The Cleansing

The bloodstained annals of the East contain no record of massacres more unprovoked, more widespread or more terrible than those perpetrated by the Turkish government upon the Christians of Anatolia and Armenia in 1915.

-          James Bryce, the 1^st 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 certainly wasn’t the first salvo in the drastic reduction 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.

Especially in the West, we consider Christianity as revolving around Rome – either for (Catholic), or against (Protestant). The farthest east we go is Constantinople, but these so-called schismatics were swept away by the Ottomans in 1453 – ancient history.  But it is not only here where the persecutions occurred.  Further to the east (and south), all remnants of Christianity were at risk.

Christianity declined in these regions in two major phases.  First, in the Middle Ages, when Christians were reduced to minority status under Muslim rule.  The second, more recent – barely a century old, when Christian communities in these regions almost ceased to exist.  In both phases, the causes were the same and could be summarized: massacre, expulsion, and forced migration. 

At the same time, it cannot be said that the reductions and the actions all ran in a straight line – there were times of relative calm punctuated by events of significant disaster.

The most important force during this time was that of the Ottoman Empire.  After the Mongols destroyed the Seljuk Turk state, the Ottoman Turks began to build and consolidate an empire.  The Balkans, the Black Sea region, and from Persia to Algiers; all under Ottoman rule.  The advances would continue into Hungary, ending only with the Christian victory at Vienna in 1683.

The Ottomans were more aggressively anti-Christian than were the original Arab conquerors of the same lands.  Churches confiscated or razed; countless thousands forcibly converted.  Christian families required to give some number of children 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 communities – even as far to the east as China.  But these were hardly 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 a strange people far removed from the kingdom of God… scarcely anything human can be detected in them.”

Another Jesuit observer would note of the arrogance of the Ethiopian king, who believed that they were the only true Christians in the world – shunning the Jesuits as heretics for their views on the Virgin Mary.

In the mid-sixteenth century, a Portuguese traveler in India was surprised to learn from Christians there that they owed their allegiance to a head in Babylon – having never 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 agreement – for example, where Chaldeans accepted Roman rule under a new patriarch in exchange for Roman support, all-the-while retaining their separate and unique customs.  Further, many European churches would come under Rome – known as Uniate churches, or Eastern-rite Catholics.

Yet, while pressured by both Muslims and Western Christians, many of these remnant communities survived.  Within the Ottoman Empire, nearly half the population was Christian, although the proportion was significantly lower in the lands east of Constantinople.

Sultans would often use Christians as administrators as, among other reasons, the Christian’s total dependence on the Sultan’s favor would make such administrators more likely to be trustworthy.  Greeks were the sailors; Armenians the merchants and traders.

Further, 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 almost as tyrannical to their Orthodox subjects as were the Turks.

“God perpetuate the empire of the Turks!” …The oppressive Poles, in contrast, were “more vile and wicked than even the worshippers of idols, by their cruelty to Christians.”

This would all drastically change by the beginning of the twentieth century, where the genocide of Armenians by the Turks in 1915 represents the most glaring – but not only – example.  These events 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 pushed into the Crimea and the Caucasus; in 1798, Napoleon’s armies routed Muslim forces with relative ease in Egypt; Britain would capture more and more 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 attacked Assyrian and Nestorian Christians in the mid nineteenth 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 total destruction at the hands of the Russians.  The Russian victory placed them on the borders of sympathetic Christian populations – especially the Armenians. 

All of this back and forth set the stage for the Armenian genocide, undertaken 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 victory would result in Russian control of Constantinople.  Britain and France also had designs on parts of the crumbling empire; further, the Italians and Greeks would have to be rewarded.

The violence aimed at Armenians in the Ottoman Empire would claim half or more of the Armenian population.  Countless more were displaced, sent into the deserts.  The Assyrian and Nestorians were not spared from this devastation.  The losses increased in the wake of the ensuing 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 perishing.  A race riot in 1955 would sweep away much of the remaining 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 known, and of these only 197 were considered to be in fairly sound condition.  In 1907, Diyarbakir was still about forty percent Christian, with almost ten thousand Armenians.  In 1997, William Dalrymple reported finding the last Armenian Christian in that same city, an old woman named Lucine.

Conclusion

The most recent nails in the coffin have been placed either directly 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, of course, is irrelevant to Christian evangelicals who choose not to be outdone in pledging allegiance to the Israeli State.

Syria and Iraq, lands where Christians remained reasonably secure, have been devastated by western imperialism in the last decades.  The statistics are as devastating as anything seen thus far.  Their churches are now found not as much in Baghdad and Damascus, but in Los Angeles and Detroit, Sydney and Paris.

And the Syrian Orthodox have established monasteries in the Netherlands and Switzerland – a reminder that these Syrians have a longer history with Christianity than do the host countries.