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143-487: Poklan (Boglan) had 77 Armenians, 8 houses, one church (St. Sargis) before the Armenian genocide . The town had a population of 20,217 in 2021. It is divided into the neighborhoods of Boğlan, Halimepınar, Yenimahalle and Yeşilova. Solhan has a dry-summer humid continental climate ( Köppen : Dsa ), with hot, dry summers, and cold, snowy winters. This article about an Eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey location

286-465: A Turkish and Muslim middle class and build a statist national economy controlled by Muslim Turks. The campaign to Turkify the economy began in June 1914 with a law that obliged many non-Muslim merchants to hire Muslims. Following the deportations, the businesses of the victims were taken over by Muslims who were often incompetent, leading to economic difficulties. The genocide had catastrophic effects on

429-561: A cheap and efficient method, but it caused widespread pollution downstream. So many bodies floated down the Tigris and Euphrates that they sometimes blocked the rivers and needed to be cleared with explosives. Other rotting corpses became stuck to the riverbanks, and still others traveled as far as the Persian Gulf . The rivers remained polluted long after the massacres, causing epidemics downstream. Tens of thousands of Armenians died along

572-610: A consequence of the sedentarization of Kurdish tribes and the arrival of Muslim refugees and immigrants (mainly Circassians ) following the Russo-Circassian War . In 1876, when Sultan Abdul Hamid II came to power, the state began to confiscate Armenian-owned land in the eastern provinces and give it to Muslim immigrants as part of a systematic policy to reduce the Armenian population of these areas. This policy lasted until World War I. These conditions led to

715-694: A dilemma: If they obeyed, the Armenians expected to be killed, but if they refused, it would provide a pretext for massacres. Armenians fortified themselves in Van and repelled the Ottoman attack that began on 20 April. During the siege, Armenians in surrounding villages were massacred at Djevdet's orders. Russian forces captured Van on 18 May, finding 55,000 corpses in the province—about half its prewar Armenian population. Djevdet's forces proceeded to Bitlis and attacked Armenian and Assyrian/Syriac villages;

858-734: A distinction between guilty and innocent Armenians. [To do so] was impossible. Because of the nature of things, one who was still innocent today could be guilty tomorrow. The concern for the safety of Turkey simply had to silence all other concerns. — Talaat Pasha in Berliner Tageblatt , 4 May 1916 During World War I, the CUP—whose central goal was to preserve the Ottoman Empire—came to identify Armenian civilians as an existential threat. CUP leaders held Armenians—including women and children—collectively guilty for betraying

1001-404: A few weeks, until there were very few survivors. This strategy physically weakened the Armenians and spread disease, so much that some camps were shut down in late 1915 due to the threat of disease spreading to the Ottoman military. In late 1915, the camps around Aleppo were liquidated and the survivors were forced to march to Ras al-Ayn ; the camps around Ras al-Ayn were closed in early 1916 and

1144-870: A growing, exclusionary Turkish nationalism in the Young Turk movement, the ARF decided to ally with the CUP in December 1907. In 1908, the CUP came to power in the Young Turk Revolution , which began with a string of CUP assassinations of leading officials in Macedonia . Abdul Hamid was forced to reinstate the 1876 constitution and restore the Ottoman parliament , which was celebrated by Ottomans of all ethnicities and religions. Security improved in parts of

1287-517: A minority in most places where they lived, alongside Turkish and Kurdish Muslim and Greek Orthodox Christian neighbors. According to the Patriarchate's figure, 215,131 Armenians lived in urban areas, especially Constantinople , Smyrna , and Eastern Thrace . Although most Ottoman Armenians were peasant farmers, they were overrepresented in commerce. As middleman minorities , despite the wealth of some Armenians, their overall political power

1430-646: A result of state policy and stated that "humanity, civilizations are shuddering, and forever will shudder, in face of this tragedy". The postwar Ottoman government held the Ottoman Special Military Tribunal , by which it sought to pin the Armenian genocide onto the CUP leadership while exonerating the Ottoman Empire as a whole, therefore avoiding partition by the Allies . The court ruled that "the crime of mass murder" of Armenians

1573-652: A result of the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent separate peace with the Central Powers , the Russian army withdrew and Ottoman forces advanced into eastern Anatolia. The First Republic of Armenia was proclaimed in May 1918, at which time 50 percent of its population were refugees and 60 percent of its territory was under Ottoman occupation. Ottoman troops withdrew from parts of Armenia following

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1716-467: A series of transit camps were set up to control the flow of victims to the killing site at the nearby Kemah gorge. Thousands of Armenians were killed near Lake Hazar , pushed by paramilitaries off the cliffs. More than 500,000 Armenians passed through the Firincilar plain south of Malatya , one of the deadliest areas during the genocide. Arriving convoys, having passed through the plain to approach

1859-706: A serious blow to the Rouran Khaganate the next year, but died soon after. His sons, Issik Qaghan and Muqan Qaghan , continued to wage war on the Rouran, finishing them off in 554. By 568, their territory had reached the edges of the Byzantine Empire , where the Avars , possibly related to the Rouran in some fashion, escaped. In 581, Taspar Qaghan died and the khaganate entered a civil war that resulted in two separate Turkic factions. The Eastern Khaganate

2002-516: A substantial decline in the population of the Armenian highlands; 300,000 Armenians left the empire, and others moved to towns. Some Armenians joined revolutionary political parties , of which the most influential was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), founded in 1890. These parties primarily sought reform within the empire and found only limited support from Ottoman Armenians. Russia's decisive victory in

2145-412: A systematic state policy involving the bureaucracy, police, judiciary, and clergy, was a major structural component of the genocide. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Armenians were Islamized, and it is estimated that as many as two million Turkish citizens in the early 21st century may have at least one Armenian grandparent . Some Armenians were allowed to convert to Islam and evade deportation, but

2288-472: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Armenian genocide The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I . Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to

2431-825: Is now Southern Russia, following the westward sweep of the Mongols in the 13th century. Other Bulgars settled in Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, but were assimilated by the Slavs , giving the name to the Bulgarians and the Slavic Bulgarian language . It was under Seljuq suzerainty that numerous Turkmen tribes, especially those that came through the Caucasus via Azerbaijan , acquired fiefdoms ( beyliks ) in newly conquered areas of Anatolia , Iraq and even

2574-525: Is the homeland of the early Turkic language. According to Robbeets, the Turkic people descend from people who lived in a region extending from present-day South Siberia and Mongolia to the West Liao River Basin (modern Manchuria). Authors Joo-Yup Lee and Shuntu Kuang analyzed ten years of genetic research on Turkic people and compiled scholarly information about Turkic origins, and said that

2717-464: The 1877–1878 war forced the Ottoman Empire to cede parts of eastern Anatolia, the Balkans , and Cyprus . Under international pressure at the 1878 Congress of Berlin , the Ottoman government agreed to carry out reforms and guarantee the physical safety of its Armenian subjects, but there was no enforcement mechanism; conditions continued to worsen. The Congress of Berlin marked the emergence of

2860-614: The Armenian question in international diplomacy as Armenians were for the first time used by the Great Powers to interfere in Ottoman politics. Although Armenians had been called the "loyal millet" in contrast to Greeks and others who had previously challenged Ottoman rule, the authorities began to perceive Armenians as a threat after 1878. In 1891, Abdul Hamid created the Hamidiye regiments from Kurdish tribes, allowing them to act with impunity against Armenians. From 1895 to 1896

3003-573: The Cumans and Kipchaks is uncertain. Probably, Cumans and Kipchaks had originally been two distinct Turkic peoples who joined one same confederation , with Cumans constituting the western part and Kipchaks the eastern part. According to Rashid al-Din Hamadani , writing much later in the Ilkhanate , Kipchak is derived from a Turkic word which means 'hollow rotted out tree'. Cuman may be derived from

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3146-792: The Eastern Roman Empire ). Victor Spinei emphasizes that the Pechenegs' association with the Bĕirù is "uncertain"; instead, he asserts that an 8th-century Uighur envoy's report, which survives in Tibetan translation, contains the first certain reference to the Pechenegs: the report recorded an armed conflict between the Be-ča-nag and the Hor (Uyghurs or Oghuz Turks ) peoples in the region of

3289-928: The Eurasian steppes . Although Göktürk empires came to an end in the 8th century, they were succeeded by numerous Turkic empires such as the Uyghur Khaganate , Kara-Khanid Khanate , Khazars , and the Cumans . Some Turks eventually settled down into sedentary societies such as the Qocho and Ganzhou Uyghurs . The Seljuq dynasty settled in Anatolia starting in the 11th century, resulting in permanent Turkic settlement and presence there. Modern nations with large Turkic populations include Kyrgyzstan , Turkmenistan , Turkey , Azerbaijan , Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan , and Turkic populations also exist within other nations, such as Chuvashia , Bashkortostan , Tatarstan and

3432-775: The First Bulgarian Empire ., the first state that the Roman empire recognised in the Balkans and the first time it legally surrendered claims to part of its Balkan dominions. In 680 the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IV (r.   668–685), having recently defeated the Arabs , led an expedition at the head of a huge army and fleet to drive off the Bulgars but suffered a disastrous defeat at

3575-614: The Kahta highlands, would have found gorges already filled with corpses from previous convoys. Many others were held in tributary valleys of the Tigris , Euphrates , or Murat and systematically executed by the Special Organization. Armenian men were often drowned by being tied together back-to-back before being thrown in the water, a method that was not used on women. Authorities viewed disposal of bodies through rivers as

3718-521: The Khabur valley, where their bodies would not create a public health hazard. The massacres killed most of the Armenians who had survived the camp system. The Ottoman Empire tried to prevent journalists and photographers from documenting the atrocities, threatening them with arrest. Nevertheless, substantiated reports of mass killings were widely covered in Western newspapers . On 24 May 1915,

3861-655: The Levant . Thus, the ancestors of the founding stock of the modern Turkish nation were most closely related to the Oghuz Turkmen groups that settled in the Caucasus and later became the Azerbaijani nation . By early modern times, the name Turkestan has several definitions: The Salars are descended from Turkmen who migrated from Central Asia and settled in a Tibetan area of Qinghai under Ming Chinese rule. The Salar ethnicity formed and underwent ethnogenesis from

4004-634: The Mongol Invasions of Inner and Central Asia.. While the Karakhanid state remained in this territory until its conquest by Genghis Khan , the Turkmen group of tribes was formed around the core of the Karluks and the more westward Oghuzes. The current majority view for the etymology of the name is that it comes from Türk and the Turkic emphasizing suffix -men , meaning 'most Turkish of

4147-632: The Rouran seeking inclusion in their confederacy and protection. His tribe consisted of famed metalsmiths and was granted land near a mountain quarry that looked like a helmet, from which they got the name Turk/Tujue 突厥 . In 546, the leader of the Ashina, Bumin , aided the Rouran in putting down a Tiele revolt. Bumin requested a Rouran princess for his service but was denied, after which he declared independence. In 551, Bumin declared himself Khagan and married Princess Changle from Western Wei . He then dealt

4290-1069: The Sakha Republic of Siberia in Russia , Northern Cyprus , the Crimean Tatars , the Kazakhs in Mongolia , the Uyghurs in China , and the Azeris in Iran . Proposals for the homeland of the Turkic peoples and their language are far-ranging, from the Transcaspian steppe to Northeastern Asia ( Manchuria ). Peter Benjamin Golden listed Proto-Turkic lexical items about the climate, topography, flora, fauna, people's modes of subsistence in

4433-784: The Soviet occupation of Armenia prevented another genocide. The victorious nationalists subsequently declared the Republic of Turkey in 1923. CUP war criminals were granted immunity and later that year, the Treaty of Lausanne established Turkey's current borders and provided for the Greek population's expulsion . Its protection provisions for non-Muslim minorities had no enforcement mechanism and were disregarded in practice. Armenian survivors were left mainly in three locations. About 295,000 Armenians had fled to Russian-controlled territory during

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4576-498: The Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children. Before World War I, Armenians occupied a somewhat protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society. Large-scale massacres of Armenians had occurred in the 1890s and 1909 . The Ottoman Empire suffered a series of military defeats and territorial losses—especially during the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars —leading to fear among CUP leaders that

4719-694: The Toquz Oghuz (nine tribes), Sekiz Oghuz (eight tribes), and Uch Oghuz (three tribes). Oghuz has been used to refer to many different Turkic tribes, causing much confusion. For example, the ruler of the Oghuz was called the Toquz Khagan, even though there were twelve tribes instead of nine. It is uncertain if the Oghuz Turks were directly descended from the Toquz Oghuz. They may have been under

4862-413: The Triple Entente (Russia, Britain, and France) formally condemned the Ottoman Empire for " crimes against humanity and civilization", and threatened to hold the perpetrators accountable. Witness testimony was published in books such as The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (1916) and Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (1918), raising public awareness of the genocide. The German Empire

5005-414: The sixth century BCE , about 1,500 years before the arrival of Turkmens under the Seljuk dynasty . The Kingdom of Armenia adopted Christianity as its national religion in the fourth century CE , establishing the Armenian Apostolic Church . Following the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, two Islamic empires—the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Safavid Empire —contested Western Armenia , which

5148-585: The 11th century, the Kimeks were displaced by the Cumans. Later Turkic peoples include the Khazars, Turkmens : either Karluks (mainly 8th century) or Oghuz Turks, Uyghurs, Yenisei Kyrgyz, Pechenegs, Cumans-Kipchaks, etc. As these peoples were founding states in the area between Mongolia and Transoxiana , they came into contact with Muslims, and most gradually adopted Islam. However, most groups of Turkic people who belonged to other religions, including Christians , Judaists , Buddhists , Manichaeans , and Zoroastrians continued to exist in smaller numbers, up until

5291-401: The 11th century, they had integrated a considerable number of Sogdians into their population, resulting in speech that to Mahmud al-Kashgari , sounded slurred. The Karluks, Chigils , and Yagmas formed the Kara-Khanid Khanate in the 9th century, but it's unclear whether the leadership of the new polity fell to the Karluks or the Yagmas. Paul Pelliot (apud Pritsak, 1975) first proposed that

5434-415: The 4th and 6th century AD. According to the first European sources to mention the Huns, they were then living east of the Volga River , in an area that was part of Scythia at the time; the Huns' arrival is associated with the migration westward of an Indo-Iranian people , the Alans . After entering Europe, the Huns incorporated members of other peoples, such as the Alans, Slavs and Goths. None or few of

5577-420: The 7th century Chinese historical Book of Sui preserved the earliest record on the Pechenegs; the book mentioned a people named Bĕirù ( 北褥 ; LMC: * puǝ̌k-rjwk < EMC: * pǝk-ŋuawk ), who had settled near the Ēnqū ( 恩屈 ; LMC: * ʔən-kʰyt < EMC: * ʔən-kʰut < * On[o]gur ) and Alan ( 阿蘭 ; MC: * ʔa-lan ) peoples (identified as Onogurs and Alans, respectively), to the east of Fulin ( 拂菻 ) (or

5720-420: The 8th-century Taibo Yinjing ( 太白陰經 ) 'Venus's Secret Classic' and the three Ġuz hordes mentioned in Al-Masudi's Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems . The Oghuz migration westward began with the fall of the Second Turkic Khaganate and the rise of the Uyghur Khaganate in 744. Under the Uyghur rule, the Oghuz leader obtained the title of "right yabgu ". When they appeared in Muslim textual sources in

5863-400: The 9th century, they were described using the same title. The Oghuz fought a series of wars with the Pechenegs , Khalaj , Charuk, and Khazars for the steppes, emerging victorious and establishing the Oghuz Yabgu State . The Oghuz were in constant conflict with the Pechenegs and Khazars throughout the 10th century, as recorded by Muslim texts, but they also cooperated at times. In one instance,

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6006-404: The ARF incite Russian Armenians to intervene on the Ottoman side. Instead, the delegates resolved that Armenians should fight for the countries of their citizenships. During its war preparations, the Ottoman government recruited thousands of prisoners to join the paramilitary Special Organization , which initially focused on stirring up revolts among Muslims behind Russian lines beginning before

6149-416: The Armenian leadership and anyone capable of organizing resistance, eventually resulted in the murder of most of those arrested. The same day, Talaat banned all Armenian political organizations and ordered that the Armenians who had previously been removed from Cilicia be deported again, from central Anatolia—where they would likely have survived—to the Syrian Desert . We have been blamed for not making

6292-411: The Armenians had to be eliminated to save the empire. Massacres of Armenian men were occurring in the vicinity of Bashkale in Van vilayet from December 1914. ARF leaders attempted to keep the situation calm, warning that even justifiable self-defense could lead to escalation of killing. The governor, Djevdet Bey , ordered the Armenians of Van to hand over their arms on 18 April 1915, creating

6435-455: The Armenians with their Russian oppressors. Nomadic Kurds committed many atrocities during the genocide, but settled Kurds only rarely did so. Perpetrators had several motives, including ideology, revenge, desire for Armenian property, and careerism . To motivate perpetrators, state-appointed imams encouraged the killing of Armenians and killers were entitled to a third of Armenian movable property (another third went to local authorities and

6578-430: The Armenians would seek independence. During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory in 1914, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians. Ottoman leaders took isolated instances of Armenian resistance as evidence of a widespread rebellion, though no such rebellion existed. Mass deportation was intended to permanently forestall the possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence. On 24 April 1915,

6721-412: The Bulgars are first mentioned. John of Nikiû (fl. 680-690) wrote about Vitalian (Roman general and consul, died 520) in his “Chronicle of John, bishop of Nikiu”: “Vitalian withdrew into the province of Bulgaria.” By the 7th century, they were under the rule of the Avars , who they revolted against in 635 under the leadership of Kubrat . Prior to this, Kubrat had made an alliance with Heraclius of

6864-429: The Byzantine Empire. He was baptized in 619. Kubrat died in the 660s and his territory, Old Great Bulgaria , was divided between his five sons. One of them, the elder brother Batbayan stayed and was subjugated by the Khazars . Another one, Kotrag , following the death of his father, began to extend the influence of his Bulgars to the Volga River . He is remembered as the founder of Volga Bulgaria . Another of

7007-430: The CUP in the perpetration of genocide. The Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants (IAMM) coordinated the deportation and the resettlement of Muslim immigrants in the vacant houses and lands. The IAMM, under the control of Talaat's Ministry of the Interior , and the Special Organization, which took orders directly from the CUP Central Committee, all closely coordinated their activities. A dual-track system

7150-534: The CUP's increasingly repressive governance. When news of the countercoup reached Adana , armed Muslims attacked the Armenian quarter and Armenians returned fire. Ottoman soldiers did not protect Armenians and instead armed the rioters. Between 20,000 and 25,000 people, mostly Armenians, were killed in Adana and nearby towns. Unlike the 1890s massacres, the events were not organized by the central government but instigated by local officials, intellectuals, and Islamic clerics, including CUP supporters in Adana. Although

7293-442: The Di, Dili, Dingling, and later Tujue mentioned in textual sources are all just Chinese transcriptions of the same Turkic word türk , yet Golden proposes that Tujue transcribed * Türküt while Dili , Dingling , Chile , Tele , & Tiele transcribed * Tegreg . The first reference to Türk or Türküt appears in 6th-century Chinese sources as the transcription Tūjué ( 突厥 ). The earliest evidence of Turkic languages and

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7436-408: The Hamidiye regiments in reserve. CUP leaders feared that these reforms, which were never implemented, could lead to partition and cited them as a reason for the elimination of the Armenian population in 1915. The 1912 First Balkan War resulted in the loss of almost all of the empire's European territory and the mass expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans. Ottoman Muslim society was incensed by

7579-485: The Huns appear to have had Iranian, Germanic, mixed or unknown origins. The earliest Turks mentioned in textual sources are the Xinli ( 薪犁 ), Gekun ( 鬲昆 ), and Tiele ( 鐵勒 ), the last of which possibly transcribes endonym *Tegreg '[People of the] Carts', recorded by the Chinese in the 6th century. According to the New Book of Tang , Tiele may be a mistaken form of Chile / Gaoche , who themselves may be related to Xiongnu and Dingling . Many scholars believe

7722-481: The Huns were literate (judging by the accounts of contemporaries such as Procopius ). They left no texts and few other linguistic clues to their origins, apart from personal names. Some names, such as Ultinčur and Alpilčur, apparently had endings related to suffixes used in Turkic personal names: Old Turkic -čor, Pecheneg -tzour and Kirghiz -čoro. Some Turkic ethnonyms had cognate endings, such as Utigur , Onogur , and Ultingir. However, other personal names among

7865-413: The Khazar king descended from the Ansa, which has been interpreted as Ashina. By the mid-7th century, the Khazars were located in the North Caucasus , where they fought against the Umayyads constantly. According to the Book of Tang , the Yenisei Kyrgyz were tall, red-haired, pale-faced, and green-eyed; black-eyed Kyrgyzes were claimed to be descendants of Han general Li Ling , presumably including

8008-507: The Khazars hired the Oghuz to fight off an attack by the Alans. In 965, the Oghuz took part in a Rus' attack on the Khazars and in 985 they joined the Rus' again in attacking Volga Bulgaria . The Yabgu State of the Oghuz did not have a central leadership and there is no evidence of the Yabgu acting as a spokesman for the entire Oghuz people. By the 10th century, some Oghuz had settled in towns and converted to Islam, although many tribes still followed Tengrism . The relationship and origins of

8151-404: The Khazars is unclear. According to Al-Masudi , the Khazars were called Sabirs in Turkic. Dunlop (1954) suggests a relation to Uyghurs , some of whom might have migrated west before 555 CE. Because imperial Chinese sources linked Khazars to Göktürks, others believe the Khazars were founded by Irbis Seguy , the penultimate ruler of the Western Turkic Khaganate, since the Hudud al-'Alam says

8294-437: The Kyrgyz Khagans who claimed such descent. It also notes that Kyrgyz women outnumbered men, both men and women wore tattoos, and they made weapons which they gave to the Turks. They practiced agriculture but did not grow fruits. The Kyrgyz lived west of Lake Baikal and east of the Karluks . According to the Book of Sui , the Kyrgyz chaffed at the domination of the First Turkic Khaganate. The Uyghur Khaganate also made war on

8437-404: The Kyrgyz and cut them off from trade with China, which the Uyghurs monopolized. As a result, the Kyrgyz turned to other channels of trade such as with the Tibetans , Arabs , and Karluks. From 820 onward, the Kyrgyz were constantly at war with the Uyghurs, until 840, when the Uyghur Khaganate was dismantled. Although the Kyrgyz managed to occupy some of the Uyghur lands, they had no great effect on

8580-439: The October 1918 Armistice of Mudros . From 1918 to 1920, Armenian militants committed revenge killings of thousands of Muslims, which have been cited as a retroactive excuse for genocide. In 1918, at least 200,000 people in Armenia, mostly refugees, died from starvation or disease, in part due to a Turkish blockade of food supplies and the deliberate destruction of crops in eastern Armenia by Turkish troops, both before and after

8723-415: The Ottoman Empire during the Second Balkan War in mid-1913, there was a campaign of looting and intimidation against Greeks and Armenians, forcing many to emigrate. Around 150,000 Greek Orthodox from the Aegean coast were forcibly deported in May and June 1914 by Muslim bandits , who were secretly backed by the CUP and sometimes joined by the regular army . Historian Matthias Bjørnlund states that

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8866-489: The Ottoman armies for the invasion of Russian territory, and tried to encircle the Russian Caucasus Army at the Battle of Sarikamish , fought from December 1914 to January 1915. Unprepared for the harsh winter conditions, his forces were routed, losing more than 60,000 men. The retreating Ottoman army destroyed dozens of Ottoman Armenian villages in Bitlis vilayet, massacring their inhabitants. Enver publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians who he claimed had actively sided with

9009-405: The Ottoman authorities arrested and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders from Constantinople . At the orders of Talaat Pasha , an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape , and massacres. In

9152-414: The Ottoman economy; Muslims were disadvantaged by the deportation of skilled professionals and entire districts fell into famine following their farmers' deportation. The Ottoman and Turkish governments passed a series of Abandoned Properties Laws to manage and redistribute property confiscated from Armenians. Although the laws maintained that the state was simply administering the properties on behalf of

9295-424: The Russians, a theory that became a consensus among CUP leaders. Reports of local incidents such as weapons caches, severed telegraph lines, and occasional killings confirmed preexisting beliefs about Armenian treachery and fueled paranoia among CUP leaders that a coordinated Armenian conspiracy was plotting against the empire. Discounting contrary reports that most Armenians were loyal, the CUP leaders decided that

9438-402: The Special Organization, and those farther away also involved local militias, bandits, gendarmes, or Kurdish tribes depending on the area. Within the area controlled by the Third Army , which held eastern Anatolia, the army was only involved in genocidal atrocities in the vilayets of Van, Erzerum, and Bitlis. Many perpetrators came from the Caucasus ( Chechens and Circassians), who identified

9581-602: The Syrian Desert, the survivors were dispersed into concentration camps . In 1916, another wave of massacres was ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of the year. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors continued through the Turkish War of Independence after World War I, carried out by Turkish nationalists . This genocide put an end to more than two thousand years of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia . Together with

9724-536: The Toquz Oghuz, while Al-Biruni claimed that the Qun were further east of them. Habash al-Hasib al-Marwazi writes that the Qun came from the lands of Cathay which they fled from in fear of the Khitans. This may have been what the Armenian chronicler Matthew of Edessa was referring to when he recounted Pale Ones being driven out by the people of the Snakes, whom Golden identified as a Mongolic or para-Mongolic people known as Qay in Arabic , Tatabï in Old Turkic , and Kumo Xi in Chinese language . In

9867-438: The Turgesh and took the Western Turkic capital of Suyab. Islam began spreading in the Karluk tribes during the 9th century. According to the Hudud al-'Alam , written in the 10th century, the Karluks were pleasant nearly civilized people who participated in agriculture as well as herding and hunting. Al-Masudi considered the Karluks to be the most beautiful people among the Turks, being tall in stature, and lordly in appearance. By

10010-430: The Turkic word qun , which means 'pale' or 'yellow". Some scholars associate the Cumans-Kipchaks with the Kankalis . The Kipchaks might have been mentioned as Turk-Kibchak in the 8th century Moyun Chur inscription, though this was uncertain as only the letters 𐰲𐰴 (čq * čaq ?) were readable on the damaged inscription; they were first definitely mentioned in the 9th century by Ibn Khordadbeh , who placed them next to

10153-450: The Turkish authorities eliminated surviving Armenians from southern Turkey, expelling thousands to French-mandate Syria . Turkic migration The Turkic migrations were the spread of Turkic tribes and Turkic languages across Eurasia between the 4th and 11th centuries. In the 6th century, the Göktürks overthrew the Rouran Khaganate in what is now Mongolia and expanded in all directions, spreading Turkic culture throughout

10296-715: The Turks' or 'pure-blooded Turks.' Thus, the ethnic consciousness among some, but not all Turkic tribes as "Turkmens" in the Islamic era came long after the fall of the non-Muslim Gokturk (and Eastern and Western) Khanates. Turkic soldiers in the army of the Abbasid caliphs emerged as the de facto rulers of much of the Muslim Middle East (apart from Syria and North Africa) from the 13th century. The Oghuz and other tribes captured and dominated various countries under

10439-408: The absent Armenians, there was no provision to return them to the owners—it was presumed that they had ceased to exist. Historians Taner Akçam and Ümit Kurt argue that "The Republic of Turkey and its legal system were built, in a sense, on the seizure of Armenian cultural, social, and economic wealth, and on the removal of the Armenian presence." The proceeds from the sale of confiscated property

10582-581: The age range of conscription. Unlike the earlier massacres of Ottoman Armenians, in 1915 Armenians were not usually killed in their villages, to avoid destruction of property or unauthorized looting. Instead, the men were usually separated from the rest of the deportees during the first few days and executed. Few resisted, believing it would put their families in greater danger. Boys above the age of twelve (sometimes fifteen) were treated as adult men. Execution sites were chosen for proximity to major roads and for rugged terrain, lakes, wells, or cisterns to facilitate

10725-547: The area around Konya in central Anatolia. In late March or early April, the CUP Central Committee decided on the large-scale removal of Armenians from areas near the front lines. During the night of 23–24 April 1915 hundreds of Armenian political activists, intellectuals, and community leaders were rounded up in Constantinople and across the empire . This order from Talaat, intended to eliminate

10868-467: The armistice. Armenians organized a coordinated effort known as vorpahavak ( lit.   ' the gathering of orphans ' ) that reclaimed thousands of kidnapped and Islamized Armenian women and children. Armenian leaders abandoned traditional patrilineality to classify children born to Armenian women and their Muslim captors as Armenian. An orphanage in Alexandropol held 25,000 orphans,

11011-634: The army , but many soldiers of all ethnicities and religions deserted due to difficult conditions and concern for their families. At least 10 percent of Ottoman Armenians were mobilized, leaving their communities bereft of fighting-age men and therefore largely unable to organize armed resistance to deportation in 1915. During the Ottoman invasion of Russian and Persian territory , the Special Organization massacred local Armenians and Assyrian/Syriac Christians . Beginning in November 1914, provincial governors of Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum sent many telegrams to

11154-552: The atrocities committed against Balkan Muslims, intensifying anti-Christian sentiment and leading to a desire for revenge. Blame for the loss was assigned to all Christians, including the Ottoman Armenians, many of whom had fought on the Ottoman side. The Balkan Wars put an end to the Ottomanist movement for pluralism and coexistence; instead, the CUP turned to an increasingly radical Turkish nationalism to preserve

11297-577: The beginning of 1916 some 500,000 deportees were alive in Syria and Mesopotamia. Afraid that surviving Armenians might return home after the war, Talaat Pasha ordered a second wave of massacres in February 1916. Another wave of deportations targeted Armenians remaining in Anatolia. More than 200,000 Armenians were killed between March and October 1916, often in remote areas near Deir ez-Zor and on parts of

11440-680: The camps to buy them from their parents. In the western Levant , governed by the Ottoman Fourth Army under Djemal Pasha, there were no concentration camps or large-scale massacres, rather Armenians were resettled and recruited to work for the war effort. They had to convert to Islam or face deportation to another area. The ability of the Armenians to adapt and survive was greater than the perpetrators expected. A loosely organized, Armenian-led resistance network based in Aleppo succeeded in helping many deportees, saving Armenian lives. At

11583-588: The central government pressing for more severe measures against the Armenians, both regionally and throughout the empire. These requests were endorsed by the central government already before 1915. Armenian civil servants were dismissed from their posts in late 1914 and early 1915. In February 1915, the CUP leaders decided to disarm Armenians serving in the army and transfer them to labor battalions . The Armenian soldiers in labor battalions were systematically executed, although many skilled workers were spared until 1916. Minister of War Enver Pasha took over command of

11726-429: The concealment or disposal of corpses. The convoys would stop at a nearby transit camp, where the escorts would demand a ransom from the Armenians. Those unable to pay were murdered. Units of the Special Organization, often wearing gendarme uniforms, were stationed at the killing sites; escorting gendarmes often did not participate in killing. At least 150,000 Armenians passed through Erzindjan from June 1915, where

11869-715: The demographics of Anatolia. Armenian homes, businesses, and land were preferentially allocated to Muslims from outside the empire, nomads, and the estimated 800,000 (largely Kurdish) Ottoman subjects displaced because of the war with Russia. Resettled Muslims were spread out (typically limited to 10 percent in any area) among larger Turkish populations so that they would lose their distinctive characteristics, such as non-Turkish languages or nomadism. These migrants were exposed to harsh conditions and, in some cases, violence or restriction from leaving their new villages. The ethnic cleansing of Anatolia—the Armenian genocide, Assyrian genocide , and expulsion of Greeks after World War I—paved

12012-555: The deportation of all Armenians throughout the empire, even Adrianople , 2,000 kilometers (1,200 mi) from the Russian front. Following the elimination of the Armenian population in eastern Anatolia, in August 1915, the Armenians of western Anatolia and European Turkey were targeted for deportation. Some areas with a very low Armenian population and some cities, including Constantinople, were partially spared. Overall, national, regional, and local levels of governance cooperated with

12155-416: The deportees, although some circumvented these prohibitions. Survivors testified that some Armenians refused aid as they believed it would only prolong their suffering. The guards raped female prisoners and also allowed Bedouins to raid the camps at night for looting and rape; some women were forced into marriage. Thousands of Armenian children were sold to childless Turks, Arabs, and Jews, who would come to

12298-476: The diet of Armenian refugees, to raise money for humanitarian efforts. Between 1915 and 1930, Near East Relief raised $ 110 million ($ 2 billion adjusted for inflation) for refugees from the Ottoman Empire. Intentional, state-sponsored killing of Armenians mostly ceased by the end of January 1917, although sporadic massacres and starvation continued. Both contemporaries and later historians have estimated that around 1 million Armenians died during

12441-683: The direct leadership of the Toquz at some point, but by the 11th century, the Oghuz were already linguistically distinct from their neighbors such as the Kipchaks and Karakhanids . Zuev (1960) connects the Oghuzes to the Western Turkic tribe 姑蘇 Gūsū (< MC * kuo-suo ) mentioned in the Chinese encyclopedia Tongdian , as well as the 三屈 'Three Qu ' (< MC * k(h)ɨut̚ ) in

12584-704: The early and medieval Turks were a heterogeneous group and that the Turkification of Eurasia was a result of language diffusion, not a migration of a homogeneous population. The Huns have often been considered a people with Turkic origins and/or associated with the Xiongnu . However, the precise origins and identity of the Huns are still debated. In regard to their cultural genesis, the Cambridge Ancient History of China asserts that "from about

12727-412: The eastern provinces after 1908 and the CUP took steps to reform the local gendarmerie , although tensions remained high. Despite an agreement to reverse the land usurpation of the previous decades in the 1910 Salonica Accord between the ARF and the CUP, the latter made no efforts to carry this out. In early 1909 an unsuccessful countercoup was launched by conservatives and some liberals who opposed

12870-642: The eighth century BC, throughout inner Asia horse-riding pastoral communities appeared, giving origin to warrior societies". These were part of a larger belt of "equestrian pastoral peoples" stretching from the Black Sea to Mongolia, and known collectively to the Greeks as Scythians . The Huns per se were first documented as a nomadic people , in Central Asia , the Caucasus , and Eastern Europe , between

13013-437: The empire as the Balkans had. In January 1913, the CUP launched another coup , installed a one-party state , and strictly repressed all real or perceived internal enemies. After the coup, the CUP shifted the demography of border areas by resettling Balkan Muslim refugees while coercing Christians to emigrate; immigrants were promised property that had belonged to Christians. When parts of Eastern Thrace were reoccupied by

13156-788: The empire officially entered the war. On 29 October 1914, the empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers by launching a surprise attack on Russian ports in the Black Sea . Many Russian Armenians were enthusiastic about the war, but Ottoman Armenians were more ambivalent, afraid that supporting Russia would bring retaliation. Organization of Armenian volunteer units by Russian Armenians, later joined by some Ottoman Armenian deserters, further increased Ottoman suspicions against their Armenian population. Wartime requisitions were often corrupt and arbitrary, and disproportionately targeted Greeks and Armenians. Armenian leaders urged young men to accept conscription into

13299-511: The empire saw widespread massacres ; at least 100,000 Armenians were killed primarily by Ottoman soldiers and mobs let loose by the authorities. Many Armenian villages were forcibly converted to Islam. The Ottoman state bore ultimate responsibility for the killings, whose purpose was violently restoring the previous social order in which Christians would unquestioningly accept Muslim supremacy, and forcing Armenians to emigrate, thereby decreasing their numbers. Abdul Hamid's despotism prompted

13442-419: The empire's eastern provinces. Ottoman records show the government aimed to reduce Armenians to no more than five percent of the local population in the sources of deportation and ten percent in the destination areas. This goal could not be accomplished without mass murder. The deportation of Armenians and resettlement of Muslims in their lands was part of a broader project intended to permanently restructure

13585-618: The empire, a belief that was crucial to deciding on genocide in early 1915. At the same time, the war provided an opportunity to enact what Talaat called the "definitive solution to the Armenian Question". The CUP wrongly believed that the Russian Empire sought to annex eastern Anatolia, and ordered the genocide in large part to prevent this eventuality. The genocide was intended to permanently eliminate any possibility that Armenians could achieve autonomy or independence in

13728-540: The empire. CUP leaders such as Talaat and Enver Pasha came to blame non-Muslim population concentrations in strategic areas for many of the empire's problems, concluding by mid-1914 that they were internal tumors to be excised. Of these, Ottoman Armenians were considered the most dangerous, because CUP leaders feared that their homeland in Anatolia—claimed as the last refuge of the Turkish nation—would break away from

13871-473: The eve of World War I in 1914, around two million Armenians lived in Ottoman territory, mostly in Anatolia, a region with a total population of 15–17.5 million. According to the Armenian Patriarchate 's estimates for 1913–1914, there were 2,925 Armenian towns and villages in the Ottoman Empire, of which 2,084 were in the Armenian highlands adjacent to the Russian border. Armenians were

14014-610: The formation of an opposition movement, the Young Turks , which sought to overthrow him and restore the 1876 Constitution of the Ottoman Empire , which he had suspended in 1877. One faction of the Young Turks was the secret and revolutionary Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), based in Salonica , from which the charismatic conspirator Mehmed Talaat (later Talaat Pasha ) emerged as a leading member. Although skeptical of

14157-568: The genocide , with figures ranging from 600,000 to 1.5 million deaths. Between 800,000 and 1.2 million Armenians were deported, and contemporaries estimated that by late 1916 only 200,000 were still alive. As the British Army advanced in 1917 and 1918 northwards through the Levant , they liberated around 100,000 to 150,000 Armenians working for the Ottoman military under abysmal conditions, not including those held by Arab tribes. As

14300-832: The genocide and ended up mostly in Soviet Armenia . An estimated 200,000 Armenian refugees settled in the Middle East, forming a new wave of the Armenian diaspora . In the Republic of Turkey, about 100,000 Armenians lived in Constantinople and another 200,000 lived in the provinces, largely women and children who had been forcibly converted. Though Armenians in Constantinople faced discrimination, they were allowed to maintain their cultural identity, unlike those elsewhere in Turkey who continued to face forced Islamization and kidnapping of girls after 1923. Between 1922 and 1929,

14443-478: The genocide endured exploitation, hard labor without pay, forced conversion to Islam, and physical and sexual abuse . Armenian women captured during the journey ended up in Turkish or Kurdish households; those who were Islamized during the second phase of the genocide found themselves in an Arab or Bedouin environment. The rape , sexual abuse, and prostitution of Armenian women were all very common. Although Armenian women tried to avoid sexual violence, suicide

14586-570: The geopolitical configuration around them. The Chinese paid no heed to them other than to award them with some titles and reasoned that since the Uyghurs were no longer in power, there was no reason to maintain relations with the Kyrgyz any longer. The Kyrgyz themselves seemed to lack any interest in occupying the former territory of the Uyghurs in the east. By 924, the Khitans had occupied Otuken in

14729-705: The hands of Asparuh at Onglos , a swampy region in or around the Danube Delta where the Bulgars had set a fortified camp. The Bulgars advanced south, crossed the Balkan Mountains and invaded Thrace . In 681, the Byzantines were compelled to sign a humiliating peace treaty, forcing them to acknowledge Bulgaria as an independent state, to cede the territories to the north of the Balkan Mountains and to pay an annual tribute. The origin of

14872-583: The hypothetical Proto-Turkic Urheimat and proposed that the Proto-Turkic Urheimat was located at the southern, taiga - steppe zone of the Sayan - Altay region. According to Yunusbayev et al. (2015), genetic evidence points to an origin in the region near South Siberia and Mongolia as the "Inner Asian Homeland" of the Turkic ethnicity. Similarly several linguists, including Juha Janhunen , Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, suggest that Mongolia

15015-629: The initial expansion from the early homeland remains unknown. The first state known as Turk , giving its name to the many states and peoples afterward, was that of the Göktürks ( gök 'blue' or 'celestial', however in this context gök refers to the direction 'east' . Therefore, Gökturks only denoted the Eastern Turks in the 6th century. In 439, the head of the Ashina clan led his people from Pingliang (now in modern Gansu province , China ) to

15158-477: The largest number in the world. In 1920, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople reported it was caring for 100,000 orphans, estimating that another 100,000 remained captive. Following the armistice, Allied governments championed the prosecution of Armenian genocide perpetrators. Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha publicly recognized that 800,000 Ottoman citizens of Armenian origin had died as

15301-469: The last to the CUP). Embezzling beyond that was punished. Ottoman politicians and officials who opposed the genocide were dismissed or assassinated. The government decreed that any Muslim who harbored an Armenian against the will of the authorities would be executed. Although the majority of able-bodied Armenian men had been conscripted into the army, others deserted, paid the exemption tax, or fell outside

15444-710: The leadership of the Seljuk dynasty , and eventually captured the territories of the Abbasid dynasty and the Byzantine Empire. Meanwhile, the Kyrgyz and Uyghurs were struggling with one another and with the Chinese Empire. The Kyrgyz people ultimately settled in the region now referred to as Kyrgyzstan . The Batu hordes conquered the Volga Bulgars in what is today Tatarstan and Kypchaks in what

15587-662: The logistics of the Ottoman Army. By late 1915, the CUP had extinguished Armenian existence from eastern Anatolia. On 23 May 1915, Talaat ordered the deportation of all Armenians in Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum. To grant a cover of legality to the deportation, already well underway in the eastern provinces and Cilicia, the Council of Ministers approved the Temporary Law of Deportation , which allowed authorities to deport anyone deemed suspect. On 21 June, Talaat ordered

15730-482: The mass murder and expulsion of Assyrian/Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethnonationalist Turkish state, the Republic of Turkey . The Turkish government maintains that the deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action that cannot be described as genocide . As of 2023, 34 countries have recognized the events as genocide , concurring with the academic consensus. The presence of Armenians in Anatolia has been documented since

15873-455: The massacres went unpunished, the ARF continued to hope that reforms to improve security and restore lands were forthcoming, until late 1912, when they broke with the CUP and appealed to the European powers. On 8 February 1914, the CUP reluctantly agreed to reforms brokered by Germany that provided for the appointment of two European inspectors for the entire Ottoman east and putting

16016-576: The men were killed immediately, many women and children were kidnapped by local Kurds, and others marched away to be killed later. By the end of June, there were only a dozen Armenians in the vilayet. The first deportations of Armenians were proposed by Djemal Pasha , the commander of the Fourth Army , in February 1915 and targeted Armenians in Cilicia (specifically Alexandretta , Dörtyol , Adana, Hadjin , Zeytun , and Sis ) who were relocated to

16159-659: The mid-9th century, the Kimek-Kipchak confederation emerged in the northern steppes stretching from Lake Balkhash in the east to the Aral Sea in the west. They were a confederation of seven minor tribes: Yemeks , Imur , Tatars , Bayandur , Kipchaks, Lanikaz , and Ajlad ; and whose leader held the title of "Shad Tutuk", derived from the Middle Chinese military title tuo-tuok 都督 'military governor' (> standard Chinese : dūdū ), but started using

16302-525: The middle class. Confiscation of Armenian assets continued into the second half of the twentieth century, and in 2006 the National Security Council ruled that property records from 1915 must be kept closed to protect national security. Outside Istanbul, the traces of Armenian existence in Turkey, including churches and monasteries, libraries, khachkars , and animal and place names , have been systematically erased, beginning during

16445-474: The perceived success of the Greek deportations allowed CUP leaders to envision even more radical policies "as yet another extension of a policy of social engineering through Turkification ". A few days after the outbreak of World War I, the CUP concluded an alliance with Germany on 2 August 1914. The same month, CUP representatives went to an ARF conference demanding that, in the event of war with Russia ,

16588-817: The process also required the eradication of Armenian names , language , and culture , and for women, immediate marriage to a Muslim. Although Islamization was the most feasible opportunity for survival, it also transgressed Armenian moral and social norms. The CUP allowed Armenian women to marry into Muslim households, as these women would lose their Armenian identity. Young women and girls were often appropriated as house servants or sex slaves . Some boys were abducted to work as forced laborers for Muslim individuals. Some children were forcibly seized, while others were sold or given up by their parents to save their lives. Special state-run orphanages were also set up with strict procedures intending to deprive their charges of an Armenian identity. Most Armenian children who survived

16731-401: The regime insisted on their destruction wherever their numbers exceeded the five to ten percent threshold, or there was a risk of them being able to preserve their nationality and culture. Talaat Pasha personally authorized conversion of Armenians and carefully tracked the loyalty of converted Armenians until the end of the war. Although the first and most important step was conversion to Islam,

16874-568: The river Syr Darya. The Pecheneg tribes were possibly related to the Kangly . In the late 9th century, conflict with the Khazars drove the Pechenegs into the Pontic steppes . In the 10th century, they had substantial interactions with the Byzantine Empire, who depended on them for keeping control of their neighbors. Byzantine and Muslim sources confirm that the Pechenegs had a leader, but the position

17017-608: The roads and their bodies were buried hastily or, more often, simply left beside the roads. The Ottoman government ordered the corpses to be cleared as soon as possible to prevent both photographic documentation and disease epidemics, but these orders were not uniformly followed. Women and children, who made up the great majority of deportees, were usually not executed immediately, but subjected to hard marches through mountainous terrain without food and water. Those who could not keep up were left to die or shot. During 1915, some were forced to walk as far as 1,000 kilometers (620 mi) in

17160-590: The sons named Kuber headed to Pannonia where he revolted against the Pannonian Avars and migrated to Thessalonika by 679. Alcek was allegedly a son of Kubrat and led the Bulgars to Ravenna that later settled the lands of the Longobard Kingdom in the villages of Gallo Matese , Sepino , Boiano and Isernia in the Matese mountains of southern Italy . Asparuh was the first ruler of

17303-515: The status of non-Muslims were strongly opposed by Islamic clergy and Muslims in general, and remained mostly theoretical. Because of the abolition of the Kurdish emirates in the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman government began to directly tax Armenian peasants who had previously paid taxes only to Kurdish landlords. The latter continued to exact levies illegally. From the mid-nineteenth century, Armenians faced large-scale land usurpation as

17446-436: The summer heat. Some deportees from western Anatolia were allowed to travel by rail . There was a distinction between the convoys from eastern Anatolia, which were eliminated almost in their entirety, and those from farther west, which made up most of those surviving to reach Syria. For example, around 99 percent of Armenians deported from Erzerum did not reach their destination. The Islamization of Armenians, carried out as

17589-454: The survivors sent to Deir ez-Zor. In general, Armenians were denied food and water during and after their forced march to the Syrian desert; many died of starvation, exhaustion, or disease, especially dysentery , typhus , and pneumonia . Some local officials gave Armenians food; others took bribes to provide food and water. Aid organizations were officially barred from providing food to

17732-664: The territory of the former Uyghur Khaganate. In 699, the Turgesh ruler Wuzhile founded a khaganate stretching from Chach to Beshbalik . He and his successor Saqal campaigned against the Tang dynasty and their Turkic allies until 711 when the resurgent Second Turkic Khaganate crushed the Turgesh in battle. Turgesh remnants under Suluk re-established themselves in Zhetysu . Suluk was killed by one of his subordinates in 737 after he

17875-1015: The time, but only referred to the Eastern Turkic Khaganate , while the Western Turkic Khaganate and Tiele used their own tribal names. Of the Tiele, the Book of Sui mentions only tribes which were not part a part of the First Turkic Khaganate. There was not a unified expansion of Turkic tribes. Peripheral Turkic peoples in the Göktürk Empire like the Bulgars and even central ones like the Oghuz and Karluks migrated autonomously with migrating traders, soldiers and townspeople. The precise date of

18018-643: The title of "Yabgu" instead when remnants of the Uyghur Khaganate fled to them in 840. By the early 10th century, the Kimeks bordered the Oghuz to the south, where the Ural formed the boundary. According to the Hudud al-'Alam , written in the 10th century, the Kimeks used the title of Khagan. They were the most removed from the sedentary civilization of all the Turks and had only one town within their territory. In

18161-558: The use of Turk as an endonym comes from the Orkhon inscriptions of the Göktürks (English: 'Celestial Turks' ) in the early 8th century. Many groups speaking Turkic languages never adopted the name Turk for their own identity. Among the peoples that came under Göktürk dominance and adopted its political culture and lingua-franca, the name Turk was not always the preferred identity. Turk, therefore, did not apply to all Turkic peoples at

18304-641: The war and continuing for decades afterward. The first arrivals in mid-1915 were accommodated in Aleppo . From mid-November, the convoys were denied access to the city and redirected along the Baghdad Railway or the Euphrates towards Mosul . The first transit camp was established at Sibil, east of Aleppo; one convoy would arrive each day while another would depart for Meskene or Deir ez-Zor . Dozens of concentration camps were set up in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia . By October 1915, some 870,000 deportees had reached Syria and Upper Mesopotamia. Most were repeatedly transferred between camps, being held in each camp for

18447-436: The war of independence was "intended to complete the genocide by finally eradicating Armenian, Greek, and Syriac survivors". In 1920 Kâzım Karabekir , a Turkish general, invaded Armenia with orders "to eliminate Armenia physically and politically". Nearly 100,000 Armenians were massacred in Transcaucasia by the Turkish army and another 100,000 fled from Cilicia during the French withdrawal . According to Kévorkian, only

18590-422: The way for the formation of an ethno-national Turkish state. In September 1918, Talaat emphasized that regardless of losing the war, he had succeeded at "transforming Turkey to a nation-state in Anatolia". Deportation amounted to a death sentence; the authorities planned for and intended the death of the deportees. Deportation was only carried out behind the front lines, where no active rebellion existed, and

18733-416: Was "organized and carried out by the top leaders of CUP". Eighteen perpetrators (including Talaat, Enver, and Djemal) were sentenced to death, of whom only three were ultimately executed as the remainder had fled and were tried in absentia . The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres , which awarded Armenia a large area in eastern Anatolia , eliminated the Ottoman government's purpose for holding the trials. Prosecution

18876-416: Was a military ally of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. German diplomats approved limited removals of Armenians in early 1915, and took no action against the genocide, which has been a source of controversy. Relief efforts were organized in dozens of countries to raise money for Armenian survivors. By 1925, people in 49 countries were organizing "Golden Rule Sundays" during which they consumed

19019-533: Was acquitted by a German jury. The CUP regrouped as the Turkish nationalist movement to fight the Turkish War of Independence , relying on the support of perpetrators of the genocide and those who had profited from it. This movement saw the return of Armenian survivors as a mortal threat to its nationalist ambitions and the interests of its supporters. The return of survivors was therefore impossible in most of Anatolia and thousands of Armenians who tried were murdered. Historian Raymond Kévorkian states that

19162-447: Was defeated by the Tang dynasty in 630 while the Western Khaganate fell to the Tang in 657. In 682, Ilterish Qaghan rebelled against the Tang and founded the Second Turkic Khaganate , which fell to the Uyghurs in 744. The Bulgars , also known as the Onogur -Bulgars or Onogundurs, occupied the Black Sea Kuban steppe zone sometime during the 5th century. It would be in 480, while serving as allies of Byzantine Emperor Zeno , that

19305-474: Was defeated by the Umayyads . The Tang took advantage of the situation to invade Turgesh territory and took the city of Suyab . In the 760s, the Karluks drove out the Turgesh. The Karluks migrated into the area of Tokharistan as early as the 7th century. In 744, they participated in the Uyghur Khaganate's rise by overthrowing the Second Turkic Khaganate, but conflict with the Uyghurs forced them to migrate further west into Zhetysu. By 766, they had pushed out

19448-502: Was hampered by a widespread belief among Turkish Muslims that the actions against the Armenians were not punishable crimes. Increasingly, the genocide was considered necessary and justified to establish a Turkish nation-state. On 15 March 1921, Talaat was assassinated in Berlin as part of a covert operation of the ARF to kill the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. The trial of his admitted killer, Soghomon Tehlirian , focused on Talaat's responsibility for genocide. Tehlirian

19591-447: Was low, making them especially vulnerable. Armenians in the eastern provinces lived in semi- feudal conditions and commonly encountered forced labor , illegal taxation , and unpunished crimes against them including robberies, murders, and sexual assaults. Beginning in 1839, the Ottoman government issued a series of reforms to centralize power and equalize the status of Ottoman subjects regardless of religion. The reforms to equalize

19734-419: Was not passed down from father to son. In the 10th century, the Pechenegs came into military conflict with the Rus', and in the early 11th century, military conflict with the Oghuz Turks drove them further west across the Danube into Byzantine territory. The Oghuz Turks take their name from the Turkic word for 'clan', 'tribe', or 'kinship'. As such, Oghuz is a common appellation for many Turkic groups, such as

19877-409: Was often the only alternative. Deportees were displayed naked in Damascus and sold as sex slaves in some areas, constituting an important source of income for accompanying gendarmes. Some were sold in Arabian slave markets to Muslim Hajj pilgrims and ended up as far away as Tunisia or Algeria . A secondary motivation for genocide was the destruction of the Armenian bourgeoisie to make room for

20020-403: Was often used to fund the deportation of Armenians and resettlement of Muslims, as well as for army, militia, and other government spending. Ultimately this formed much of the basis of the industry and economy of the post-1923 republic, endowing it with capital . The dispossession and exile of Armenian competitors enabled many lower-class Turks (i.e. peasantry, soldiers, and laborers) to rise to

20163-545: Was only possible in the absence of widespread resistance. Armenians who lived in the war zone were instead killed in massacres. Although ostensibly undertaken for security reasons, the deportation and murder of Armenians did not grant the empire any military advantage and actually undermined the Ottoman war effort. The empire faced a dilemma between its goal of eliminating Armenians and its practical need for their labor; those Armenians retained for their skills, in particular for manufacturing in war industries, were indispensable to

20306-413: Was permanently separated from Eastern Armenia (held by the Safavids) by the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab . The Ottoman Empire was multiethnic and multireligious, and its millet system offered non-Muslims a subordinate but protected place in society. Sharia law encoded Islamic superiority but guaranteed property rights and freedom of worship to non-Muslims ( dhimmis ) in exchange for a special tax . On

20449-408: Was used to communicate orders; those for the deportation of Armenians were communicated to the provincial governors through official channels, but orders of a criminal character, such as those calling for annihilation, were sent through party channels and destroyed upon receipt. Deportation convoys were mostly escorted by gendarmes or local militia. The killings near the front lines were carried out by

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