Popolazione dell’Armenia orientale secondo i censimenti ottomani del 1727 [OC]

A myth sometimes repeated by historians and others is that Armenians lost their demographic majority to Muslims in the 14th century. This idea was sustained by a lack of access to Ottoman censuses of the area, which were only translated from Ottoman Turkish in the 1990s-2000s and only digitised in the last couple of years.

They show that in the early 1700s, Armenians were counted as a majority across Eastern Armenia, although had been turned into a minority in certain places, especially the plains of the Arax river by mount Ararat.

It would appear that Shah Abbas’ deportations of Armenians into Iran were particularly destructive in the Ararat valley but that the general population of the Nakhichevan were able to better evade it. The story is very different on the eve of the Russian conquest in 1828; Armenians only formed 30% of Yerevan Khanate and 20% of the Nakhichevan khanate. In only a hundred years, the chaos that befell the Iranian sphere resulted in the emigration and conversion of tens of thousands of Armenians across most of Eastern Armenia (with the exception of Karabakh).