More than a hundred years later, it may seem surprising that prominent Bostonians filled Faneuil Hall in 1894 to discuss the Armenian Question, or that Ohannes Chatschumian was greeted with such affection by a group of New England’s intellectual elite. But in the late nineteenth century, Armenia resonated with Americans, and Armenian civilization held a place of fascination in the Western mind because it was an ancient culture of the Near East and the first Christian nation in the world.
American interest in the Armenian Question was inseparable from the legacy of the Protestant missionary movement, which had brought American culture, and in particular New England Protestant culture, to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. American Protestants were not the only missionaries in Turkey in the nineteenth century: Catholics and Protestants from Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Denmark, and other countries had found their way to the Christian interior of Anatolia, some as early as the late eighteenth century. But the American Protestant missionaries had, by the 1880s, created an organized network of institutions that surpassed those of European Christians.
The American missionary movement grew out of the Second Great Awakening that swept through the United States in the early nineteenth century; it spread with particular intensity through New England, upstate New York, and the new Ohio Territory. A Christian revival movement, the Awakening was a response to growing secularization in American life and a fear that the American Christian ethos was waning. Charles Grandison Finney, Lyman Beecher, and Samuel Hopkins were among the dynamic clergy who propelled the new wave of religious enthusiasm across the various “burned-over districts,” as they came to be called, of the Northeast. At the same time enthusiasm grew for missionary work abroad.
In 1806 Samuel Mills Jr. formed the Society of Brethren, which was dedicated to foreign missions, at Williams College, and two years later he took his society to the newly founded Andover Theological Seminary, renaming it the Society of Inquiry on the Subject of Missions.1
The founding of Andover Theological Seminary in 1808 by the Calvinist minister Samuel Hopkins would become a bedrock of the Protestant foreign mission movement. Hopkins believed that Christian spirit and duty should inspire evangelists to convert non-Christians around the world—the essence of the missionary zeal that led Americans to Turkey in the 1830s, or as the historian Suzanne Moranian has put it, to “export Jesus and America to the ‘cradle of civilization.’”2 Within years Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Union, and Andover Theological Seminaries became leading forces behind the foreign missions movement, and colleges like Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Smith, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Williams, Amherst, Hamilton, and Oberlin sent their graduates out to foreign missions, many of them in the Armenian provinces.3
The earliest missionaries had millennial views, and hopes that the conversion of the world to Christianity would bring about the Second Coming of Christ and thus the fulfillment of history. But it became clear to them that the Muslims of Turkey were not going to become Christian, and so most of their energy became focused on modernizing the already existing Christian cultures of the Near East and converting those who were willing to Protestantism. By 1812 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had been founded in Boston by Congregationalists and to a lesser degree Presbyterian and Dutch Reform churches, which later went out on their own. The first missions were set up in 1812 in India and in 1816 in Ceylon, and a year later, on native ground, the ABCFM began its program among the Cherokee and the Choctaw. By 1818, evangelizing the Holy Land and the Near East became a priority, and by 1819 two missionaries who were Middlebury College classmates, Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, shipped out for Smyrna on the western coast of Turkey.4
Parsons and Fisk were sent on an exploratory mission to the Ottoman Empire with the millennial hope of converting the Jews of Palestine, and then the Turks, Arabs, and the Orthodox Christians of the Near East, such as the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Maronites, Nestorians, and Copts. In his send-off speech to the two young men, Samuel Worcester, a founder of Andover Theological Seminary, told Parsons and Fisk to search “from the heights of the Holy Land, and from Zion” for “variegated scenes presenting themselves on every side to Christian sensibility.” The young missionaries were to ask themselves: “WHAT GOOD CAN BE DONE? and BY WHAT MEANS?”5
Parsons and Fisk, reporting back to Boston, noted that of all the Christians in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians seemed among the most welcoming to the Protestant mission. In 1831 the ABCFM established missions for the Armenians in Smyrna and in Constantinople, where later that year Mr. and Mrs. William Goodell became the first American missionaries to set up shop in Turkey. Delighted with this success, the American Board soon opened missionary stations in Brusa, Trebizond, and Erzurum—part of the heartland of the historic Armenian vilayets, or provinces. And by 1863 Protestant missions had spread from Asia Minor and Anatolia to northern Syria and Mesopotamia. By the end of the century, the ABCFM had twelve stations and 270 outstations in Asiatic Turkey; about 150 missionaries and 114 organized churches had already made more than thirteen thousand converts to Protestantism. The missionaries taught more than sixty thousand students in their 132 high schools and eleven hundred elementary schools, and ran six colleges and various theological academies.6
Although the Yankee Congregationalists never lost hope of converting the Turks—who regarded Christians as gâvur, meaning “infidel” and “unbeliever”—when they realized that the Ottoman authorities and Turkish families punished and sometimes even killed Muslims who showed an interest in Christianity, they directed their energy toward the Armenians, the Greeks, and the Assyrians. The missionaries were further galvanized by the fact that there was already a reform movement afoot in the Armenian Apostolic Church (Armenia’s original church), which, they believed, had made the ground fertile for their mission. But, for the Armenians, the missionaries created further complexity and often damage. While the Armenian church leaders were interested in improving their mother church, they were not interested in abandoning it. Thus the missionaries, with their zeal for converting Armenians to the Protestant way, became agents of divisiveness: They were often imperialistic in their attitudes at the same time as they were forces for progressive change and democratic ideas.
The clergy, and the wealthy Armenian community that often controlled the clergy, saw the missionaries as powerful threats to their authority. Now Armenians were often forced to choose between being Armenian Apostolic or this new thing—Armenian Protestant. In the city of Chemeshgezek, the Armenian community referred to converts as “Protes,” which was a pun on “the first syllable of Protestant, but also meant leper in Armenian.”7 The missionary Henry Otis Dwight reported that the Armenian Apostolic patriarch and the wealthy class of Armenians called for “the expulsion of Protestantism from the land.” There were even cases of Armenian Protestant converts being imprisoned or exiled. By 1846 the Armenian patriarch was so enraged by the havoc created by the missionaries that he excommunicated all Armenian Protestant evangelicals. Within days his decree led to the founding of the First (Protestant) Evangelical Armenian Church of Constantinople.8 Even the sultan remarked—from a slightly different vantage point—in 1847 that the American missionaries were “turning the world upside down.”9
While the relationship between the new Protestantism and the ancient Armenian church remained tense throughout the nineteenth century, the American missionaries and the Armenian Protestants activated social change for Armenians throughout the Ottoman Empire. The missionaries emphasized the importance of learning, and their educational projects included making the Bible available to the Armenian populace through translation from classical into modern Armenian. As a campaign for total literacy was essential to modernizing Armenian culture, the missionaries not only established schools and colleges but promoted Sunday School, Bible study, prayer meetings, and youth organizations—all of which conveyed the democratic ideas of human liberty and individualism embodied by Protestantism.
Because many of the missionaries were women who had graduated from progressive colleges, they stressed the idea of equality for women in their educational mission and curriculum. Educating women was such a primary goal for many of the missionaries that by the later part of the nineteenth century, women’s schools and colleges had cropped up in Armenian cultural centers from Constantinople to as far east as Van and Bitlis. Euphrates College at Harput, Central Turkey College in Aintab, the Girls’ College and Theological Seminary at Marash, Anatolia College of Marsovan, the International College of Smyrna, and Robert College in Constantinople were some of the major institutions the missionaries created.
At Mount Holyoke, for example, women were trained for foreign missions and to crusade against the subjugation of their sex; and they were trained to be teachers. Mary Lyon, founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837, formulated feminist ideas about education that fueled, among other things, an interest in educating women in foreign lands, and especially Christian women who were living under the yoke of patriarchal societies.10 Opposed to the idea of educating privileged women to be the refined wives of wealthy men, Lyon believed in training women to be independent, intellectually rigorous, and capable of professionally sustaining themselves. In the spirit of Lyon’s motto—“Go where no one else will go, do what no one else will do”—her graduates were fast creating the first generation of American women teachers, many of whom went to the American West or to far parts of the world to practice their new profession. Their progressive ideas about teaching had come from Lyon’s notions, some of which sound contemporary: “If you cannot teach without scolding,” she wrote, “lay aside your office; let certainty rather than severity inspire dread; Never ask categorical questions that could be answered by ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ Know your students personally and sympathetically. Never let a dull pupil know that she was thought dull. Never mortify one before the others.”11
By 1888 Mount Holyoke had sent 178 graduates to work in foreign missions, and had transported Mary Lyon’s philosophy of activist education to Turkey, which meant to the Christian minorities, and most particularly the Armenians. This new force of educated women missionaries was an extraordinary aspect of what was evolving as a groundbreaking experiment in nineteenth-century education.12 By the 1880s a network of international education had been established between elite colleges and universities in the United States and the Armenian cities and provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
The impact on Armenian life was dramatic. The missionaries chipped away at Armenian patriarchal customs in the church and family and made it possible for women to attend church services in public rather than listen to them from an adjacent chamber. And, because the missionaries trained women to become teachers, by the end of the nineteenth century most of the women teaching in Armenian elementary schools were Armenian graduates of American missionary schools.
Along with these liberal American notions, the missionaries also planted ideas about freedom of expression and justice in the face of oppression—ideas that fostered resistance to the existing structures of Ottoman authority, as well as pride in Armenian cultural values. As the missionary Edwin Bliss wrote in 1896: “We have no political ends to serve; we want not to square a foot of the sultan’s domains…. But we stand, as we have always stood, for freedom for the oppressed, for the right of every man to worship his God in the light of his own conscience.”13
Activities at Robert College, the Christian college in Constantinople, reveal the impact of the new liberalism on the Christian minorities. Because Turks were generally forbidden to attend the missionary schools, the students were Christian, primarily Armenian, Bulgarian, and Greek. Among the college’s official goals was the promotion “of the use of the English language and the influence of Protestant…and American ideas in the East.”14 In 1881 alone the college sponsored public debates on such topics as “Christianity and Patriotism,” “Free Thought,” “Representative Government,” and “Violation of Popular Rights.” George Washburn, soon to be president of Robert College, remarked, “There was certainly no other place in Constantinople where such subjects could have been publicly discussed,” though he maintained that “there was nothing seditious in any one of them.”15 At first the Ottoman government watched the missionaries with “a curious and nonchalant eye, and cared not a straw what particular form of worship the infidel dogs preferred,”16 but as the progressive American influence began to vitalize Armenian society and culture, the Turks grew suspicious and finally hostile to the new reality that had been created. This would make for more complexity as the Armenian dilemma unfolded.
Although the missionaries had planted a vivid sense of Armenia in the American mind by the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans already had a sense of Armenia’s place in Near Eastern history and Western civilization. An Indo-European civilization, Armenia emerged from Urartu, the ancient civilization that spanned eastern Anatolia and western Transcaucasia, around the sixth century B.C. In the classical period the Greek historian Herodotus, the Greek writer Xenophon, and the Persian king Darius depicted Armenia as a rugged highland culture bridging Asia Minor and Europe. English travelers to Armenia in the seventeenth century John Cartwright and John Freyer wrote about the Armenians as excellent entrepreneurs, defined by tight-knit family structures, and as a people who were keepers of both ancient Christian civilization and the Hebraic past. The eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire noted the prominence of the Armenian Empire under King Tigran I during the first century B.C.17
Certain facts about Armenia continued to be significant for European and later American intellectuals and cartographers. On maps of the Roman Empire in and around the era of Caesar’s rule, Armenia is the most formidable kingdom abutting the Roman Empire on the east. At the peak of its power in the late to mid 70s B.C., Armenia extended midway across Anatolia into the Russian Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian, and encompassed what is now northernmost Iran. It was large and powerful enough for Caesar to send his generals Pompey and Lucullus to conquer it. After killing the Armenian king, Tigran the Great, the soldiers of Marcus Antonius kidnapped his talented son, Artavazd II—who wrote plays in Greek and founded a Greek theater—and put him and his family to death.
For the Christian West it was of no small significance that in the early fourth century A.D. (the traditional date celebrated by the Armenian church is A.D. 301) Armenia became the first nation to adopt Christianity as its official religion. (A century later Armenia’s reigning monarch commissioned the monk Mesrop Mashdots to invent an alphabet so that people who could not read Greek or Syriac would be able to read the Bible in their native language.) In the European imagination Armenia would be continuously associated with the place and landscape of the Bible. Armenia’s national symbol, Mount Ararat, was the site of God’s covenant with Noah, and cartographers of the Renaissance depicted Mount Ararat, the Garden of Eden, and other sacred sites in or near Armenia.
But upholding a Christian civilization amid invading tribes from the East proved more than difficult. In the seventh century Arab tribes came from Arabia, and by the eleventh century nomadic hordes from central Asia started their journey south and west, sweeping through the lands of the Arabs, Armenians, and Byzantine Greeks. Saracens, Seljuks, Mongols, Tatars, and lastly the Ottoman Turks, who were by now predominantly Muslim, rode in by the tens of thousands. For several centuries Armenia persisted in the wake of the Turkic invasions.
In the early medieval period, from about A.D. 861 until the first attacks by the Seljuk Turks in 1064, Armenia flourished under the Bagratid dynasty, which negotiated delicate diplomacy between the Byzantines and the Muslim rulers to the east. Thus by the tenth century Armenia was socially cohesive, prosperous from its commerce and agrarian productivity, and culturally vital. Music, poetry, and architecture flourished. The most important poet of the era, Krikor Narekatsi (Gregory of Narek), anticipated Dante with his epic poem, Book of Lamentations: Conversations with God from the Depths of My Heart.
Armenians built hundreds of churches in the rocky highlands during this period, many of them innovative in their structure and artistically sophisticated with their decorative stone carvings and inscriptions. The city of Ani, the capital of the kingdom, was so refulgent with churches, cathedrals, and chapels that it was known as the city of a thousand and one churches.18 Today the remains of those churches lie in ruins in Turkey, just yards from the Armenian border. (Thousands of other Armenian churches throughout Turkey also lie in ruins and are used as stables or army barracks, while others are demolished by local people or destroyed by dynamite).19 Not far from Ani, on the island of Achtamar in Lake Van, the Church of the Holy Cross (915–21) is another monument of the Armenian imagination, with its elegantly drawn and carved iconography, bas-reliefs, and friezes.20
But in the eleventh century the Seljuk Turkish invasions drove a good portion of the Armenian population southwest to what came to be known as Lesser Armenia, also known as Cilician (Kilikian) Armenia, in what is now south-central Turkey. An important geopolitical zone in the European quest to recover the Holy Land, it quickly became “a symbol of Christian hope.”21 The Armenian kings of Cilicia made strong alliances with the Crusaders and the Crusader states in the Levant, and by the late twelfth century an Armenian-Frankish alliance was exerting cultural and political impact on both Armenia and Europe. Cilician Armenia was also an important trading zone from which dyes, textiles, coffee, and spices came into Europe.
The Armenian king Levon II was a close friend of King Richard I (the Lion-Hearted), who was a passionate Crusader himself, and Levon aided him in the Third Crusade. The significance of Armenia was embedded deeply enough in the cultural and political milieu of the late Middle Ages that the great English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about or made allusions to Armenia in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales and in “The Squire’s Tale,” “The Man of Law’s Tale,” and “The Monk’s Tale,” as well as in Anelida and Arcite.22
The last Armenian king, Levon VI, was close to King Richard II and was involved in English court politics. In the last decades of the fourteenth century, he worked assiduously as a mediator trying to bring about peace between the French and the English in the midst of the Hundred Years’ War.23 When Cilician Armenia was destroyed by the Muslim Mamluks in 1375, it became an emblem of the failure of European Christianity to save its “Eastern brothers.” Philippe de Mézières, the fourteenth-century French diplomat and writer, described the fall of Armenia as “a great disgrace to all of Christianity.”24 It was a statement that would foreshadow the European and American concern for Armenia in the early twentieth century.
In May 1453 the Ottoman Turks brought down the Byzantine Empire, sacking Constantinople, which they made the seat of the new Ottoman Empire. After this the Armenians of Anatolia lived in a complex relationship with their new Muslim rulers. Like the other non-Muslims of the empire, the Armenians were legally designated “infidels” and subjected to a set of oppressive social and political rules that would remain at the center of the Armenian Question when it finally emerged more than four hundred years later.
The imprint of Armenia deepened in the nineteenth century. Lord Byron—who later fought and died in the Greek War for Independence, and was a champion of the Christians living under Ottoman rule—spent 1817 studying and learning classical Armenian at the Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro in Venice. So passionately did he feel about Armenia that he wrote:
If the Scriptures are rightly understood, it was in Armenia that Paradise was placed—Armenia, which has paid as dearly as the descendants of Adam for that fleeting participation of its soil in the happiness of him who was created from its dust. It was in Armenia that the flood first abated, and the dove alighted. But with the disappearance of Paradise itself may be dated almost the unhappiness of the country; for though long a powerful kingdom, it was scarcely ever an independent one, and the satraps of Persia and the pachas of Turkey have alike desolated the region where God created man in his own image.25
In the United States the bard of the new age, Walt Whitman, attuned to the mythic power of ancient Armenia, allotted the Armenians one of the more extensive meditations in his poem to the peoples of the world, “Salut au Monde”:
You thoughtful Armenian pondering by some stream of the
Euphrates! you peering amid the ruins of Nineveh!
you ascending mount Ararat!26
Whitman envisioned Armenia in the same geocultural realm as Greece, Egypt, and Syria and located the Armenians on their native homeland of 2,500 years. Defining Armenia by iconic landmarks of Western civilization, including the Armenian national symbol, Mount Ararat, the poet sees the Armenians amid the debris of historical struggle (“the ruins of Nineveh”) but also creates a hopeful image—“ascending” the great mountain.
To Americans of the 1890s, then, the Armenians were a Christian people who had survived on the battleground of empires for centuries and were known for their endurance. As the first Christian nation and the easternmost indigenous Christian culture in the world, the Armenians held a unique place in the American mind. As a Bible land civilization that was now in need of rescue (as it had been in the late fourteenth century), Armenia was an inspiring reminder of the continuity and typology of the Judeo-Christian tradition as it evolved from its origins in the Near East through Europe and then to the Puritan wilderness of New England.
While Armenians in the late nineteenth century were in the middle of a cultural revival on their own terms, rediscovering their history and creating a new body of literature and music, the American missionaries remained an important force in this renaissance. In the end the Protestant missionaries embodied the dual nature of imperialist attitudes. Fiercely proud of doing God’s work in the wilderness, they brought beneficial change and reform to the Armenians. Yet they were arrogant about their superior role in the so-called backward parts of the world, and too often oblivious to the dangerous situation they were creating for the people they were so dedicated to helping. That paradoxical situation would unravel in increasingly tragic and ironic ways as the fate of the Armenians became bound up in the power struggles surrounding President Wilson’s foreign policy during and after World War I. But in the 1890s, as Armenian relief movements sprang up around Turkey, the missionaries were working day and night to help the Armenians.