THE GREAT ARMENIAN FLIGHT: THE CELALI REVOLTS AND THE RISE OF WESTERN ARMENIAN SOCIETY

Abstract

This dissertation addresses Armenian history in the Ottoman Empire from 1590 to 1695, documenting how a culturally distinct “Western Armenian Society” developed in the coastal cities of the Ottoman Empire after a mass migration from Eastern Anatolia. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the historical Armenian population centers in Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus were ravaged by war with Persia, the “Celali Revolts,” famine, and economic collapse. As a result, thousands of Ottoman subjects began a “Great Flight” towards more secure territories in Western Anatolia, Istanbul, Thrace, and even as far as Poland and Egypt. Previous scholarship on the “Great Flight” has not noted that the instability took place in historically Armenian population centers and that it led disproportionately to Armenian resettlement.

This dissertation has two parts. The first part describes the mass flight of Armenians from Kemah to Rodosto (Tekirdağ), i.e. from Eastern Anatolia to an Ottoman port city near Istanbul, relying on Armenian narrative sources and Ottoman Turkish archival documents. The second part documents transformation that took place in the aftermath of mass migration by focusing on the corpora of two authors with roots in Kemah, Grigor Daranaḷts‘i and Eremia K‘eōmurchean. While Grigor was a political leader and infrastructure builder who led refugee communities in a period of crisis, Eremia was the first great Istanbul-Armenian author and intellectual. In 1550, there was almost no Armenian manuscript production in Istanbul, there had never been a major Istanbul-Armenian author, Armenian vernacular languages were not widely employed in extended prose, and the Armenian patriarchate in Istanbul was a minor ecclesiastical center. In the course of the seventeenth century, Istanbul exploded as a center of Armenian manuscript production, it produced its first major author, Armeno-Turkish began to be used in prose-works on both secular and religious topics, and the patriarchate emerged as a major ecclesiastical center. It is known that the Ottoman Empire would become a graveyard for Western Armenian Society during the Armenian Genocide of 1915: this thesis shows how that society was born out of structural transformations which took place in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century.