Entrance to the monastery of Etchmiadzin, Armenia
It is a matter of regret that this legend cannot be sustained, but it is an actual fact that Tiridates, king of Armenia, was converted to Christianity in the year 259 A.D. by St. Gregory, “the Enlightener,” and was therefore the first sovereign in the world to accept the new faith and to adopt it as the religion of his nation. The Emperor Constantine did not accept Christianity until thirty years or more afterward. Armenia is therefore the oldest of Christian countries, and the monastery of Etchmiadzin, twelve miles from Erivan, is still, as it has been from the third century, the ecclesiastical headquarters of the Armenian church. The word in English means “the only begotten.”
But the Armenians have had a stormy time in defence of their religion ever since. Theological controversies began early among them, and persecution has been relentless. The Armenian clergy refused to accept the decree of the council of Chalcedon, and in 491 A.D. seceded from the Church of Rome. Later they separated from the orthodox Greeks, and although frequent attempts have been made to bring about a reunion with the Church of Russia, which is a branch of the Greek Church, the Armenians have remained an independent ecclesiastical body, with a pope or patriarch called a katholikos as its administrative head, with the monastery of Etchmiadzin as his metropolis. He is elected for life by delegates from the various Armenian communities throughout the world, who come there for that purpose when a vacancy occurs, and he is the spiritual head of believers in the Armenian creed in America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The authority of the Armenian katholikos does not extend to theological questions. The creed of that faith cannot be altered except by a vote of the house of bishops, and he does not claim to be infallible. His jurisdiction is executive and judicial, and he is protected by the czar of Russia, who enforces his edicts.
No people have suffered so much for their religion, not even the children of Israel, as the Armenians, and the atrocities committed upon them during the thirty years of the reign of Abdul Hamid, the late sultan of Turkey, were the most barbarous that modern history has ever recorded. I do not remember that ever before, at least in modern times, the sovereign of a country deliberately set about to exterminate by massacre the subjects of his authority. There is no longer any question that “The great assassin, the unspeakable Turk,” as Mr. Gladstone called him, gave the instructions that led to the slaughter of nearly 100,000 innocent inhabitants of his province of Armenia, the destruction of their homes, the plundering of their property, and the violation of their wives and daughters. Even if there had been any previous doubt of his guilt, documents found in the Yildiz Kiosk after he was deposed, established the fact that he had a deliberate intention to depopulate Armenia by the torch and the sword in a systematic and thorough manner.
It has long been conceded that a Mohammedan cannot govern believers in other religions with justice, but how far Abdul Hamid was actuated by fanaticism, how far he applied religious prejudices for political purposes, or whether he was afraid that the Armenians would ultimately succeed in throwing off his yoke, are conjectures upon which students of Turkish affairs will never agree. He knew from the events of the past that he could never convert the Christian inhabitants of his empire to Islam by the sword, because the persecution which the Armenians had suffered for centuries only strengthened their faith, but no sultan since Selim the Inflexible ever did more to stimulate religious intolerance and encourage his Mussulman subjects to persecute his Christian subjects, than Abdul Hamid in Bulgaria and other parts of his empire as well as Armenia.
The Armenians who inhabit the northern part of Asia Minor along the southern coast of the Black Sea are a simple, quiet, primitive people of agricultural and pastoral pursuits. They live in small villages, and are devoted to their families and their religion. For centuries they have suffered from the depredations of the Kurds, migratory, half-civilized tribes who haunt the mountains during the summer but in winter come down to the plains and either quarter themselves upon the Armenian peasants or plunder them. Some villages pay regular blackmail, as the Scottish farmers used to do to protect themselves from troublesome Highland clans. Sometimes the Armenians defended themselves, but while they have not lacked courage, as their records show, very few had arms and those who did purchase guns and ammunition were in constant peril of arrest for conspiracy. Occasionally when they resisted the invasions of the Kurds, their villages were entirely destroyed and the inhabitants put to the sword, men, women, and children alike, with a ferocious brutality in which Turkish soldiers invariably joined with enthusiasm.
While a large majority of the Armenian population lived pastoral lives, caring nothing for the rest of the world, without any ideas of constitutional freedom or national independence, many of the young men drifted to the cities, where they prospered and became prominent and influential. They are thrifty and shrewd in trade. It is a common saying that it takes two Jews to cheat one Greek, and two Greeks to cheat one Armenian; but as a rule the members of that race have a high reputation for integrity as well as sagacity, and the late sultan, himself their bitterest enemy, trusted his finances to Armenians, as he trusted his life to Albanians in preference to Turks.
Gradually the mercantile affairs, the manufacturing, the banking, and other lines of business in the principal cities of Turkey have become absorbed by Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, for the Turk is no trader, and the Armenians are the most enterprising and successful of all.
There was no act of disloyalty until they recognized the significance of the persecution of their people at home. They accepted their long years of agony and despair as the penalty of their religion, but when American missionaries planted schools and colleges in Turkey and began to educate the young people, a new spirit of national pride and hope gradually developed. Thousands of Armenians, and among them some of the ablest leaders and most influential thinkers, received their first impulses and aspirations for civil and religious liberty at Robert College, an American institution on the Bosphorus, and in other colleges of the American Board of Foreign Missions in different parts of Asia Minor. This racial pride and spirit first found its expression in attempts to improve the intellectual condition of their own families, in the emancipation of their women, in a revival of the use of the Armenian language, which had been very largely superseded by the Turkish, and the enlightenment of the common people as to the rights and privileges to which all human beings are entitled.