The bloodstained record of the East contain no record of massacres more unprovoked, more prevalent or more terrible than those committed by the Turkish government upon the Christians of Anatolia and Armenia in 1915.
– James Bryce, the 1st Viscount Bryce
The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia– and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins
This genocide definitely wasn’t the very first salvo in the drastic decrease of Christianity in the Middle East and Central Asia, and it hasn’t been the last. But it is here where Jenkins introduces his chapter: The Last Christians.
Particularly in the West, we think about Christianity as revolving around Rome– either for (Catholic), or against (Protestant). The farthest east we go is Constantinople, however these so-called schismatics were swept away by the Ottomans in 1453– ancient history. However it is not just here where the persecutions happened. Further to the east (and south), all remnants of Christianity were at danger.
Christianity declined in these areas in two significant phases. Initially, in the Middle Ages, when Christians were minimized to minority status under Muslim rule. The second, more recent– barely a century old, when Christian communities in these regions almost disappeared. In both phases, the causes were the exact same and might be summed up: massacre, expulsion, and forced migration.
At the exact same time, it can not be stated that the decreases and the actions all ran in a straight line– there were times of relative calm punctuated by events of considerable catastrophe.
The most important force throughout this time was that of the Ottoman Empire. After the Mongols damaged the Seljuk Turk state, the Ottoman Turks began to build and consolidate an empire. The Balkans, the Black Sea area, and from Persia to Algiers; all under Ottoman rule. The advances would continue into Hungary, ending just with the Christian success at Vienna in 1683.
The Ottomans were more strongly anti-Christian than were the initial Arab conquerors of the very same lands. Churches seized or razed; many thousands forcibly converted. Christian families required to provide some number of kids to be raised by the state as slaves or elite soldiers.
Then, as the West advanced and trade routes opened up to the East by sea, Western Christians would come into contact with these remnant Christian neighborhoods– even as far to the east as China. However these were barely seen as “Christian” by the westerners. For example, in 1723, a French Jesuit would report on the Copts in Egypt:
“… the Copts in Egypt are an odd people far eliminated from the kingdom of God … scarcely anything human can be spotted in them.”
Another Jesuit observer would keep in mind of the conceit of the Ethiopian king, who believed that they were the only true Christians in the world– avoiding the Jesuits as apostates for their views on the Virgin Mary.
In the mid-sixteenth century, a Portuguese traveler in India was amazed to learn from Christians there that they owed their allegiance to a head in Babylon– having never ever heard of a Pope in Rome. Indian Nestorians referred to the Patriarch in Babylon as the universal head of the Catholic Church.
There were also examples of contract– for example, where Chaldeans accepted Roman rule under a brand-new patriarch in exchange for Roman support, all-the-while maintaining their separate and unique customs. Even more, many European churches would come under Rome– called Uniate churches, or Eastern-rite Catholics.
Yet, while pressed by both Muslims and Western Christians, a lot of these remnant neighborhoods endured. Within the Ottoman Empire, almost half the population was Christian, although the percentage was significantly lower in the lands east of Constantinople.
Sultans would often use Christians as administrators as, among other factors, the Christian’s total reliance on the Sultan’s favor would make such administrators more likely to be credible. Greeks were the sailors; Armenians the merchants and traders.
Even more, these Christians found the Muslim rulers no more obnoxious that the Western Christians they would meet. The Latins, after all, sacked Constantinople in 1204; the Catholic Venetians were practically as dictatorial to their Orthodox subjects as were the Turks.
“God perpetuate the empire of the Turks!” … The oppressive Poles, in contrast, were “more repellent and wicked than even the worshippers of idols, by their cruelty to Christians.”
This would all significantly change by the start of the twentieth century, where the genocide of Armenians by the Turks in 1915 represents the most glaring– but not just– example. These occasions had roots even a century or more in the past– with western pressure on the Ottoman state increasing even at the end of the eighteenth century.
In the 1760s, the Russians pressed into the Crimea and the Caucasus; in 1798, Napoleon’s armies routed Muslim forces with relative ease in Egypt; Britain would record a growing number of the fringes of the Ottoman Empire. The Greek revolt in 1821 would take the lives of tens-of-thousands of Muslims on Greek soil.
In 1860, Druze and Muslim forces would massacre ten thousand Maronite Christians; Muslim forces assaulted Assyrian and Nestorian Christians in the mid 19th century and again in the 1890s. Bulgarians would perish in the wars of the 1870s.
In 1877-78, only British intervention saved the Turks from overall damage at the hands of the Russians. The Russian victory positioned them on the borders of sympathetic Christian populations– particularly the Armenians.
All of this backward and forward set the stage for the Armenian genocide, carried out under the cover of the First World Wars. With Britain and France allied with Russia (Germany now being the larger concern for Britain), it was clear that an Allied triumph would result in Russian control of Constantinople. Britain and France also had styles on parts of the falling apart empire; further, the Italians and Greeks would need to be rewarded.
The violence targeted at Armenians in the Ottoman Empire would claim half or more of the Armenian population. Countless more were displaced, sent out into the deserts. The Assyrian and Nestorians were not spared from this destruction. The losses increased in the wake of the taking place war between Greece and Turkey.
This ethnic cleansing would reach a climax in 1922 in the destruction of Smyrna, with perhaps one hundred thousand Greeks and Armenians diing. A race riot in 1955 would sweep away much of the staying Greek remnant.
In 1914, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople recorded a total of 2,549 ecclesiastical buildings.
By 1974, only 913 9f these were still understood, and of these just 197 were thought about to be in relatively sound condition. In 1907, Diyarbakir was still about forty percent Christian, with nearly ten thousand Armenians. In 1997, William Dalrymple reported discovering the last Armenian Christian because exact same city, an old female named Lucine.
Conclusion
The most recent nails in the coffin have been placed either straight or indirectly by western powers: The establishment of the state of Israel created over seven hundred thousand refugees, 55,000 of which were Christians. This, obviously, is unimportant to Christian evangelicals who choose not to be outdone in promising allegiance to the Israeli State.
Syria and Iraq, lands where Christians remained fairly safe and secure, have been ravaged by western imperialism in the last years. The data are as devastating as anything seen thus far. Their churches are now found not as much in Baghdad and Damascus, however in Los Angeles and Detroit, Sydney and Paris.
And the Syrian Orthodox have actually established abbeys in the Netherlands and Switzerland– a suggestion that these Syrians have a longer history with Christianity than do the host nations.