Ottoman History Podcast - The Catastrophic Success of the Armenian Tanzimat

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

with Richard Antaramian hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | How did the Ottomans secure widespread buy-in for modernization projects across the empire's many geographies and communities? This episode explores that question through the experiences of Armenians in the Ottoman East. Our guest, Richard Antaramian, shares some of his research, which argues that Ottoman shared governance worked through networks of power that linked center to periphery and sustained relationships among notables of different confessions, classes, and locations. The Ottoman tax-farming system of the 18th century forged ties among central authorities, provincial notables, and Armenian financiers. As the Ottoman government embarked upon the modernizing reform projects of the late 1700s and 1800s, those forms of shared governence frayed. In the Ottoman East, the Armenian Patriarchate's attempts to enact new notions of reform saw major successes, with the establishment limited representative governance, a constitution, and new educational institutions. Yet, those successes came at the cost of weakening the ties between provincial Armenians and important power brokers like provincial notables and Kurdish tribal leaders. Ultimately, the Armenian Patriarchate's successes at reform translated into trouble for its newly-isolated flock in the empire's eastern borderlands. « Click for More »

This is Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Matt Kazarian. Today we'll be speaking with Professor Richard Antaramian. Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California, where I teach and write about Ottoman and Armenian history. His research examines the Ottoman East, the empire's eastern borderlands with the Caucasus and Iran. He looks at how changing financial structures in the 18th century transformed the relationships between the Armenian Patriarchate, provincial notables, and the Ottoman government. Basically, you have the circulation of Armenian capital through the institutions of the Armenian Church

acting as a kind of social adhesive, as a broker of sorts, that ties together the imperial state and the provincial notables. In the 19th century, he looks at how the state's major reform project transformed provincial governance and the relationships among the different groups in the region. What we have is a state that is jealously guarding whatever power it takes away from these other groups in society. And we also talk about the unintended consequences of these reforms. That's what's catastrophic about the success, that the Armenians take themselves out of power. They cut their connections,

and they bank on the state holding up its end of the bargain. Before discussing the 19th century, Professor Antarami and I discussed the 18th century, a time when the Ottoman dynasty renegotiated its relationships with different institutions and power brokers across the empire. For the longest time, when it comes to the Armenians especially, we only tend to think about this interface between the patriarchy and the state as this very kind of simplistic binary. The Armenian church, centered around the Armenian patriarchy of Constantinople in Istanbul, is this instrument that the Ottoman of religion, and that this then helps generate a sense of loyalty among the community by guaranteeing them freedom of religion, certain rights, prerogatives vis-a-vis their own culture, language, etc.

And this is, for me, a really incomplete story of what actually unfolds. What we see happening in the 18th century, to borrow the phrase coined by Ali Ayyoloo, the establishment of partnerships across the empire, where the state is kind of developing arrangements with different groups, individuals, institutions across the imperial spectrum, and basically sharing sovereignty with all these different groups in order to get them invested into the enterprise of empire itself. The non-Muslim communities are no exception to this, and we see them being brought into these partnerships, being made partners of the empire as a result. And for the empire, again, there are these benefits to that, is that one, you introduce legibility, you render these non-Muslim communities more easily identifiable. You make it easier to tax them. You make it easier

to work with their leadership in order to promote Ottoman sovereignty in different parts of the empire. And this manifests mostly ecclesiastically, where again, as I noted, you have all sorts of authority being given to these patriarchates that they didn't have beforehand, such that they can actually rule as hierarchical bodies. The main takeaway that we get, though, from the 18th century, and there'll be a few more that I'm sure we'll discuss, but one of the main ones is that the Armenian community, and to a certain extent also the Greek Orthodox community, see themselves as partners of the imperial state.

And this is a very, very important point to bear in mind when we get into the 19th century and talk about reform. That when we talk about the reforms that we see happening, they play out most dramatically in the Armenian community, but they play out in all the non-Muslim communities of the empire. For the people on the ground, they see this as the continuation or renegotiation of that partnership with the state. So across the 18th century, the Ottoman dynasty renegotiation of that partnership with the state. So across the 18th century, the Ottoman dynasty renegotiated its relationships with its non-Muslim communities via their church hierarchies. But that process also encouraged the emergence of lay elites within those same non-Muslim communities. It's important to bear in mind that what we see developing alongside the growth of

the ecclesiastical authority of the patriarchy is the rise of these Armenian-led elites called the Emirats. And this group develops most of its political connections through life-term tax farming and through the tax collection system of the Ottoman state generally. And obviously, most people listening know what tax farming looks like. Basically, you have someone who purchased a tax farm, they have to put up so much money at the outset, and they almost never have that cash on hand, or even if they do, they need to keep their assets liquid. So they take out loans. And they take out these

loans overwhelmingly from Armenians in the capital who have this cash on hand. So you have these Armenian elites in the capital who control much of the tax collection system of the Ottoman Empire that helps them establish very pronounced relations with these notables at the edges of the empire. So when we look at the landscape of Ottoman governance, we have all of these powerful local leaders. Most of these people get their hands on some portion of the tax collection system, and they will then have to go to these Armenians in the capital to get their loans. So for the Armenian elites, they want to guarantee their investments that they're making across the empire, it turns out that there's this wonderful institution

that they happen to be members of that can help them ensure their investments. And that, of course, is the Armenian church. So what we see happening is as the patriarchy is expanding its authority and gaining the ability to control the activities of monasteries at various edges of the empire, to control churches in different places, to exert unprecedented influence and authority over the clergy across the empire. You also have these amiras who all of a sudden have all this kind of cash on hand, who are just flush with money. And the amiras use this money to buy the Patriarchate, essentially. Every time a patriarch comes to the throne, they have to pay an ascension fee, typically referred to as the pishkish. They need to work with these Amiras who can help support them. Not only give them the money to pay for the ascension fee, but also get money to do things like renovate churches, get nice vestments, publish books that they can use to denounce the Catholics.

So the clergy gets money. It gets all sorts of favors from the emiras. Then the emiras get to control the church, which means that they then get to control not just individual patriarchs, but they also get to control the finances of the church across the empire. And this then gives them influence and control over, through the patriarchy, over these clergymen at edges of the empire. And these clergymen then on the ground, of course, are going to ensure that taxes are collected in a very profitable manner that serves the interest of both the tax collectors on the ground, which is to say

these Muslim notables, and also then serves the interest, therefore, by extension, of the financiers, the Armenians in the capital. So the tax farming system created opportunities for laypeople to insert themselves into important political and economic relationships. As a result, there was a strengthening of ties among local tax farmers, Armenian financiers, the church hierarchy, and the Ottoman government. Basically, you have the circulation of Armenian capital through the institutions of the Armenian church acting as a kind of social adhesive, as a broker of sorts,

that ties together the imperial state and the provincial notables. It keeps those groups together. Really what we see happening is that this expansion of ecclesiastical authority is helping tether the peripheries closer to the center. In this way, the 18th century witnessed circulations of emirate wealth that cemented relations between the Ottoman state and provincial notables, and also between the Armenian church and the emirates. Moving into the 19th century, the Ottoman government began to try to assert more direct control. So we see a number of developments unfolding over the course of the 19th century. So one is this important transition where we shift power from groups, from relationships, into the state.

We discussed two examples of this, the reforms of the Ottoman army that came about with the abolishment of the janissaries, and the reforms of Ottoman government that came about with the banishment of the Phanariat households. So the first thing to bear in mind, so we go back to Selim III, and we see the introduction of the new order. This is another attempt by the Ottoman state to take away institutions or instruments of governance away from groups who exist either at the edges of or even outside of the state. So we see the Janissaries, this kind of corporate group that can contest power, that really has privatized many elements of governance for itself. The desire to remove them from governance and replace them with a new army suggests that we have significant

changes coming to the social contract that orders the Ottoman domains. So this is the first point. Obviously, that fails. We have a Janissary revolt that leads to the death of Selim III. Mahmud II comes in, and he finishes the job, so to say. What we see happening is that the Janissaries lose. So now the work of the military is being folded into the government itself. We have to understand the destruction of the Janissaries in conjunction with the Greek Rebellion of 1821. And as Christine Filio shows in her book that I learned something new from every time I go over it, Biography of Empire, you see the connections between the Janissary households and the Phaneriod households are very, very clear. The Phaneriods,

who had lost control of their community, who had ceased to be able to guarantee the loyalty of their communities to the Ottoman state, are kicked out. Well, the Finariots have these, they control certain governorships, but also they're very well integrated into the foreign ministry. So what happens when they get pushed out and they can no longer organize their power into households, we then get a translation office. Who floods into this translation office? Armenians. Not as people who can organize power into households and privatize governance, but as salaried employees of the port. So we see this shift away from shared governance, where we have instruments of governance that are held privately. these are all

being taken away and invested in the state. Another realm into which the Ottoman government tries to insert itself is tax collection. So when we get to 1839 and the proclamation of the Tanzimat, the big thing is the abolition of tax farming. Because once we abolish tax farming, this tax collection, which the Armenians had somewhat privatized, ceases to be. This also gets folded into the state. So suddenly, these power-sharing arrangements that we see existing previously with the Janissaries, with the Phanariots, with the Armenian Emirates, these disappear. What we have is a state that is jealously guarding whatever power or sovereignty it takes away from these other groups in society. And this is why historians of the Arab provinces talk about the Tanzimat not as this great reform, but as the restoration of the state, the restoration of the monarchy. And they have a very strong basis for making that argument, I think. And they have a very strong basis for making that argument, I think.

In addition to the spread of direct government control in the 19th century, we also talked about how Armenian institutions became more politically isolated. We see through these mechanisms for managing difference, the removal of non-Muslims and their institutions from any sort of power relationship. And that's what's catastrophic about the success, is that the Armenians take themselves out of power. They cut their connections and they bank on the state holding up its end of the bargain, which it won't for a variety of reasons. As we see the state rolling out these new bureaucratic tools of administration, the Armenian church then is conscripted to support this. And that is going to play out most dramatically, as I said, after 1856.

And this is where we get the Armenian constitution. The Armenian constitution is this, it's a watershed in certain respects. There's a tendency, I think, to read this as a process of nationalization. Well, theoretically, it looks like it's taking power away from the clergy and giving it to the laity. Because now the laity gets to vote on who their leaders are. We have a school system that is going to standardize a language. We have a school system that is going to basically create the structures that we associate now with national identity. But if we actually look at what is

actually in the Constitution, right, nine articles, the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of them deal with ecclesiastical issues. How do we administer a religious community? And what we see happening is, if we read these, it's legislating a diocese, right? This is just giving more shape to these hierarchical relationships that we see coming into their own originally in the 18th century. So this community is becoming much more hierarchically arranged than it had been beforehand.

But these new, if we wanna call them democratic controls that are being introduced, are designed to take power away from the old Armenian elites who were part of the larger tax collection system and at local levels continue to maintain a role in certain tax collection and certain commercial activities. People who can act as brokers between Muslim notables in different areas, people who can finance economic activity in certain areas, people who are really tied to this old order that is being kind of brushed away after 1839. So as the Armenian church is introducing these new controls, really they're just trying to take power away from these people and their allies in the clergy

by giving the laity more control and the laity in a more democratic sense. And again, this is nothing new in the Armenian church. The laity has always had the deciding voice in determining who their leaders are. But by democratizing it further and putting more power in the hands of gildsmen, peasants, and what have you, you can take power away from these people tied to the old order of things, take power away from their allies in the clergy, and give these people more control over their own institutions. And what that does is it takes these Armenian institutions out of those old relationships of power, the very networks of power that state

centralization wants to remove. The irony of it, however, is that now the church is being removed from these relationships of power, right? The church, the elites, to use the church as their own power base to establish and perpetuate those relationships. The church itself, and therefore the community by extension, loses its access to those relationships. And as a result, again, ironically, becomes more isolated. As an example of this isolation, we talked about the rivalry between two Armenian clergymen, Murgadich Khrimyan and Bogos Melikyan. Khrimyan is a very interesting character, and he's really typically held up as a paragon of Armenian nationalism.

He's well known because he ends up going to the Congress of Berlin to try and impress upon the delegates there the importance of integrating questions of Armenians and their concerns into whatever document they ultimately sign. Largely fails. But for a lot of people, this is what we see coming out of Krimian is an interest in articulating some type of Armenian sovereignty over the land of Armenia. articulating some type of Armenian sovereignty over the land of Armenia. But when we get into what he was and what he was actually trying to do, again, a much different picture comes into view. So Khimiyan, after he spends his time in Istanbul as a labor migrant,

comes to the realization that the only way to really help his people within the context of the Armenian world, or the Ottoman world in particular, is to become a priest. And he becomes a celibate priest. His wife and daughter passed away while he was in Istanbul. But he was very concerned with the needs, wants, and desires of Armenian labor migrants and of the Armenian peasantry. And this is why he himself becomes a champion of the Armenian constitution. And if we kind of read between the lines, it's very clear that Khrimyan's influence

is all over this document, and that he is really creating a pathway for Armenians who are at the margins of Ottoman life to chart a path to power. Armenians who are at the margins of Ottoman life, to chart a path to power. So Khrymian goes back to Van, becomes a clergyman, and begins trying to use the power of the patriarchy, and by extension, the power of the Ottoman state, to enact reforms that will be of benefit to the vast majority of the Armenian community. So he is, in this sense, less an Armenian nationalist and more a tanzimachi. He's much more someone who is at the forefront and places the Armenian community at the forefront of state centralization in a bid to better the lives of Armenians and thereby, and to do so,

has to improve the level and quality of Ottoman imperial governance. So Khrymian is born in 1820. Around the same time, another Armenian is born. This is a guy named Bogus Melikyan. Comes from much more humble backgrounds than had Khrymian. So he doesn't have the kind of like dense social ties to the community that Khrymian would have had. His only connections are those brokered by the institutions of the church itself. But what he also has is a penchant for violence. He had no problem using that, the threat of

violence, to extort people, to get things out of them, and thereby becomes a prolific fundraiser, which of course vaults him ahead very quickly in the ranks of the Armenian church because he's proving how indispensable he is to their activities. And when he uses that violence as he gains more notoriety, as he gains more authority within the church, he uses that to begin abusing more members of his community, forces them to do free labor for the government, forces them to do free labor for Muslim notables, and in the course of doing so, establishes deeper connections with members of the government, members of the local elite, Muslim elite, and becomes very, very powerful and entrenched as a result. So Melikian enjoys all the support, and he's able to continue to act as a powerful intermediary between these different groups.

And that brings him, of course, to loggerheads with Khrymian. And they basically go at it over the course of 40 years. The first issue is, I had mentioned beforehand that, so you have Bogos trying to force people to compel them to do unpaid labor for the government or for elites. And it revolved actually around building a bridge and a barracks for the military. And actually the Khrymian on this basis is able to win the temporary banishment of Boros. That then creates problems for Khrimyan because he is angered not just Boros but his allies. So Khrimyan now finds himself being targeted to this implementation of the constitution in 1864. So you have these kind of dying embers of the old Kurdish emirates that are also trying to hold on to some type of power.

by the Armenians to introduce this constitution, and they rally behind the reactionary clergymen who don't want it, who are, of course, then backed by the Armenian elites in the area, who also don't want to lose their access to power. So you have this convergence of Kurdish and provincial Armenian elite interests that leads to the Armenian clergy working with the old Kurdish emirs to murder the Armenian Catholicos of Akhtamar in 1864. So when we talk about the violence that is being deployed, it is very real. Khrymian himself survives at least two or three assassination attempts. In the 1870s, we have efforts in Van to hold an election for Prelate. So the Prelat theoretically is going to be this very important person. Kurdish allies of Bogos actually flood the city center of Van and go up to every

Armenian they see and start harassing them, saying, you know, who are you voting for? You know, why aren't you voting for Bogos? Bogos is the guy that you want. So you see these active campaigns of intimidation taking place. You see violence being used to combat these efforts at reform launched by Armenians, who again see themselves as people on the front lines of the battles over state centralization. So implementing the Armenian constitution in the Ottoman East provoked competition among those who wanted to implement a new order and those who liked the current distributions of power. The stakes of this split were high enough that banishment, threats of violence, and even murder came into the struggle. As a result of all of this, pro-reform Armenians asked for more direct state intervention in the region.

asked for more direct state intervention in the region. To come back to Krimian, in his report on provincial oppression to the Ottoman state that he submits in the 1870s, in the introduction, he lays out his plans for resolving things. And one of them is to say, you need to put more police stations and military bases out here. Based on what we know about, we're supposed to think about Ottoman Armenians. Can you imagine any Ottoman Armenian saying, please, more state coercion? It runs counter to what we think about. But what Khrymen is saying in the 1870s is, we have invested in your institutions. They're not paying off. So it's time for you to make sure that they work. And that captures, I think, very brilliantly this problem that they're confronting. But because

we have these new formations of power taking place, we have to ask ourselves then, so Armenians are taking themselves out of these relationships of power. The state is accumulating more power, but not always able to exercise it. So who else is left? We have Muslim elites that remain in power, right, that continue to mobilize and marshal coercion. We have Muslim elites who are very, very, who remain, you know, able to author rebellions against the state, who are able to intimidate groups, who are able to command the economy, who are able to influence politics, both with the non-Muslim communities and elsewhere. So the state begins basically negotiating with them, but outside of the relationships that we'd seen beforehand.

outside of the relationships that we'd seen beforehand. So effective power then remains in the hands of a Muslim state, the Ottoman Empire, and Muslim elites at the edges of the empire, such that political power now becomes the domain, almost exclusively, I don't want to speak in absolute terms, but what we see happening is the non-Muslims, as a result of these reforms, give up their power. It goes over to only Muslims. And as a result, the political enterprise becomes Muslim. This is where we see the end of a politics of difference. We see it with the state's response to Kurdish rebellions. When the Turkmen rebel in Cilicia, the only group that gets massacred are the Armenians. It's not the Turkmen who get massacred. It's their Armenian allies. We have two vestiges of Armenian royalty kicking around in the 19th century.

One is in Garabakh, the other is in Zeytun, and it's the one in Zeytun who get basically wiped out in 1862 against the backdrop of the state's interventions into Cilicia. The state is working towards a type of Muslim consensus, And anytime the Armenians contest it, they become the people who are the threat to the state. They become the subversive element. And any Armenian effort to do that is dealt with harshly. So especially after the Russian war in 1877-78, we see the momentum building in that direction anyways

with Armenian petitions increasingly falling on deaf ears. In the 1860s, when we first have the constitution, we see lots of things happening. And the Armenians are managing to get certain Kurdish and Turkmen and Turkish landlords removed in some cases, at least sent into temporary exile. We see clergymen who are the allies of these Muslim elites being sent into internal exile. We see things happening, but in the 1870s, it slows down. And we see the state increasingly ignoring the pleas of the Armenians to resolve issues. And then really after the 1870s is when it really goes downhill very quickly.

But this is the backdrop for Abdulhamid's what we call Islamist policies. He's dealing with an empire now in which political power rests in the hands of Muslims and really nobody else. So of course that provides him with a language, a political language, a political idiom that he can share with these other groups. And any time Armenians try to contest it, again, they find themselves increasingly sent to jail. They are accused of being rebels, insurrectionists, revolutionaries, Russian agents. They have no way of contesting the status quo. And this is why the success of the Tanzimat in the Armenian community is catastrophic,

because it's completely cut them off from any networks of power. And this is why it comes to a head in 1885 when Khrymian is ordered to go into internal exile at Jerusalem. And this being a clear symbol, this being a clear message to the Armenian community that, you know, your institutions no longer work. Your reformers, these people on whose chests we pinned all sorts of medals for being exemplary Ottoman reformers, you're going to internal exile. That's the end of it. And as he's leaving, what does Khrymian try to do? He brings back Boris Melikyan, the guy who he'd spent decades trying to remove from power, the guy he had spent decades trying to remove from Armenian life. He brings him back because this is his last hope. If we can revive some element of the old order in which, yes, Armenians were oppressed.

Yes, Armenians did not have equal access or equal opportunity. But at the very least, they were part of the system. At the very least, they enjoyed some type of protection because they were part of the system. Again, not as equal members, not as people on par with their Muslim neighbors, but they were at least part of the system. And what Krimian sees now is they are no longer part of that system. So if you can bring this guy back, maybe, maybe we'll get back a little bit of what we had beforehand, is what he's thinking. So Bols comes back into power, and that's the end of Khrimyan's Ottoman life in 1885. He eventually goes on to be elected Catholicos of all Armenians in Ichmyadzin, which was in the Russian Empire in 1892. But his Ottoman life ends at that point. And really,

for all intents and purposes, we see that this is now a place with no space for difference. This is a place where Armenians no longer have a say. And that's why they are so enthusiastic about the Young Turk revolution. It's why the first thing they do is they bring back these constitutions. They bring back these high Tanzimat ideas. And yes, we do see the Young Turks at the outset going after these Kurdish landlords, these Kurdish leaders in the provinces who are creating problems for the Armenians. But very quickly, the Young Turks realized the same issue that Abdulhamid had. We have weak state institutions. We have people out there who actually have effective power. So whose side are we going to take at the end of the day? It's clear. meathead. We have weak state institutions. We have people out there who actually have effective

power. So whose side are we going to take at the end of the day? It's clear. And that's where we end up on that most joyous of notes. Yes. That's all we have time for today. As usual, listeners can go to our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, where we will post images, a bibliography, and more information about Richard Antaramian's book, Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire. That's all for this episode. Until next time.