Armenian communities of Asia Minor

Richard G. Hovannisian

"The Armenian communities of western Asia Minor were far removed from the historic Armenian territories on the great highland plateau far to the east and the fertile Cilician plain bordering the Mediterranean Sea to the south. These communities were relatively new, dating to the later centuries of the Byzantine Empire and the early centuries of the Ottoman Empire. Armenian movement into this area near the Sea of Marmara and Constantinople was prompted primarily by the turbulence in the traditional Armenian homelands by the Turkic and Mongol invasions in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, the fall of the Armenian Cilician kingdom to the Mamluks in the fourteenth century, and the ruin and devastation caused by the Ottoman-Persian wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In time, scores of Armenian villages and small towns sprang up in a broad arc of about 100 miles...