The Armenians of New Julfa and Their Cultural Heritage
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THE ARMENIANS OF NEW JULFA AND THEIR CULTURAL HERITAGE VAZKEN S. GHOUGASSIAN During the first half of the eleventh century, the Bagratuni and Arcruni kings and most of the prominent princely families of Greater Armenia were coerced by the Byzantine Empire to exchange their lands with imperial territories in Armenia Minor, Cappadocia and Cilicia or were forced into permanent exile to the interior parts of the Empire. Consequently, by the middle of the century, Armenia was deprived of its political leadership and military force and was almost completely annexed by Byzantium. In 1071, at the battle of Manazkert to the north of Lake Van, the Byzantine army suffered a devastating defeat in the hands of the Seljuk Turks and retreated from the eastern provinces of the Empire, leaving Greater Armenia wide open before invading Turkic tribes from Central Asia.1 Except for a few decades of relative peace under the Zakarid Armenian dynasty in early thirteenth century, Armenia was subject to successive Seljuk, Mongol, and Turkmen invasions and domination between 1064 and 1500. Under the yoke of these Turkic tribes, the country was physically and economically devastated, the remnants of old Armenian principalities and landlords were oppressed and most of their ancestral lands were gradually confiscated either by Muslim tribal lords or in the name of Islam. Some were compelled to convert to Islam to save their properties. Others donated their lands to monasteries to avoid confiscation. But most of them were forced to flee with only their movable belongings to safer areas in the region or emigrate in increasing numbers to the west.2 With the emergence of the Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor and the Safavid Kingdom in Iran at the turn of the sixteenth century, Armenia turned into a battleground between these two ferocious enemies for a period 1 N. Garsoian, ‘The Byzantine Annexation of the Armenian Kingdoms in the Eleventh Century’, The Armenian People, ed. R.G. Hovannisian, I (New York, 1997), pp. 187-198. 2 H.P. Papazyan, ‘Socio-Economic Relations in Eastern Armenia in the XVI-XVIII Cen- turies’, History of the Armenian People, IV (Yerevan, 1972), pp. 247-248. 202 V.S. GHOUGASSIAN of one and a quarter century, beginning with the battle of Chaldiran in 1514 and ending with the treaty of Zuhab in 1639. During this period, the Ottomans and the Safavids waged a chain of eleven wars, always advancing or retreating through Armenia. Both sides frequently adopted the scorched earth policy, which aimed at massacres, forced deportations to slavery and total destruction of populated areas, to deny supplies and labourers to their advancing enemy. According to the Ottoman historian Ibrahim Pechevi, in 1554 alone, during the Ottoman invasion of Yerevan, Qarabagh and Nakhitchevan in Eastern Armenia, “to the length of four-five days journey, all villages, towns, fields, and constructions were destroyed to such a degree that there was no trace of construction and life”.3 In 1588 Shah Abbas I ascended to the Safavid throne at age sixteen. The following year he concluded a peace treaty with the Ottomans and ceded to them large territories, including Northern Iran and Eastern Armenia. In 1603, having reorganized his army and fully secured the internal stability of his Kingdom, the Safavid Shah marched against the Ottomans, recaptured Tabriz, Nakhitchevan and Yerevan and in the summer of 1604, the Safavid army advanced to Van and Erzrum.4 But facing a strong counter-offensive from a large Ottoman army, the Shah decided to retreat and adopt the traditional scorched earth policy. He ordered his troops to deport to Iran all the inhabitants on their way of retreat and “burn the crops and pastures, with the object of denying supplies to the Ottomans for a period of several days as they marched through that region”.5 In a matter of a few days, the retreating Safavid troops deported hundreds of thousands of Armenians from the provinces of Ayrarat and Nakhitchevan, destroyed the vacated towns and villages, and hastily pushed the deported people across river Arax into Iran, before the arrival of the advancing Ottoman army. Three hundred thousand refugees survived the ordeal of the forced deportations and the months long torturous journey to be settled in north-eastern and central parts of Iran, mainly in Gilan, 3 Turkish Sources on Armenia, Armenians and Other Peoples of Transcaucasia, transl. H.D. Safrastyan (Yerevan, 1961), p. 34. 4 V.S. Ghougassian, The Emergence of the Armenian Diocese of New Julfa in the Seven- teenth Century (Atlanta, 1998), pp. 22-24. 5 Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah Abbas the Great, transl. R.M. Savory, II (Col- orado, 1978), p. 857. THE ARMENIANS OF NEW JULFA AND THEIR CULTURAL HERITAGE 203 Mazandaran, Kashan, Qazwin, Shiraz, Hamadan, Isfahan, and its neigh- bouring districts in 1605.6 With the forced deportation of almost half a million people from Armenia and the subsequent destruction of the country, Shah Abbas achieved his immediate military objective against the Ottomans. In addition, he ordered the distribution and settlement of the surviving refugees according to his economic agenda. Thirty thousand Armenian families were taken to Gilan and Mazandaran region to serve as labourers in the production of silk, which was a royal monopoly, the backbone of the Iranian economy and the main commodity for export to Europe. Tens of thousands of villagers were settled in rural areas divided into seven districts between Isfahan and Hamadan, to serve as agricultural labourers for the royal household or Muslim feudal lords. Thousands of artisans and craftsmen were placed in urban centres, including Isfahan, the Safavid Capital. Finally, a mercantile community of two thou- sand families from Julfa – which is the main subject of this study – was settled in a suburb of Isfahan, across the river Zayenderud.7 Julfa, the emergence of a mercantile community Julfa was a very old but until late fifteenth century a little known village established on a rocky and arid strip of land, more or less two kilometres long and five hundred metres wide, between the river Arax and a steep mountain range, twenty miles to the southeast of Nakhitchevan. Its sudden emergence as a densely populated mercantile town in the sixteenth century is quite puzzling and little explored, mainly due to scarcity of contemporary sources. The rise of Julfa seems to be a direct result of the fourteenth-fifteenth century political turmoil in Armenia and the Levantine trade of raw silk in the sixteenth century. Seventeenth century Armenian patriarchal encyclicals, manuscript colophons and epitaphs address or identify the male members of the most prominent merchant families of Julfa with titles of social distinc- tion, such as prince (ishkhan or melik), lord (agha), sir (paron), gentry (azat) and a person of noble descent (azatadzin or payazat).8 Certainly, these titles were of very old and hereditary origin and could be traced back in the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries, when as already indicated, the remnants of 6 Ghougassian, The Emergence of the Armenian Diocese of New Julfa (see n. 4), pp. 25-32. 7 Ibid., pp. 33-47. 8 Ibid., pp. 47-48. 204 V.S. GHOUGASSIAN the old Armenian princely families and nobility had lost their ancestral lands under Muslim rule and were compelled to move elsewhere. According to the seventeenth century Armenian writer Stepanos Dashtetsi, under foreign occupation, Armenians were not entitled to military or civil service, were subject to physical persecutions and lootings and were left with no other choice but to turn to trade and disperse around the world.9 Indeed their agricultural based economy being ruined, the Armenian nobility had to leave with their movable wealth and settle along trade routes to try their chances in commerce. Being ideally located near an international trade route, which passed from Tabriz to Yerevan, Julfa must have attracted a large number of these people, who have settled there in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The economic prosperity of Julfa was closely connected to a surge in Europe for raw silk in the sixteenth century and the Levantine trade of that commodity. Being in reasonable proximity to silk producing centres of Qarabagh, Shirvan, Gilan and Mazandaran, the Armenians of Julfa ventured in the traffic of silk, from the points of production to the two most impor- tant silk markets of the time, namely Aleppo and Bursa. The raw silk was sold for silver to European trade companies, who lacked the flexibility and the mobility to reach the remote areas of silk production in a century which was marked with long lasting wars in the region. By the end of the sixteenth century, the merchants of Julfa had expanded the geographical scope of their trade, reaching Europe in large numbers.10 It is very difficult to understand the prosperity of Julfa and the commer- cial success of its merchant population, amid wars and general insecurity in the region. Unlike other towns and villages, Julfa seems to have largely remained free of plunders and destruction for the greater part of the six- teenth century, as indicated in a manuscript colophon copied in 1595.11 Was this because its geographical location far from common battlefields, its neutrality as a town inhabited only by Armenians, or its financial means to pay large ransoms and secure peace? We simply do not know. But certainly 9 V.A. Bayburdyan, The International Trade and the Armenians of Iran in the 17th Cen- tury (Teheran, 1996), p. 16. 10 L. Alishan, Hay Venet (Venice, 1896), p. 160. 11 S. Ter Avetisyan, Catalogue of the Armenian Manuscripts of All Saviour’s Monastery of New Julfa, I (Vienna, 1970), p. 84. THE ARMENIANS OF NEW JULFA AND THEIR CULTURAL HERITAGE 205 the security of Julfa to some degree was guaranteed by its status as a royal estate (khas or khassaye sharife).