Материал: Payaslian S., The History of Armenia From the Origins to the Present

Soon thereafter, however, Shah Abbas moved his army northward deep into the Caucasus. While initially the Armenians in Jugha (Julfa), Agulis, and Meghri celebrated his arrival as a liberating force from Ottoman domination, his troops destroyed the land and ordered thousands of Armenians to abandon their communities and to march to Persia. No more than one-fifth survived the march. The survivors settled in New Julfa in the southern region of the capital city of Isfahan, south of the Zangi-Rud River. The Treaty of Zuhab (1639), signed by Sultan Murad IV and Shah Safi I, granted to the Ottomans Iraq (including Baghdad and Mosul) and a large part of historic Armenia—the vast territory stretching through the Armenian Plateau and encompassing the region of Lake Van, Bayazid, Kars, and Ardahan, as its eastern border—while Persia controlled Tabriz, Shirvan, and Erevan. The treaty thus divided historic Armenia between Turkish Armenia and Persian Armenia.11

The political economy of empire-building and the military conquest of such vast territories necessitated effective institutional mechanisms for the administrative and economic integration of nomadic tribes and sedentary communities of various cultures and religions. Neither the economic nor the military situation seemed conducive to their smooth incorporation into the Ottoman system. While western mercantilism encouraged economic expansion and development of industries for the acquisition of wealth and power by the state, the Ottoman political and economic elites relied mostly on agricultural production. By the sixteenth century, European markets were increasingly relying on money economy, while their Ottoman counterparts continued to use bartering and credit. As a result, the Ottoman economy grew vulnerable to European financial penetration. As the central government struggled to defend its realm, as in the clashes across Armenian lands bordering with Persia, beginning in the 1580s the injection of vast quantities of silver coins into the Ottoman economy from the Americas and Europe caused the depreciation of Ottoman silver.12 Moreover, the central government sold the provincial governorships and local offices to the highest bidder and employed imperial administrators and tax-farmers to collect taxes— a practice that made the burden and prevalence of the economic corruption and political instability doubly unbearable for the people. Once in power, governors imposed heavy taxes on their subjects to recover the capital expended to win the office.13 Further, they raided the towns and villages to accumulate wealth and to pay their taxes to the central government. As raids and wars destroyed the land and economy, Armenians migrated westward to Constantinople and to European countries such as Poland.14

In the late sixteenth century the economy and commerce began to improve and contributed to rapid increases in population in the Ottoman

empire and the Mediterranean basin.15 Political stability and economic revival led to the emergence of a new class of merchants, with commercial ties with Europe, India, and Russia, and set the foundations for the Armenian amira (business barons) class and the esnafs (guilds) of the eighteenthand nineteenth-century Ottoman economy. Their occupations included such crafts as goldsmiths, shoemakers, and tailors. The Armenian communities in the Lake Van basin (especially Van city, Bitlis, Arjesh, and Varag) grew economically and culturally vibrant.16

In Persian Armenia, the Safavids established the two provinces of Chukhur-i Sa’d, encompassing Erevan and Nakhijevan, and Karabagh, which included Zangezur (Siunik) and Ganja. Each region was placed under a governor-general (beglarbegi).17 Shah Abbas granted the Armenians the freedom to develop their own commercial networks with the outside world, which facilitated the growth of a new group of wealthy and powerful Armenian families. Likewise, the Armenian churches, including Echmiadzin, became closely linked with outside trade and financial relations.18 The emergence of a wealthy Armenian elite with close ties to the church resembled the old symbiotic relationship between the nakharar houses and the church centuries earlier.

Commercial expansion and economic reconstruction in both Ottoman and Persian Armenia also encouraged cultural revival, as evinced by the development of scriptorium and monasteries as the Surb Karapet monastery in Mush and elsewhere. Beginning in the seventeenth century, as a result of economic growth and migrations from the eastern parts of the Ottoman empire, Constantinople became one of the most important cities for Armenians; unlike some of the other major cities in the empire, however, no Armenian quarter developed in the capital.19 Further, commercial relations with Europe, Persia, and China influenced Armenian art. The printing of Armenian books was a product of the close ties between finance and culture for merchant markets. The first Armenian book was printed in 1641 in New Julfa. In 1666 the Armenian Bible was produced in Amsterdam by the printer Oskan, and the first press in Armenia was established at Echmiadzin in 1771, financed by an Armenian merchant living in India.20

As the Persian Armenian economy expanded, Armenians gradually developed close ties with the Russian economic sphere of influence, encouraged particularly by the improved status of Armenian merchants in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Thus, by the time Russian military expansionist activities reached the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus in the seventeenth century, the Persian Armenian communities had economic and cultural ties with the Christian power to the north. The growing Armenian economic and cultural orientation toward Russia became particularly pronounced as Armenians found themselves divided between

the two Muslim empires. Nothing demonstrated the sentiments of the Armenian elite favoring Russia better than the richly decorated Almazi Throne that Armenian merchants presented to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in 1660. In return, the tsar granted them the right to monopolize particular sectors (e.g., silk) of Persian commerce in Russia, constructed a port on the Volga River to facilitate commerce, and permitted the construction of churches as well as the recruitment of Armenians for the state bureaucracies.21

As Armenian communities prospered, both secular and religious leaders sought to revive the Armenian sense of “nationhood” and even thought of plans to liberate the nation from Muslim domination. The church played a leading role in nearly all such endeavors. The catholicosate of the Mother See at Echmiadzin, at the time within the Safavid domain, became directly involved in Armenian liberation affairs and cooperated with the Armenian meliks (local feudal landlords and leaders) of Karabagh and Zangezur. The meliks, secure in their mountain fortresses, had maintained a culture of local independence, which readily transformed into liberation movements under propitious circumstances. In the sixteenth century, Catholicoses Stepanos V Salmastetsi (1545–1567) and Mikayel I Sebastatsi (1567–1576) had made repeated attempts to secure the support of the Roman Catholic Church and European governments for the liberation cause. In 1547 Catholicos Stepanos had summoned community leaders to a secret conference at Echmiadzin to devise plans to protect Armenians against further persecution and physical attacks. The conferees proposed that the catholicos travel to Europe to petition for political support to liberate the Armenians from Turkish and Persian control. Armenian ecclesiastical leaders and commercial magnates in European capitals met with leaders of the major powers, including the conference held by Catholicos Stepanos with the German emperor Charles II. The Armenian Church even went as far as pretending to accept unity with the Roman papacy, the sine qua non for papal engagement in Armenian affairs, but to no avail.

More than a century later, in 1678, Catholicos Hakob Jughayetsi (1655–1680) summoned the Armenian meliks to a secret meeting at Echmiadzin with similar plans. In a letter to the catholicos, Pope Alexander VII had promised support for liberation on condition that Echmiadzin recognize the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church. By this time, however, Echmiadzin-Rome relations, coupled with matters pertaining to the finances of and corruption in the Armenian Church, in addition to jurisdictional issues, had become the source of tensions within Echmiadzin as well as between the Mother See, the catholicosate at Sis, and the patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the participants at the secret meeting sent a delegation to Constantinople that included the young and idealistic Israel Ori, whose solicitations for

European support, like similar attempts earlier, produced promises but little policy.23

Political instability and the power struggles among the Afghans, Afshars, Qajars, and Zands led to the fall of the Safavid empire in 1722 and to the emergence of the Qajars, who governed Persia for the next two centuries.24 The prolonged political upheaval also caused a large number of Armenians to migrate to Tiflis, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, and their petitions for national liberation coincided with growing Russian interest in the Caucasus. The tsarist government capitalized on such appeals to pursue its geopolitical objectives. Peter I the Great (r. 1689–1725), who proclaimed himself “Emperor of All Russia,” had maintained good relations with the Armenian community in Russia, but his immediate purpose in the Caucasus was to create a united front with the local population against Ottoman and Persian presence in the area.25 Peter I seized the opportunity presented by the collapse of the Safavid government to launch in 1722 his southern military campaign into the Caucasus. Although Peter the Great abandoned his troops in the Caucasus in 1735, the Russian military’s engagement in the region encouraged local Armenian chieftains, such as Davit Bek, to press for independence. Not to be outdone, the Ottoman army also invaded Safavid lands in the region, and in 1724 their combined attacks led to the partition of Transcaucasia, whereby the Ottomans established control over Armenia and Russia gained lands on the Caspian Sea.26

Russian expansionist policy resumed under Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796), whose drive to bring the Black Sea and the Balkans into the Russian sphere of influence provoked a war with Turkey in 1768 and culminated in the favorable Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (July 1774). Under the treaty, Russia gained territory on the Black Sea coast and access to the Mediterranean through the Straits of Dardanelles. Although the western powers—particularly Britain and France—briefly cooperated with Russia against the Ottomans, by the late eighteenth century such cooperation appeared less sustainable as European industrial and colonial interests collided with Russian objectives from the Balkans to the Middle East and to the Caucasus. After the Russo-Ottoman wars of 1768 to 1774, Catherine the Great encouraged Armenians of Crimea to settle in the area of Rostov-on- Don, located on the banks of the Don River about thirty miles from the Sea of Azov.27 The early phases of the “Great Game,” which in the nineteenth century pitted the imperial powers against each other for power and prestige in the Caucasus and Central Asia, had begun.28

The Armenian community in Russia witnessed a period of economic and cultural revival under such prominent families as the Lazarians, who along with their counterparts in India (e.g., Joseph Emin [1726–1809]), continued to envision, and sought Russian protection for, an autonomous Armenia.29 Two proposals were submitted for such a plan. The first, prepared by Archbishop Hovsep Arghutian, proposed the creation of an

Armenian kingdom with its capital at Vagharshapat. The king would be chosen by the Russian tsar and could be of Armenian or Russian origin; the Armenian king would possess the authority to maintain his own seal and mint his own currency. Armenia and Russia would sign commercial treaties, granting the former access to at least one port city on the Caspian Sea. The second proposal, drafted by Shahamir Shahamirian of India, proposed a republican form of government rather than a kingdom. Following the British system, it would be led by a prime minister and an “Armenian House” as the parliament. The Armenian government would maintain a permanent embassy at St. Petersburg. In matters of defense, Armenia and Russia would sign a mutual security pact, whereby Russia would maintain a force of 6,000 soldiers in Armenia, subject to gradual withdrawal over a twenty-year period. In times of war, Armenia would supply 6,000 soldiers to Russia. Russian merchants would have free access to Armenian markets for a fee comparable to taxes paid by local merchants. These two proposals reflected the two major intellectual currents among Armenians at the time. Arghutian’s proposal represented the religious and feudal institutions and tradition and would revive the Armenian monarchy and the powers of the nakharar houses. Shahamirian’s proposal, clearly influenced by the presence of the British East India Company in India, expressed the sentiments of the emerging bourgeois classes, who, as in Britain, would check the economic and political power of the aristocratic class and the monarchy through political liberalization and parliamentary democracy.30 Would the Russian government be favorably inclined?

Beginning in April 1783, the Russian military formulated plans for a campaign across the Caucasus, which, with further discussions with the Georgians, culminated in the Treaty of Georgievsk (July 24, 1783), thereby establishing Russian protectorate over eastern Georgia. Catherine the Great made preparations for further military expeditions across the Caucasus, but in 1784, having signed a treaty with the Ottomans regarding the security of the Crimea, she reversed her decision, although plans for a Russian protectorate over an autonomous Armenia were not shelved. Although during the Russo-Turkish war of 1787-1792 Catherine the Great refused to become too heavily involved in the Caucasus, she escalated Russian involvement soon thereafter, certainly by 1795. The Russian and Persian empires now preferred peace and stability in the Caucasus so as to widen their trade relations. The growing French influence in Isfahan, however, foiled these plans, as Paris perceived Russo-Persian friendly relations as detrimental to its interests in the region and insisted on OttomanPersian cooperation against Russia. The death of Ali-Murat Khan, the chief Persian negotiator representing the Qajar leader Agha Mohammad Khan (r. 1743–1796), provided an opportunity for the opposition to terminate the Russo-Persian negotiations. In 1794 the Persian military launched a campaign to reinstate control over Tiflis and Eastern Armenia, which it