact destroyed in international wars with militarily superior foes, primarily Russia. The same wars decided the fate of the Muslim peoples of the empire \-- their suffering was attendant upon attacks on the empire and invasion of their homeland. In some areas, such as eastern Anatolia during the First World War, many Muslim deaths were the result of intercommunal conflicts, but those too occurred as a part of international war. Russian expansion began in the fourteenth century when the Russians recovered native rule from the overlordship of the Golden Horde. By the end of the fifteenth century, Russian Tsar Ivan III ( 1462-1505) ruled over a kingdom freed from Muslim sovereignty. Then the process of subjection reversed. Ivan the Terrible ( 1533-84) began the conquest of lands north of the Black Sea, in which the population was predominantly Muslim and Turkish-speaking. During his reign and for a hundred years afterwards, wars with the Turkish-speaking Crimean Tatars and other Muslims continued. The wars were vicious, led by raiders on both sides. Like the earlier, somewhat similar wars of expansion in Spain, self-serving leaders and unstable alliances between Christians and Muslims played a part, and sides were not always clearly drawn. Yet, in the end, the Muslims were defeated. By the reign of Peter the Great ( 1689-1725), Tatar rule had been reduced to a small region consisting of the Crimea and its immediate hinterlands. Under Peter and his successors, Russian expansion to the south continued. Perforce the expansion was at the expense of Muslim rulers and the conquest was the conquest of Muslim peoples. The difficulties inherent in this conquest were perhaps more evident to the Russians than they might have been to others. For two centuries the Russians had been under the rule of a people who were religiously and ethnically separate from the population they ruled. Eventually, they succeeded in overthrowing what was viewed as alien rule. The tsars were now undertaking a similar conquest of alien peoples and might ultimately expect the same sort of uprising against alien rulers themselves. The method adopted by the Russians to insure they would not suffer the same fate as the Golden Horde was effective, if ruthless: they denuded the areas they conquered of Muslims and replaced them with Christians. This was not a policy unique to Russians; at the same time as the Russian actions against Muslims, for example, European settlers in North America were imposing a similar policy on the Native Americans. Nor was it a policy -14- Page Number: 14. applied by all the tsars and Russian governors. Russians who felt sympathy and respect for Muslim peoples were not lacking. Nevertheless, viewed as a historical phenomenon, Russian conquest of Muslims was a policy consistently and effectively applied for 150 years. The ethnological map of southern Russia, the Crimea, and the Caucasus today reflects the success of the Russian operations. An investigation of the causes of Russian imperialism is beyond the purview of this study. Scholars have attributed the Russian drive for annexation to everything from paranoia (the result of remembered Mongol domination) to desire for warm-water ports; simpler explanations such as the demands of imperial prestige and the desire to pay supporters with conquered lands cannot be ignored. Imperialism was often its own justification. Whatever the root cause, much of Russian expansion was at the cost of Muslim peoples. The first major group of Muslims to suffer forced migration were the Crimean Tatars. Their experience is instructive not only because of their sufferings, but because the Tatar experience established a pattern for later Russian expansion. **EMIGRATION OF THE** **CRIMEAN TATARS** The Crimean Tatars are considered to have been descendants of Turkic tribes who came to the region between 1000 and 1300 in various waves of conquest. Although in fact largely independent under their own *khans,* the Crimeans were nominally vassals of the Ottoman sultan from the late fifteenth century onward. The Crimean khans both independently and as allies/vassals of the Ottomans battled the Russian tsars. As Russian power increased, the power of the Tatars correspondingly decreased. After subverting the loyalties of the Nogay Tatars of Yedisan (northwest of the Crimea proper) from the Crimean khan in 1770, the Russians invaded the Crimea in 1771, forcing the Crimeans to accept Russian dominance. In 1774, in the treaty of K\`k Kaynarca, the Ottomans accepted the reality of their loss of power over the Crimea and acknowledged it as an independent state, with diminished territory, under a khan acceptable to the Russians. The Russians began to settle Christians from the Ottoman Empire on the lands they had taken from the old Crimean territory. The new settlers were, in fact, military forces, organized by the Russians. When the Tatars -15- Page Number: 15. rebelled against the khan who had been installed by the Russians, the new Russian forces attacked the Tatars, burned Kefe and other Crimean cities, and slaughtered hundreds of the rebellious Tatars in the cities, along with their wives and children. Others were hunted down in the mountains and killed there. 12 Crimean independence only lasted until 1783, when, following further Russian invasions, Tsarina Catherine the Great declared the Russian annexation of the Crimea. 13 The Tatar emigration from the Crimea and adjoining regions to the Ottoman Empire, inspired by a desire to evade Russian rule, began in 1772. Very little is known of the numbers of these early migrants, which may have been as high as 100,000. 14 Similarly, little is known of the Russian pressures that caused them to flee. It is known that more stayed than left. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Crimean and Nogay Tatars remained the dominant demographic element in their homelands. Ultimately, the remaining Tatars were also to be forced from their homes. Mark Pinson has made a convincing case that the primary pressure on the Tatars was administrative. 15 Through measures both \"legal\" and illegal, Russian landlords and officials seized vast expanses of Tatar lands. Tatar peasants were routinely thrown off their ancestral lands. Moreover, the Tatars who remained to work the lands of their new lords were prey to added fees, confiscations, and forced labor. The Russian government continuously increased Tatar taxes, and illegal extra taxes were collected for the pockets of administrators. In addition to the exactions of the Russian administration, the army was used to harry them. For example, an entire Cossack army was settled on the Crimean coast after the 1828-29 RussoTurkish War, and they plagued the Tatar villages in the region. 16 The Crimean War ( 1854-56) brought the Tatar situation to a head. The Russian government assumed, probably correctly, that Tatar sympathies lay with the Ottomans and their British and French allies rather than with Russia. In order to forestall any revolt, the Russians sent armed units among the Tatars. Cossacks and other soldiers raided Tatar villages and threatened their destruction. 17 Many were killed or forced to flee. 18 An unknown number were exiled to the Russian interior. 19 A Russian general who had seen the events commented: From the start to the finish of the war, Cossacks patrolled the Crimean villages, continually accusing the Crimeans of helping the enemy, arrest- -16- Page Number: 16. ing them and setting them free after payment of bribes; others were killed or driven away. 20 Crimean Tatar assistance to the Allies during the Crimean War was, in fact, minimal. The Tatars were a completely disarmed people with no hope of effective rebellion. 21 Nonetheless, immediately after the war, the Russian government made it plain that the Tatars were unwanted. In 1856, Tsar Alexander ordered that Tatar emigration be facilitated. Much of the pressure applied to the Tatars was what today might be called \"psychological\" - creation of societies to spread Christianity, rumors of planned mass deportations to the north, \"Russification\" measures in education and administrative language, and the like. More concretely, new taxes were put on Tatar lands, more lands were seized, and more Tatars were forced off the land. 22 For the Tatars of the Crimea, the most ominous sign was the presence in the Crimea of tens of thousands of Nogay Tatars who had been forced from their lands north and west of the Crimea and who were passing through the Crimea on their way to ports and to the Ottoman Empire. The Nogays had been offered the choice of leaving their lands for less desireable regions elsewhere in Russia or migrating to the Ottoman Empire. Their brother Tatars of the Crimea could only expect that their turn would soon come. 23 The emigration of Nogay Tatars continued through 1860. The Crimean Tatars joined the exodus. 24 They came to an Ottoman Empire ill-prepared to receive them. Observers of the mass emigration of the Crimeans stated that there was not enough money, not enough tents, not enough food, and not enough transport. 25 Health conditions among the closely packed refugees in their camps were deplorable. Perhaps 50 to 60 people a day were dying in Mecidiye, a major gathering and settling location for the exiled Tatars. 26 The situation was the same in the other areas that received the refugees. The Crimea was no longer a Muslim land. At least 300,000 Tatars 27 had emigrated, leaving their lands to be filled with Slavs and other Christians. The small rump of Tatars who remained lived on until after World War II, when Stalin ended the Tatar presence in the Crimea by deporting all those who remained. 28 Incredibly, despite their extensive suffering, the Tatars fared best of the Muslim peoples forced from their homes by the Russians. What the Russians had begun with the Tatars, they were to continue with far greater brutality in the Caucasus and the Balkans. In order -17- Page Number: 17. to cause the Tatars to flee, administrative pressure, unfair treatment, and occasional physical violence were employed. The Tatars, unarmed and undefended and with reason to fear for their religion, culture, and lives, fled. The Russians seldom actually put bayonets to their backs and forced them out; there was no need. As events in the Caucasus were to prove, however, the Tatars were correct in assuming that the bayonets were ready and would be used if required. **THE WARS AND EXILES TO** **FOLLOW** The Russian rulers stumbled into the policy of emigration from the Crimea. In the mid-nineteenth century, some fostered it, as a final remedy to the question of Muslims living under Russian rule and for obvious economic and strategic reasons. Others were unsure, primarily because of the short-term economic loss that accompanied the departure of the main agricultural element of the Crimea. However, after the Tatar migration, the loss was compensated and the Crimean lands became a valuable part of Slavic Russia, as vast estates were taken by the Russian nobility. The lesson was learned by Russian policymakers in the future. In conquests to come in the Caucasus, forced expulsion of peoples was an effective instrument of Russian policy. Unlike the Crimean Tatars, these Muslims were not willing to leave on account of mainly administrative pressures; for them, the pressures brought to bear were more violent \-- massacre, pillage, and destruction of homes and villages. The agency through which nationalism and imperialism led to the loss of the Muslims of the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus was war. In all but one case, the wars were wars with the Russian Empire, and in all the wars but the final one the Muslims were defeated. The wars in the West began with the Greek Revolution of 1821 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29. They continued with the Crimean War of 1853-56, the Russo-Turkish War of 187778, and the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. In the East, the wars under consideration here began with the Russo-Persian and Russo-Turkish Wars of 1827-29, then the Crimean War, the 1877-78 War and -18- Page Number: 18. World War I. In addition to the expulsions of Muslims due to these wars, the Russians fought and expelled from their lands Caucasian Muslims in the 1860s. The final war, the Turkish War of Independence ( 1919-23), was the only war won by Muslims. In each of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century wars, Muslims were massacred and Muslims were forced from their homes. Millions of Muslims died and millions were exiled. Each war was quite different from the others, but the effect of the wars on the Muslims was consistent \-- in great numbers they were killed or driven from their homes. Ottoman defeats were not only military and political matters; they were the occasion of massive population shifts and enormous mortality. In the process, Muslim deaths were not the only deaths, although the number of Muslim deaths dwarfed the numbers of dead Greeks, Bulgarians, or Armenians. For all the peoples of the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of horror. All groups suffered the horrors of war, the famine and disease that accompanied war, and the forced migration of the losers. The chapters that follow selectively tell the history of Muslim migration and mortality. The selective description of Muslim suffering is proper, because the compression of the Muslim Land and the expulsions were continuing historical events, presenting a coherent historical picture. Moreover, without an understanding of the fate of the Muslims, an understanding of the general history of the Ottoman Empire and Russia, as well as the histories of non-Muslim peoples of both empires, is impossible. **NOTES** 1\. George Finlay, *History of the Greek Revolution*, London, 1861, p. 172. (This is a reference to his original history of the revolution, not the later general history of Greece as edited by Tozer.) Many histories of the Greek Revolution do not mention massacres of Turks or they give them little attention (e.g., Eduard Blaquiere , *The Greek Revolution: its origin* *and progress*, London, 1824, and John Lee Comstock , *History of the* *Greek Revolution*, Hartford, 1851). One cannot help but feel that such matters did not fit the ideological stand of the authors. For an account that emphasizes the massacres of Muslims, see Alfred Lemaitre, *Musulmans et Chrétiens. Notes sur la guerre de l\'indépendance greque, Paris, 1895.* 2\. Finlay, pp. 179-86. 3\. Finlay, p. 187. -19- Page Number: 19. 4\. Thomas Gordon, *History of the Greek Revolution*, Edinburgh and London, 1832, p. 149. An example of the general feeling behind the sentiment \"Death to the Turks\" is to be found in W. Alison Phillips, *The War of Greek Independence, 1821 to 1833*, New York, 1897, p. 48:... in April the insurrection was general. Everywhere, as though at a preconcerted signal, the peasantry rose, and massacred all the Turks \-- men, women, and children \-- on whom they could lay hands. In the Morea shall no Turk be left Nor in the whole wide world. Thus rang the song which, from mouth to mouth, announced the beginning of a war of extermination. The Mussulman population of the Morea had been reckoned at twenty-five thousand souls. Within three weeks of the outbreak of the revolt, not a Moslem was left, save those who had succeeded in escaping into the towns. 5\. Finlay, pp. 201-03. 6\. George Finlay, *A History of Greece* (edited by H. F. Tozer), vol. VI, Oxford, 1877, p. 119. See also, Phillips, pp. 32 and 33. 7\. Finlay ( 1877), vol. VI, pp. 116-21, and Phillips, pp. 32-35. 8\. C. M. Woodhouse, *The Greek War of Independence: Its Historical* *Setting, London*, 1952 (reissue, New York, 1975), p. 77. Even Woodhouse, who was usually at pains to avoid saying anything that could be called sympathetic toward the Turks, was forced to admit this. 9\. Phillips, pp. 60-61. 10\. The Ottoman government reacted to the massacres in Greece with a ferocity of its own. The Greek Patriarch and others were hanged in Istanbul, and uprisings in Aydin VilU+0E4yeti and the island of Chios were met with massacres of Greeks. 11\. The estimates of Muslim mortality are generally in the 25,000 range, but in the absence of population registration no one can be sure of the actual numbers. A reading of the massacres as described indicates the magnitude of the mortality. For example, in the following selections from Finlay ( 1877), by no means inclusive: 26 March to 22 April 1921, 10- 15,000 Muslims \"killed in cold blood\" (p. 152), followed by all but 22 in Missolonghi (p. 163); 500 families in Vrachori (p. 165); almost all the men, women, and children in Navarino (p. 215); more than 2,000 in Tripolitza (p. 219), etc. Douglas Dakin ( *The Greek Struggle for Independence, 1821-33*, London, 1973, p. 59) states that \"15,000 out of 40,000 Turks perished,\" but gives no evidence on how so many Turks escaped, when earlier sources indicate that few did so. Dakin uniformly overestimates Greek deaths and underestimates Turkish deaths. 12\. Alan W. Fisher, *The Russian Annexation of the Crimea, 1772-1783*, Cambridge, 1970, pp. 90-95. 13\. This short section on the history of the Crimea is taken from Alan Fisher *The Crimean Tatars*, Stanford, California, 1978, pp. 1-69 and Russian Annexation of the Crimea. 14\. See Alan Fisher, \"Emigration of Muslims from the Russian Empire in the Years After the Crimean War\", Jahrbucher fér Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 35, no. 3, 1987, pp. 356-71. Elsewhere, Fisher has estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Crimean emigrants before 1789 ( *The Crimean Tatars*, p. 78). -20- Page Number: 20. 15\. Mark Pinson, \"Russian Policy and the Emigration of the Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire, 1854-1862, *Güney-Doüu Avrupa Arastirmalan* *Dergisi. I ( 1972), pp. 38-41.* 16\. Fisher, \"Emigration of Muslims\" and Djafer Seidahmet, *La Crimée*, Lausanne, 1921, pp. 47-50. 17\. Pinson, pp. 42-43. 18\. Fisher, \"Emigration of Muslims\". 19\. Pinson, pp. 43 and 44. 20\. Fisher, *Emigration of Muslims*. 21\. General Totleben himself deprecated the effect of any Tatar feelings or action on the Russians, saying that the Tatars had not influenced Russian losses in the war ( Pinson, p. 43). 22\. *Atrocities Russes. Documents soumis a la Conference de Constantinople,* *Constantinople, 1877, esp. pp. 3, 4, and 36. Seidahmet, pp. 39-43.* 23\. This is a valuable insight of Mark Pinson, who felt that the Nogay migration was \"the last straw\" for the Crimeans ( Pinson, p. 46). 24\. The Russian government, alarmed by the great extent of the migration, vacillated on whether or not to let so great a part of the productive population leave. Permission to leave was alternately granted and refused, the desire to see all Muslims gone warring with fear of a destroyed economy (see Pinson I, pp. 48-56). This is one of the reasons a Tatar community still existed in the Crimea until Stalin\'s expulsion. (Under more tolerant Soviet leaders, some returned.) See Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, *Muslims of the Soviet Empire: a* *Guide*, London, 1985, pp. 240-41.) 25\. *F.O. 195-644, Suter to Bulwer*, Varna, 23 July 1860. 26\. *F.O. 195-644, Suter to Bulwer*, Kustendji, 22 October 1860. Kemal Karpat has described the settlement of the Crimean refugees in interesting detail in \"Ottoman Urbanism: the Crimean Emigration to Dobruca and the Founding of Mecidiye, 1856-1878\", *International* *Journal of Turkish Studies* 3 (no. 1, 1981), pp. 1-25. The article is valuable not only for its information on Mecidiye and the Dobruja, but for its view of Ottoman settlement policy and the concern given the refugees in Ottoman official policy. 27\. For estimates of the numbers, see Fisher *Russian Annexation of the* *Crimea*, pp. 145 and 146 and \"Emigration of Muslims\". There is much disagreement on the numbers of Crimean emigrants. Kemal Karpat estimates 1,800,000 \"between 1783 and 1922\" ( *Ottoman Population* *1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics*, Madison, Wisconsin, 1985, p. 66) and others give varying figures. When there is a question of which of a set of estimates to use, it is my policy here and elsewhere in this book to opt for lower figures on Muslim migration and mortality. The thesis of this work is that there was major death and forced migration of the Muslim population. By taking the lower figures for death and migration, therefore, I am perhaps underestimating, but by making the thesis harder to prove, I intend to make the proof all the more plausible. 28\. Fisher, *Emigration of Muslims*. The Russians also gave lands in the Crimea to Moldavians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks \-- migrants from the Ottoman Empire. A large number of Jews emigrated to the Crimea from elsewhere in the Russian dominions ( Fisher, \"Emigration of Muslims\"). -21- Page Number: 21. **CHAPTER TWO** **EASTERN ANATOLIA AND THE** **CAUCASUS** *Russia is half an ape and half a bear. She apes Europe in foreign kingdoms,* *but at home the bear\'s paw is felt everywhere.* \-- Ivan Golovin 1 MOST OF WHAT HAS been called the history of the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has in fact been mostly propaganda from the ethnic groups that vied for control of the region. While more than willing to exaggerate the losses of their own groups, the authors of such histories seem to have been unaware that enemy groups suffered losses as well. This has led to a tendency to label battles as massacres and wars as \"genocide.\" To do otherwise would be to admit that both sides were shooting and both sides died. In the absence of accurate histories one is thrown back on original sources. Unfortunately, these are also greatly deficient for the study of the Muslims of eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. Ottoman governmental records are only slowly and laboriously becoming available, and the situation with Russian records is similar. European consuls were few, were usually deeply prejudiced, and very seldom actually saw the events about which they reported. Therefore, evidence on the Ottoman East must be laboriously collected, and a researcher\'s emphasis must be on observed facts, not on the interpretations and analyses of contemporaries, which were often seriously flawed by prejudice. The geographic area considered in this chapter began in the steppe north of the Caucasus mountain chain and extended in the south through all of eastern Anatolia, in the east through Persian Azerbaijan, and in the west at least through the vilâyet of Sivas. 2 It was a vast and polyglot region. Christians were primarily represented by the Armenians, spread throughout the region, by Georgians in their homeland, and by Chaldeans and Nestorians in the southern mountains. Greeks were present in significant numbers -23- Page Number: 23. only on the coast of the Black Sea. From the southern Caucasus (\"Transcaucasia,\" today the Armenian Republic, the Azerbaijan Republic, and part of Georgia) to the mountains of northern Iraq, the Muslims were Turks and Kurds. The Azeri Turks who lived in Azerbaijan (the southeastern Caucasus region and northwestern Iran) were primarily Shi\'a Muslims. Sunnī Turks were the majority of the population in the far southern Caucasus and in all eastern Anatolia except the southeast, with groups of Sunni Turks in the cities and some rural areas of the southeast. While the Kurds were primarily nomadic or seminomadic, settled agricultural and urban Kurds lived in the cities and villages of the southeast. Kurdish tribes ranged over the entire east of Anatolia, forming a compact mass in the Dersim region (southwest of Erzincan) and in the Van Vilâyeti, northern Iraq, and southwestern Persia. The Muslim population of the Caucasus mountains, the eastern Black Sea littoral, and the northwest Caspian Sea littoral was made up of what are usually called the Caucasian tribes. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Circassians, who had once spread over greater territory, were the main population of the northwest Caucasus. Various tribes inhabited Daǧstan (the mountains and coast of the west-central Caspian, often written Daghestan) -Chechens, Andis, Avars, as well as Azeri Turks. To the west, the Laz (of the Georgian language group) inhabited the coastal regions near Batum and south to Rize. The Abhazians (or Abhazs, also a Georgian linguistic group) inhabited the coastal region to the north, centered on Sukhumkale. A number of other tribes, many attached to the larger groups, were spread throughout the Caucasus. While migration was later greatly to change settlement patterns, in 1800 Muslims undoubtedly were the largest religious group. Only in Georgia and in small sections of Anatolia were Christians a majority. In studying the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia, one becomes aware that they can and should be treated as one region, despite political boundaries. Throughout the 100-year period of this study, the histories and the peoples of the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia cannot be understood separately. Economically, socially, linguistically, and religiously the connections among the peoples of the region remained strong well into the 1920s, perhaps beyond. To understand the closeness of the histories of the peoples of the \"Russian South\" and \"Ottoman East\" one has only to consider them by religious groups, rather than by political borders. It is -25- Page Number: 25. impossible to consider the Anatolian Armenians as if they were not intimately connected to the Armenians of Erivan. Too many migrants crossed from the Ottoman Empire to Russia, too many bishops from the jurisdiction of Istanbul to that of Echmiadzin and back, too many revolutionaries crossed and recrossed the borders for the Armenians to be accurately styled as Turkish Armenians and Russian Armenians in any but a political sense. The same was true of Muslims, especially the Turks and Kurds of the southern Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. Although most Muslim migration was outmigration from the southern Caucasus to eastern Anatolia, there was considerable ongoing migration for purposes of trade, employment, and family. Muslim nomads crossed the political borders freely. New infusions of forced migrants brought news of the Caucasus to their fellow Muslims in the east. Armenians under Russian and Ottoman rule obviously viewed each other as brothers, no matter their citizenship. The same was true of Muslims. It is doubtful if the concept of citizenship, as opposed to religious affiliation, had taken any great hold in either the Caucasus or eastern Anatolia before the 1920s. In the east, a Caucasian Muslim felt closer to an Anatolian Muslim than to a Caucasian Armenian, just as an eastern Anatolian Armenian affiliated himself with Armenians of the Caucasus, not Anatolian Muslims. For this reason, it is ridiculous to speak of a large group of loyal Muslim subjects of Russia in the Caucasus or loyal Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in eastern Anatolia. Both regions had Muslims and Armenians who were integrated into the political system and could be considered as loyal, even patriotic subjects. Most Armenians and Muslims, however, were peasants or nomads who knew no real affiliation above tribe or village, except their religious affiliation. Their primary loyalty to their own religious groups was proven again and again in the Caucasian and eastern Anatolian wars. In time of war, the sympathies of Armenians and Muslims emerged openly. There was no doubt as to the loyalty of either group. Despite the fact that some Muslims fought on the side of the Russians, particularly in the Crimean War, 3 and many middleclass Armenians supported the Ottoman government, both Armenians and Muslims in the east generally assumed that their place was alongside their coreligionists. This was true in both the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. In the Caucasus, Muslims re- -26- Page Number: 26. sponded to Ottoman calls for rebellion against their Russian masters in time of war and fought as guerrillas and regular troops against their Russian masters, as stated by W. E. D. Allen: \[In World War I\] In the Valleys of the Çoruh and the Oltu-çay there were very mixed elements: Christians (Armenians) predominated in the towns of Artvin, Ardanuch, Ardahan and Oltu, while Muslims were in the majority in the countryside; these Muslims included Groups of Georgian origin, like the Laz and Acars, Turks, remnants of the old Tatar hordes, and Cherkesses who had settled, after 1864, on what was then the Turkish side of the border. Irrespective of their racial origins, all the Muslims proved more or less ready to help the Turks, particularly when they came as an invading army. Thus the Cherkesses of Upper Sarikamiș stubbornly defended their stone saklyas by the side of the Turkish askers, and the needy inhabitants of the uplands provided scanty food to the divisions of Hafiz Hakki during their desperate march across the Allahuekber Mountains \[in the ill-fated invasion of the southern Caucasus\]. 4 Some Armenians began to act as adjuncts of Russian policy and the Russian army as early as the early 1700s, in the time of Peter the Great. The dependence of Armenians on Russia and their expectations of assistance from that quarter had begun to grow from the first incursions of the Russians into the Caucasus. As far back as the reign of Peter the Great, when they organized a military force to assist the Tsar\'s invasion of the region, 5 Caucasian Armenians had promised loyalty and support to the Russian tsars. During the 1700s and 1800s, Armenian secular and religious officials supported the Russian invasion of the Muslim khanates in the Caucasus and the overthrow of their Muslim rulers. At the same time, Armenians first acted as spies for the Russians against their Muslim overlords, in this case the Persian Empire. 6 When the city of Derbend was under siege by the Russians in 1796, its Armenian residents sent the invaders information on the town\'s water supply, allowing the Russians to defeat the Khan of Derbend. 7 An Armenian Archbishop, ArgutinskiiDolgorukov, proclaimed publicly ( 1790s) his hope and belief that the Russians \"would free the Armenians from Muslim rule.\" 8 Armenian subjects of the Persian and Ottoman empires, as well as Armenians living in the Russian Empire, fought on the side of the Russians against Persia and the Ottoman Empire in the 1827-29 wars and the Crimean War. 9 -27- Page Number: 27. For their part, Armenians in Ottoman Anatolia also first showed their loyalty to the Russian cause by acting as spies for the Russians. Armenians from Anatolia crossed the lines and reported on Ottoman troop movements in all the east Anatolian wars. Anatolian Armenians assisted invading Russian armies in 1827; many thousands followed the Russian army out of Anatolia when they left. During the Crimean War, Armenians brought intelligence out of besieged Kars to the Russians. Armenian guides from Ottoman Anatolia led the Russian invaders in 1877. The Armenians of the Eleșkirt Valley welcomed the invading Russian armies in 1877 and, when the Russians retreated, left en masse with them. 10 In the First World War, as will be seen, the Armenians in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus were, as a group, allied to the Russians. In Anatolia, the reliance of Armenian revolutionaries on the Russians began to be evident by mid-century in the revolution at Zeytun. When funds were needed to strengthen the defenses of Zeytun against the Ottomans in 1854, while the Ottomans fought the Russians in the Crimean War, Armenian rebels attempted to get financial assistance from the Russians. 11 In 1872, the Armenians of Van wrote as a \"community\" to the Russian Viceroy for the Caucasus asking for assistance against their own government. They asked to become Russian subjects and, more concretely, began to collect arms. 12 The connections of Ottoman Armenians with the Russian Empire carried on in the activities of the main Armenian revolutionary groups, especially the Dashnaks (Dashnaktsuthiun). Russian Armenia was a center for arms collection and revolutionary organization aimed at the Ottomans. 13 The activities of the revolutionaries were greatly facilitated by their relationship to the Armenian Church. As a body, the Church naturally crossed the OttomanRussian border, because its two centers were in Echmiadzin, in Russian Armenia, and in Istanbul; and clerics, bishops, and ideas freely crossed between the two ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Using the facilities of the Church, revolutionary clerics easily kept up communication between revolutionaries in the southern Caucasus and Anatolia and between the Russian government and the revolutionaries. The presence in the Armenian revolutionary movement of priests and bishops 14 brought together the two foci of Armenian identity \-- the Church and modern nationalism. It also gave religious blessing to secular nationalism and presented Armenian nationalism in a religious context easily understood by eastern Anatolian Arme- -28- Page Number: 28. nian villagers. Moreover, church officials also gave practical assistance to the revolution. For example, the monastery of Derik, on the Persian side of the Ottoman-Persian border, was organized by its revolutionary abbot (Bagrat Vardapet Tavaklian, or \"Akki\") into an arsenal and infiltration point for Armenian revolutionaries acting in the Ottoman Empire. 15 The continuity of eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus explains much about seemingly spontaneous violence that erupted in both regions. Traditional histories have treated each outburst of eastern Anatolian or Caucasian intercommunal violence as an isolated instance. Divorced of their historical and geographic context, the conflicts have only been explainable as outpourings of irrational feelings. Because Armenian attacks on Muslims have seldom been considered (only Muslim attacks on Armenians), it has been easy for commentators to portray the Muslims as savages who occasionally felt the need to kill Christians. In fact, Armenians attacked Muslims just as Muslims attacked Armenians, sometimes without apparent provocation or immediate justification. At times this was an outpouring of irrational hatred, but more usually it arose from an awareness on both sides of their history. Because of that history and because of knowledge of events in the Caucasus and Anatolia, Armenians and Muslims both knew that their fellows had been killing each other in great numbers. They knew that both sides had been forced to flee from the other or die, again in great numbers, and they knew that if intercommunal war came to them, they would suffer the same fate as their coreligionists, unless they defeated their enemies. This is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy \-- both sides killed because they knew the other side would kill them \-- and makes perfect sense within this context. In sum, to understand the history of the enmity between Armenians and Muslims, one must view the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia as a whole, an entire region in which Armenians and Muslims fought for supremacy for 100 years. **RUSSIAN EXPANSION** In many ways, the enmity between Armenians and Muslims had at its base Russian expansion into the Caucasus. In this, as in -29- Page Number: 29. many other ways, the Caucasus region and eastern Anatolia were tied together, for both were steps in the piece-by-piece expansion of the Russian Empire. From a relatively early period in the Russian conquests, Georgians and Armenians appeared as natural allies in the Russian expansion. The Georgians, an Orthodox Christian people in the south-central Caucasus, feared dominance by the Persian or Ottoman empires. This fear and natural religious affinity with Russian Orthodox Christians led Georgian rulers to become first the allies and then the subjects of the tsar. The Armenian situation was different: Scattered throughout the southern Caucasus and eastern Anatolia, they were in a clear majority in no large region in 1800. The Armenians lived in and claimed as theirs the same land as the Muslims. It was this fact that allied them with the Russians, for without Russian assistance an Armenian homeland was unattainable. With hindsight, one can construct a model of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. The seeming intent was to replace Muslim demographic and political domination in the Caucasus with Christian demographic and Russian political preponderance as in the Crimea. Their demographic policy had two pillars \-- the exodus of Muslims and the immigration of Christian elements, Slavs in the north Caucasus, Armenians in the south Caucasus and later in Anatolia. As is the case in most such models, the reality was much more complex. As in the Crimea, the tsars were not unified in purpose, and Armenian hopes for independence sometimes made them unreliable tools of Russian imperial ambitions. Like other imperial powers, the Russians at first seemed to have actually expanded through a desire to protect traders and settlers who moved into foreign territories, rather than through a coordinated plan of expansion. There can be no question, however, that the expulsion of Muslims ultimately became a feature of Russian expansion in the Caucasus. Where Muslim majorities strongly opposed Russian conquest and rule, they were forced out by means of government pressure and exemplary violence. In areas conquered by the Russians, mosques were confiscated, and *vakifs* (pious foundations), which had supported the Muslim religion and Muslim charities and schools, were also taken. 16 A good example of early Russian policy is afforded by the Russian conquest of the khanate of Ganja (renamed Elizavetpol). In 1803, the Russians attacked Ganja and defeated its khan. Geor- -30- Page Number: 30. gian auxiliaries in the Russian Army as well as Russians themselves were allowed or encouraged 17 to massacre Muslims in Ganja Province. 18 After the conquest, every effort was made to demean the Islamic way of life, so that the Muslims felt they had no alternative but to flee. 19 Armenians were then encouraged to move into Russianheld territory. For example, after the Russian conquest of Georgia, Tsar Paul attracted Armenians to Georgia by offering Armenian leaders very attractive terms to come into Russian territory in 1800. 20 Armenians also came into the khanate of Karabagh after its conquest by the Russians. 21 **THE 1820s** The century-long struggle between Muslims and Armenians began in earnest in the Russo-Persian and Russo-Turkish wars of 1827-29. The basic features of that long battle were all seen in those first wars \-- Russian invasion of Ottoman territory, Armenians siding with the invader, great Muslim mortality, forced migration of Muslims and a de facto population exchange of Muslims and Armenians. In the 1827-29 wars in the east, a massive population exchange began, sparked by Russian expulsion of Muslims of the Erivan region. George Bournoutian has made use of Persian and Russian sources to estimate the population change in the Khanate of Erivan due to Russian conquest. He concludes that approximately 26,000 (30 percent) of the Muslims of the khanate either died or emigrated, based on a Russian population survey. 22 Bournoutian further states that 45,000 Armenians had newly arrived in Erivan by 1832, \"but it was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century \-- after the Russo-Turkish Wars of 1855-56 and 1877-78 brought more Armenians in from the Ottoman Empire \-- that the Armenians established a solid majority in the region.\" 23 Thus an Armenian majority came to pass in what today is the republic of Armenia, a majority created by the Russians. Erivan, approximately the area of the present Armenian Republic, was until 1827 an Iranian province with a Muslim (primarily Turkish) majority. The destruction or forced migration of the Muslim population allowed the Russians to repopulate the region with Armenians from Iran and the Ottoman Empire. -31- Page Number: 31. A large number of Armenian residents of Anatolia followed the Russians when they left Anatolia in 1829. One estimate listed 90,000 as having left, 24 perhaps a slight exaggeration, but indicative of a large movement of Christians to the Russian Caucasus. H. F. B. Lynch stated that 10,000 Armenian families from Erzurum Province \"followed the Russians out of Turkey in 1829\" to join the 40,000 Armenians who had recently come from Persia. 25 After the Crimean War another large number of Armenians left eastern Anatolia. The European Commission that was delegated by treaty to fix the boundary between Russia and the Ottoman Empire found Armenian villages \"half inhabited\" and stated that the Muslims regarded the Armenians as partisans of the Russian invaders. 26 The events in Erivan cannot have escaped the attention of the Muslims in what remained of the eastern Ottoman Empire. Even had they not themselves been affected by the wars, eastern Anatolian villagers and city dwellers would have noticed the influx of refugees and heard their stories of Russian activities in the wars. To the Turks and the Kurds of eastern Anatolia, as well as those of the Caucasus, Russian intentions would have been clear. **FORCED MIGRATION FROM** **THE CAUCASUS** Before the Russian invasion, the Muslim population of the Caucasus region was primarily made up of Turks in Azerbaijan and Erivan and Muslim tribes in the rest of the region. The largest groups of tribesmen were the Circassians (Çerkes), the Abhazians, the Chechen-Ingush, and the Daghestanis. 27 Smaller groups were usually tied to larger ones, and the Circassians, in particular, were divided into smaller tribes. All had been largely independent throughout history, occasionally accepting the nominal overlordship of Ottomans or Persians, but never relinquishing their independence. Ottoman or Persian rule had never acutally penetrated beyond the coasts and the southern khanates or kingdoms (such as Georgia or Erivan). Russia had shown an interest in conquering the Caucasus from the time of Peter the Great, who seized Derbend and Baku in 1722-23. Peter\'s successes, however, were short-lived, and the Russians were forced from the region by Nadir Shah of Persia, who regained Derbend and Baku by the Treaty of Ganja in 1735. Not -32- Page Number: 32. until 1812 were the two cities definitively captured by the Russians, 28 along with the city and region of Ganja (Elizavetpol). Georgia had become a Russian tributary in 1783. 29 After defeating Persia ( 1828) and the Ottoman Empire ( 1829), Russia forced Ottoman and Persian acceptance of its conquest of Akhalkalak and the province of Erivan. With the exception of the cities of Batum and Poti and their hinterlands, all the Caucasian possessions of the former U.S.S.R. were nominally in the hands of the Russian Empire by 1829, 30 but much of the territory was not under Russian control. The great mountainous interior of Caucasia was populated by tribes that had never been defeated, nor had they ever accepted Russian rule. The Russians had seized northern border areas of tribal lands in the 1830s, but were unable to counter fierce Caucasian resistance and conquer the interior. After 1836, the Russian presence in the Caucasus was threatened by the brilliant leader Shamil and his fanatically loyal Chechen and Daghestani followers. 31 Shamil managed to meld together followers from disparate tribes with a combination of Islamic revivalism and the subjugation of traditional aristocracies who opposed him. He was a gifted and ruthless leader, but much of his support depended on the resolve of the Caucasian tribes to resist Russian control. Through the 1840s, the Muslim mountaineers, though sometimes defeated in battle, held their own against the Russians. The Caucasians were fierce fighters, especially as they were fighting in defense of their homes and families. They gave no quarter, nor did the Russian invaders. However, the Russians were warring on entire peoples, women and children as well as male fighters, whereas the Caucasian Muslims were fighting against an organized army. 32 Count Leo Tolstoy, who himself saw the carnage in the Caucasus, described the Russian conquest of Caucasian Muslim villages: It had been the custom to rush the aouls \[villages\] by night, when, taken by surprise, the women and children had no time to escape, and the horrors that ensued under the cover of darkness when the Russian soldiers made their way by twos and threes into the houses were such as no official narrator dared describe. 33 It was only after Ottoman defeats in the east in the Crimean War had removed any threat from that quarter that the Russians -33- Page Number: 33. were able to set upon the final reduction of the Caucasian mountaineers. In 1857, they began their final attack on Shamil. The exhausted Chechen and Daghestani tribes were finally defeated and Shamil forced to surrender ( 25 August 1859). The Circassians were then in turn defeated. By May of 1864, Russian control of the Caucasus was complete. With victory came the implementation of a Russian policy of forced migration, much more vicious than anything seen in the Crimea. While a number of Chechens migrated to the Ottoman Empire as well, it was the fertile lands of the Circassians that most tempted the Russians, who resolved to turn the western and northern Caucasus into a Christian land, loyal to their empire. The Russians adopted a system of attack and repression that made it impossible for the Circassians to remain in their homes. Villages were plundered, then destroyed. Cattle and anything else necessary to survival were taken. The Russian method was a classic system of forced migration that would later be repeated again and again in the Caucasus and the Balkans \-- destroy homes and fields and leave no choice but flight or starvation. 34 The Caucasian Muslims were sometimes given the choice of either migrating elsewhere in the Russian Empire and remaining under Russian domination or leaving for the Ottoman Empire: A Russian detachment having captured the village of Toobah on the Soobashi river, inhabited by about a hundred Abadzekh \[a tribe of Circassians\], and after these had surrendered themselves prisoners, they were all massacred by the Russian Troops. Among the victims were two women in an advanced state of pregnancy and five children. The detachment in question belongs to Count Evdokimoff\'s Army, and is said to have advanced from the Pshish valley. As the Russian troops gain ground on the Coast, the natives are not allowed to remain there on any terms, but are compelled either to transfer themselves to the plains of the Kouban or emigrate to Turkey. 35 The Circassians were, in effect, herded to Black Sea ports. They waited amidst dismal conditions, with great loss of life, for Ottoman boats to transfer them to Trabzon or Samsun. 36 Their former homeland was depopulated, later to be filled with immigrants from Slavic Russia. It was reported that one could walk a whole day in formerly inhabited parts of the Caucasus and not meet a living person. 37 The -34- Page Number: 34. Russians made no secret of their plan and its techniques of implementation. As Lord Napier, British Ambassador in St. Petersburg, reported, \"The language of the official journals in Russia on this subject has been the language of triumph not of conscience.\" 38 Ultimately, much of the Circassian lands were settled by Slavs and other Christians. 39 **THE ABHAZIANS** The expulsion of Muslim tribesmen from the Caucasus slowed while the Russians considered their gains and cemented their military control over the Caucasian highlands. Then, three years after the main Circassian flight, the Abhazians, whose settlements were centered on the Sukhum Kale region, were in turn expelled from their homes. The methods of forced migration visited upon the Abhazians in 1867 were essentially the same that had been used earlier. Russian soldiers came to Abhazian villages, burned down the houses, stole the cattle and other belongings, and left the Abhazians with barely enough to live. 40 The Abhazians were not in a position to offer effective resistance and all attempts at it failed quickly. Russian intentions toward them were the same as their intentions toward all Muslims of the Caucasus, as demonstrated by British Consul Gifford Palgrave, who rode through the region of Abhazia by horseback to collect the information. Palgrave found that threefourths of the Muslims of Abhazia and surrounding districts would emigrate. He was convinced that the Russians intended to force the migration not only to rid valuable territories of their Muslim population but also \"to embarrass the Turkish Government, on whose coasts a still larger number of starving and penniless co-religionists would thus be thrown.\" 41 The Russians forced the flight of many thousands of Abhazians, but kept many behind. They seem to have learned from their experiences with the Crimean Tatars and the Circassians that wholesale deportations had an adverse effect on the economy of the region. While old men, women, and children were encouraged or forced to emigrate, able-bodied men necessary to the economy were kept behind and used as forced labor. The exact number of those who were left behind is unknown. Abhazian leaders claimed many -35- Page Number: 35. thousands had been forced to remain, while their families were forced to leave. 42 Entire families were sometimes expelled; in others the males who could work were forced to remain while their families left. In either case, the Abhazian families in the Caucasus were gone and the Abhazian nation had virtually ceased to exist. Only a small portion remained. As Palgrave noted, \"It is very painful to witness the extinction, as such, of a nation whose only crime was not being Russian.\" 43 There is much debate over the numbers of Circassians and others evicted from their lands in the Caucasus. No accurate counts were made of the Tatar or Circassian Muslims, so one cannot say how many set out. Upon analysis of various estimates, 44 it seems reasonable to state that approximately 1.2 million Caucasians emigrated from Russian-conquered lands; 800,000 of them lived to settle in the Ottoman domains. 45 The Russian Empire saw to it that the conquered Muslim lands were settled with what they considered to be more congenial populations. Just as Russians and Ukrainians had become the main populations of the Crimea, Russians, other Slavs, and Cossacks took most of the old Circassian and Abhazian lands. 46 The first truly reliable Russian census, taken in 1897, recorded the transformation; Christians now outnumbered Muslims by more than ten to one. 47 **DISEASE** The worst enemy of the Circassians and other Caucasians who were forced from their homes was disease, abetted by malnutrition. The Circassians were literally stuffed into boats at Russian-controlled ports. They were given neither assistance nor supplies, 48 and at the first Ottoman port of call, Trabzon, they died in great numbers of smallpox, typhus, and scurvy. In the winter of 1863, twenty to fifty Circassians were dying each day in Trabzon. 49 By the worst days of the next spring, 500 a day were dying; 50 and 30,000 may have died at Trabzon alone. 51 Those who landed at other ports, such as Samsun and Sinop, shared similar mortality. At the height of the immigration, 50 refugees a day were dying in Samsun. 52 The Ottoman Empire was completely unprepared for the forced immigration of Circassians. Sanitary conditions in the empire were -36- Page Number: 36. none too good in the best of times, 53 and the general poverty of the empire allowed for little in the way of relief payments or supplies. 54 Other than sending what few doctors and what medicine was available, the Ottomans could do little else. There were, in any case, no cures for smallpox or typhus. The only remedy was to remove the migrants from their Black Sea camps and scatter them throughout the empire. 55 The mortality of the Circassians continued unabated as the Ottomans sent them on from the Black Sea ports to other areas of the empire for resettlement. Mortality records showed disease death rates of up to one-third, sometimes more, on the transport ships. According to one report, a group of 2,718 Circassians was put on ship at Samsun for Cyprus; 202 died between Samsun and Istanbul, where 528 left the ship; and 1,988 continued on to Cyprus, 637 more dying on the journey. 56 Another report from Cyprus further described the fate of the aforementioned shipload of Circassians: \"Of those landed, more than half are expected to die, and in fact the deaths daily have ranged from thirty to fifty.\" 57 By the time the Abhazians arrived at the Black Sea ports, the Ottoman government was better prepared. Despite continuing financial troubles, the Ottomans were able to treat the Abhazians with more care, and disease mortality among them was minor. Refugee numbers were quite a bit smaller than in the earlier migration, and this surely had a salutary effect. 58 **EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION** **ON THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE** The influx of hundreds of thousands of Caucasian immigrants naturally had a great effect on the lives of those already resident in the empire. The most immediate effect was the spread of disease in the Black Sea ports of the empire. In Trabzon, the Circassians brought with them typhus, and conditions became so bad that for a time the entire population fled the city. 59 Commerce was completely paralyzed and bread was in short supply. There was even less bread than in normal times in Samsun, where all the bakers closed their ovens and fled the typhus and smallpox brought by the Circassians. 60 Mortality due to disease in Trabzon between December and the middle of February 1864 (Table 1) shows that local inhabitants, though not experiencing as great a mortality as the immigrants, still had much to fear. -37- Page Number: 37. **TABLE 1. 61** *MORTALITY DUE TO DISEASE IN TRABZON 1 DECEMBER 1863 TO 17* *FEBRUARY 1864.* Immigrants 3,000 Local Turks 470 Local Greeks 36 Local Armenians 17 Local Catholics 9 Europeans 6 Similar mortality of native Muslim residents was seen wherever Circassians were resettled. At first, the refugees were lodged together in camps and public and commercial buildings. Later, they were distributed throughout the countryside, spreading disease contracted in the camps: In the month of June 2000 Circassian Emigrants (amongst whom Diarrhoa *\[sic\]* and typhus prevailed) arrived at Ushak. They were at first lodged in khans and in the crowded habitations of the natives, but were afterwards distributed amongst the villages situated to the N.E. of the town. Their contact with the inhabitants gave rise to bowel complaint soon after by Typhus. In the space of six months (June to November) there were 500 Mahomedans taken ill, of whom two hundred died; and 100 Christians of whom only 20 died. 62 The effects of the Circassian immigration were felt in villages all over the empire. The Ottomans had neither finances nor administrative manpower to oversee the settlement of the newcomers; therefore, it was left to the localities to which the Circassians were sent to provide for them. Houses were built and grain provided, through the work and expense of the villagers, and it must have seemed to them that they were being asked to pay for their own suffering, for word of plundering by the Circassians had spread rapidly. Any extra payments exacted from the peasantry were naturally resented, but paying for those whom they had cause to fear, who were being settled next to them, must have appeared excessive even to the long-suffering Anatolian, Bulgarian, and Syrian villagers upon whom the Circassians were resettled. 63 Russian capture of Caucasian ports and replacement of Muslims with Christians in cities and hinterlands caused great economic -38- Page Number: 38. disruption. Much of the traditional trade of the eastern Black Sea was in the hands of Muslim merchants, and Russia did all it could to see that this Muslim trade ceased. Russian actions were often forceful and murderous. Ottoman coastal boats were destroyed by Russians, harming traditional fishing and trade patterns. 64 But most Russian actions against Muslim commerce were administrative. At the time of the Abhazian migration, illegal taxes were levied on Turkish tradesmen dwelling in cities along the Black Sea coast. The merchants were told that if the levies were not paid, they would be expelled along with the Abhazians. 65 **CIRCASSIANS IN THE** **OTTOMAN EMPIRE** The Crimean Tatars had quickly settled into the ordinary life of the Ottoman Empire. Once their initial trauma was over, they went to farms provided by the Ottoman government and once again took up their agricultural existence. Their language and customs were little different than those of the other Turks around them, and they became assimilated. The only differences between them and their fellow Turks were the memories taught to their children. This was not so for the Circassians. The Circassians were not Turkish-speakers, nor were they primarily agricultural. Unlike the Tatars, they were linguistic outsiders who needed to be assimilated into the language and customs of the empire. Most settled down to a constructive existence, especially those granted fertile lands in the Balkans and Western Anatolia. Some others, who were settled where they could barely survive, took to raiding as a means of livelihood, and all those around them, Christians and Muslims alike, suffered their depredations. Whereas the Tatars were a positive contribution to the empire, the Circassian contribution was, at least in the beginning of their life in the empire, a mixed one. Not for some time could they be said to have \"settled down\" as a normal part of Turkish community life. **MEMORY OF RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM** One of the greatest effects of Russian actions in the Caucasus was to put Muslim inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire on guard. -39- Page Number: 39. The Russians had forcibly removed Muslim peoples in order to replace them with Christians. This policy cannot help but have impressed itself upon Muslims who were themselves in the path of future Russian expansion. They would soon see that the policy was ongoing. Ottoman Christian revolutionaries would also see that the Russian policy potentially worked in their favor. As will be seen in later chapters, this realization on the part of both Ottoman Muslims and Ottoman Christians became an important part of the bloody history of intercommunal warfare that was to come. **THE SITUATION IN THE** **OTTOMAN EAST** The Ottoman Empire did not actually rule in much of eastern Anatolia. The state was an important and intrusive factor in the lives of only a portion of the eastern population, primarily the inhabitants of cities, rural areas close to cities, and border regions. In most rural areas, the Ottomans functioned as tax-collectors whenever possible and as an ultimate military force whenever absolutely necessary. The main danger, and thus the main political factor in the Ottoman East, was the constant presence of marauding elements that lay in wait for situations that allowed them to operate with impunity. These were especially nomadic or seminomadic Kurdish tribes, and the main public security activity of the Ottoman government was to control these tribes. The Ottomans had neither the manpower nor the finances to constantly oversee the activities of the Kurds, so they controlled them by a typically Ottoman system of bribes coupled with force. Tribal chiefs were coopted to the Ottoman system with honors, posts, and money. During relatively quiescent times, Kurdish tribes were allowed to treat their own affairs by themselves. They kept lands farmed by Muslim and Christian tenant farmers, operated market \"industries\" in handicrafts and foodstuffs, kept extensive herds of animals \-- all without the intervention of the state. Only when the Kurdish tribes actually revolted or engaged in marauding campaigns did the Ottomans send troops. 66 When successful, such expeditions sometimes resulted in the hang- -40- Page Number: 40. ing of a rebellious tribal *sheyh.* More often they resulted in the sheyh\'s being forcibly transferred to Istanbul or elsewhere with a sizeable pension, so that the Ottomans\' troubles would not be complicated by an ongoing blood feud. The organic situation in the east remained unchanged. For real changes to have transpired, the army would have had to remain in the eastern provinces, constantly keeping the Kurds in check. One must be careful when identifying the Kurds as a disruptive element. Those who were a disruptive force were tribal groups, and their loyalties were tribal. It would be an error to infer any \"Kurdish\" identification among them. If tribes cooperated, it was out of mutual benefit, not ethnic loyalty, for which there is no evidence. Also, most Kurdish-speakers were not at any time in rebellion. They were farmers and herdsmen with basically the same feelings toward religion and state as ethnic Turkish farmers and herdsmen. The rebellious tribes were as much an enemy to their lives and livelihoods as they were to those of Turkish-speakers. When disruptive Kurdish tribesmen are discussed here it is not these Kurds, surely the majority, who are being described. While the Armenians of the east were often subject to Kurdish rule in the countryside and the Ottoman government in the cities, they also took advantage of Ottoman weakness to gain practical autonomy. Armenian villages in the mountainous regions of the southeast were often actually free of external control. This was particularly true in the Zeytun region. In Zeytun, Armenians sometimes grudgingly paid tribute to the Ottomans, as they had to the Arabs, Byzantines, and others before, but they ruled themselves. Throughout the nineteenth century, tension between the Zeytunlis and the Ottomans over tribute payments remained high. In armed confrontations, the Ottomans were only partially successful in gaining assessed taxes or tribute. 67 Ottoman tolerance of Kurdish and Armenian quasiautonomy was symptomatic of the weakness of the Ottoman state. Occupied by lifethreatening wars in the north and the west, the Ottomans were forced to be satisfied with relative calm in the east. The defects in the system of government in the Ottoman East became especially obvious in times of war. During peacetime, Ottoman garrison soldiers and gendarmes were usually sufficient to guarantee something approximating civil order. They could enforce their authority because behind them ultimately stood the Ottoman -41- Page Number: 41. army. With war, the situation was radically altered. Gendarmes (the police of the Ottoman East) were withdrawn to provide the backbone of the Ottoman armies battling the Russians. Thus the day-to-day security of the region was threatened. Moreover, there was now no army available to threaten ultimate for