The immediate pre-war distribution of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire presented a variegated picture. Although most Armenians still lived on the Armenian high plateau – then known as the eastern vilayets – communities of greater or lesser density had long since been implanted in western Asia Minor, European Turkey, and Constantinople. The capital of the empire had naturally attracted people from the provinces for centuries, but the wars between the Ottomans and the Safavids and, later, between the Ottomans and the Russians, also contributed to altering the demographic situation on the Armenians’ lands.
At the turn of the seventeenth century, the deportations carried out by Shah Abbas and the Jelali revolts resulted in major demographic shifts and the emergence of virtually depopulated areas, particularly in the crescent stretching from Erzincan to the plain of Ararat. The events gradually brought on a division of the Armenian habitat between its two historical poles, north and south. It was accentuated by the division of the high plateau into Persian and Ottoman spheres. The general tendency was an almost constant westward drift of the population. Furthermore, communities materialized in the seventeenth century to the east and southeast of the Sea of Marmara in historical Bythinia, which had itself sustained unprecedented demographic losses the century before.
Thus, there sprang up sharply contrasting situations within the Armenian world: peasants living on their ancestral lands contrasted with city-dwellers present in large numbers in the capital. The ways of life and cultural foundations of these groups were radically different. Indeed, one might even speak of mutually foreign worlds had the rural exodus not unceasingly replenished the Armenian population of the capital with people from the countryside who maintained familial ties with the regions from which they came.
Until the 1878 Congress of Berlin, which not only hastened the end of the Ottoman presence in Europe but also put the Armenian high plateau on the political map, the existence of these Christian populations on the eastern confines of the Ottoman Empire had apparently not been a matter of concern to the Ottoman rulers.
However, when the Europeans, especially the Russians, began to be “preoccupied” by the fate of the eastern provinces, the sultans reacted in short order. The question of the territorial integrity of the empire gradually became an obsession for the Ottoman elites, with every fresh territorial loss only intensifying the dominant group’s trauma and humiliation. The process of radicalization was a long time in coming, but it was no less powerful for that. The obsession with the empire’s territorial integrity, which was obviously bound up with the question of its demographic composition, haunted the Young Turk movement as much as it had Sultan Abdülhamid’s regime. Their modernization plans for the empire were not radically different. In any case, demographic considerations helped shape the sultan’s policy vis-à-vis the Armenians, even if the massacres committed between 1894 and 1896 have often been presented as punishments meted out to “insurgents.” The proof, we would suggest, is provided by the complementary Hamidian policy of very plainly encouraging emigration. The destruction of work tools, looting of stores and businesses, growing tax burden, and constant insecurity due to the bands of hamidiyes organized by the sultan drove hundreds of thousands of people into exile, depopulating both town and country.
From the day the Armenian question was posed, the Armenians’ demographic weight in the population became a political problem and was treated as such. Thus, it is not surprising that the Ottoman authorities systematically falsified their own censuses. Their goal was to show that there was no Armenian question because the Armenians were only a tiny minority in an ocean of Turks. To attain this goal, they set up barriers that made it difficult to make a precise assessment of population trends in the empire. One of the most frequently used methods consisted in constantly redrawing the administrative boundaries of the Armenian vilayets. The result was that successive censuses bore on different regional entities. This makes it harder to study the demographic evolution of a region, the impact of massacres, and the consequences of emigration.
The Administrative Divisions
At the administrative level, under the cover of the tanzimat (reforms), the eyalet of Erzerum – the former governorship of Ermenistan – was in 1864–66 subdivided into seven mutesarifliks (department governed by a mutesarif) (Erzerum, Çaldıran, Kars, Bayazid, Muş, Erzincan, and Van). They included almost all of the Armenian plateau. Notably excluded from the eyalet were the regions of Harput, Arğana, Palu, Agn, and Arapkir, as well as the Sasun and Şirvan districts and Hizan, which were all incorporated into the eyalet of Dyarbekir.
A European diplomat offers an instructive comment on these administrative boundaries: In Asia, the major [administrative] divisions corresponded to the territorial divisions as they had been at the time of the conquest and, like the European provinces, bore the names of the communities that originally inhabited these territories: for instance, the eyalet of Ermenistan (Armenia) or the eyalet of Kurdistan. These names survived down to the reign of Sultan Mahmud II. From that period on, however, the policy pursued by the Divan, which wanted to efface the names of the aforementioned major subdivisions because they provided too stark a reminder of the vanquished nationalities’ historical importance, [consisted in] … chopping up the eyalets.
The 1864–66 administrative divisions, however, left too high a proportion of Armenians in a single region. Istanbul accordingly decided to divide up the vilayet of Erzerum in 1878 – that is, immediately after the Congress of Berlin, which ratified the loss to Russia of the regions of Batum, Kars, and Ardahan – by removing entire districts from it and adding others.
Four new vilayets were now created: Erzerum, Van, Hakkari, and Muş. The following year, the Ottoman authorities created the autonomous sancaks of Dersim and Harput. In 1880, they attached Dersim to Harput and Hakkari to Van. The effect was to dilute two Armenian regions in two zones populated by Kurds.
Later, in 1886, the Ottomans decided to divide up the Armenian Plateau once again, this time into smaller administrative units. The Euphrates Basin now found itself cut up and assigned to the new vilayets of Erzerum, Harput (Mamuret ul-Aziz), Dyarbekir, and Sıvas, to which the Dersim district, the Hakkari district, Bitlis, and Van were attached.
The last important division took place in 1895, on the eve of the great massacres. The eight existing vilayets were now condensed into six new administrative units – Van, Bitlis, Dyarbekir, Harput, Sıvas, and Erzerum. The Dersim and Hakkari districts disappeared, “to the benefit of” Harput and Van. With these manipulations in mind, we must now come to grips with the problem of the censuses and the other statistics on the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. The specialists who have treated this question all agree on certain points: the best known – Vital Cuinet, Gustave Rolin-Jaequemyns, and Abdolonyme Ubicini – unhesitatingly speak of “the Turks’ indifference to the demographical sciences,” the dubious methods utilized by Ottoman government officials, the extreme difficulty with which they managed to obtain vague figures, and finally, the subjective nature of the standards of measurement used. In one instance, the number of households was counted; in another, Armenians were accurately distinguished from Greeks or Syriacs, and Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox were separately counted, while the census-takers studiously avoided distinguishing Turks from Turcomans, Kurds, Kızılbaş, Zazas, Yezidis, and other sects. Thus, Muslims were set against the various Christian denominations as a monolithic block. Demography was here harnessed to purely political ends; the Ottomans produced statistics for the consumption of international public opinion alone.
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 265-267.
