Every historian of the late Ottoman Empire is familiar with the artistic and cultural production of Ottoman Armenians from architecture to theater and literature, as well as with the role of Armenian elites in state finance and administration. However, until the early seventeenth century, the demographic and cultural center of the Armenian people had been eastern Anatolia, the historical Armenian heartland from ancient times. How did these communities come to be in the first place?
Henry Shapiro's book tells the story of the creation of an Armenian diaspora in western Anatolia as the result of mass migrations of Armenians from eastern Anatolia, which he calls the Great Armenian Flight, during the disruptive Celali rebellions from the late sixteenth century onward. According to Shapiro, this mass exodus brought about major transformations in the demography and cultural life of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: new Armenian communities emerged in Western Anatolia and in the Balkans where they had not existed before, and the center of Ottoman Armenian cultural production shifted from Eastern Anatolia to Istanbul. There, new forms of Armenian literature and poetry emerged in a cosmopolitan context characterized by frequent cultural exchanges between Muslims, Jews, and Christians from the Ottoman Empire, Europe, and Safavid Iran. The contributions of Shapiro's well-researched book to the historiography of the Ottoman Empire and Armenian history are numerous. Here I focus on two of them.
First, Shapiro offers the first topical study in English of the Armenian Great Flight, which hitherto was known mostly to scholars of Armenian history (4). Relying on both Armenian literary sources and Ottoman archival documents, he discusses the causes and the consequences of the Celali rebellions on the social and religious life of Anatolian Armenians (chapter 2), and the challenges they encountered in the new loci of settlement (chapter 3). In this way, Shapiro demonstrates the importance of Armenian sources for studying major events of Ottoman history, such as the Celali Rebellions and internal migrations in the empire, and their complementarity with Ottoman ones. Furthermore, by engaging with the works of both Ottomanist and Arminiologist scholars, he bridges the historiographical divide between Ottoman history and premodern Armenian history, which the tragic events of 1915 had contributed to keep as distinct scholarly ventures.
Second, and more important, Shapiro rightly frames the mass migrations of Armenians and their social and cultural consequences as an episode of Ottoman history. The Great Flight and the cultural changes it generated within Ottoman Armenian communities were the outcome of internal developments in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century, from economic and administrative transformations to rising religious tension and new literary trends in Ottoman intellectual circles. This is most clear in chapters 5 and 6, where Shapiro describes the literary production of the Istanbul-born scholar Eremia K‘eōmurchean (d. 1695). For the first in Armenian literature, and like his contemporary Muslim and non-Muslim peers in the Ottoman capital, he wrote first-person narratives, biographies of Ottoman sultans, geographical works, and religious manuals in a colloquial language to address his time's religious disputes. According to Shapiro, Eremia's choices of themes, genres, and language were part of a “broader trend that transcended religion and community” (241) and were the outcome of the “hybrid cultural interaction” (198) between medieval Armenian and Muslim literary traditions and new cross-cultural intellectual developments in the early modern period. The literary output of Eremia and other scholars of the Western Armenian diaspora did not enrich Armenian culture alone, but, as Shapiro remarks, this output constituted one of the many contributions of non-Muslim communities to Islamic civilization (291).
Overall, by studying the creation of the Western Armenian diaspora, Shapiro introduces a new important topic of research for Armenian and Ottoman history, especially considering the current scholarly interest in mobility and cross-cultural interactions in the premodern world. Hopefully new studies will expand the research started by Shapiro by focusing on different contexts of Armenian immigration and on social and economic interactions between Western Armenians and other Ottoman groups as well as Europeans.
