Armenia in the Age of Columbus

The 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America has become less the expected celebration of his achievement, than a condemnation of European colonialism, which led to the genocidal destruction of the native populations of North and South America.

Columbus was born in 1451, he died in 1506; his life spanned two centuries inviting a discussion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of Armenian history. How is one to view this obscure moment in the affairs of Armenia? Rather than a traditional approach analyzing distant travel undertaken by Armenians themselves in the period or the exploration of Armenia by Western, especially Italian, voyagers, I prefer to reexamine the consequences of the history of Armenia, particularly its relationship with the conquering Turkic dynasties, in view of the reassessment of the darker side of Columbus's achievement during this quincentennary anniversary.

The paper will provide a profile of Armenian society during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period of great distress but also of continuance and momentus social change. Sometimes the analysis will transgress the geographical limits of Armenia proper and at other times the chronological limits of the time of Columbus. Finally, I will describe the radical transformation of Armenian society from a medieval to a modern one, which I believe had its genesis in these same centuries.

After the fourteenth century Armenia as an autonomous state ceased to exist; the last king Levon, lost his throne in 1375 when the Muslim rulers of Egypt, the so-called Mamluks, seized Sis, the capital of his Cilician kingdom. Armenia as a geographical area remained coveted by its more powerful Islamic neighbors as the land mass between the eastern and western worlds; finally, Armenia as a nation struggled to survive.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are the dark ages of Armenian historiography. The period is either ignored in standard reference histories or relegated to a page or two. The poverty of sources reflects the disastrous decline of society and culture under Turkish rule. No history or chroncile was written during the lifetime of Columbus, indeed none from 1450 to 1650; never since the invention of the Armenian alphabet in the fifth century had their been such a hiatus.

In a series of studies published during the past decade I have discussed in great detail the painful events of these years of war between rival Islamic Turkic factions for the control of Armenia. In this paper I will only briefly summarize the major episodes as a context for discussion.

No region where Armenians lived was spared ruin: from Kayseri in the west of Asia Minor to Erevan in the east, from Tiflis in the north to Mosul in the south. War and pillaging was followed by excessive taxation, enslavement, destruction of farmland, famine, and finally emigration, both forced and voluntary.

The major powers in these centuries are exclusively Muslim. The Ottoman Turks, descendants of professional frontier warriors who made their way around 1300 from Central Asia into the weakened Byzantine Empire. By 1400 they had consolidated their control of the western part of Asia Minor or Anatolia as well as the Balkans; in 1453 they seized the great Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, the Second Rome as it was called, located just where Europe meets Asia. They proclaimed the city the capital of their new empire. In the next hundred years, during Columbus's lifetime, the Ottomans pushed their frontiers towards the east, Armenia, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. They were to quarrel for the control of these areas not only with two Turkomen dynasties -- the Qara Koyunlu and the Aq Qoyunlu, that is the Black and White Sheep -- who like their Ottoman cousins were also tribal Turkic adventurers from Central Asia, but also with the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, themselves decendants of Turkic and Circassian slave soldiers from the Russian steppes. Finally, the sixteenth century presents the Ottoman Turks with a new challenge for the control of Armenia from the Iranian Safavid dynasty.

Several factors differentiate the fifteenth from the sixteenth century. There were more periods of peace in the former, allowing moments of reconstruction. The White Sheep and Black Sheep dynasties, despite their onerous exactions, still considered the well-being of the local population as important to the prosperity of the moderate-sized state they had carved out in Armenia, western Iran, and northern Mesopotamia. For instance these rulers allowed the rebuilding of several churches in the fifteenth century; they accorded tax relief on petition to the Armenians of Bitlis, Mush, and Akhlat; and gave tacit permission for the re-establishment of the catholicosate at Etchmiadzin in 1441 and its transfer from Sis. Later, however, when the vast Ottoman and Safavid empires fought each other directly in Armenia, they showed no interest in the needs or suffering of people living in the war zone because their respective capitals and major population centers were far removed from the conflict.

When Columbus was born, the Qara Qoyunlu or Black Sheep dynasty had already controlled Armenia for two decades. The ruthless onslaughts of their cheif Jihan-Shah in the 1450s targeted Erzinjan, Kemakh, Bayburt, Terjan, and then Bitlis, Mush, and Akhlat. Heavy reprisal attacks against the rival Aq Qoyunlu or White Sheep dynasty laid waste the districts of Taron and Mush in 1467. In the same year, Jihan Shah and his Black Sheep forces were slaughtered by the charismatic White Sheep leader Uzun Hasan, who became Armenia's ruler. At first scribal colophons, the primary Armenian sources of the period, saw the destruction of Black Sheep power as a deliverance from oppressive taxation and exactions, but it was not long before the White Sheep oppressed and taxed as much as their predecessors. Furthermore, in Uzun Hasan's time restrictions were put on church activities, and Christians were required to wear a blue mark for identification.

The money to equip the White Sheep army and manage military affairs came from heavy taxation and levies, the brunt of which was borne by the Armenians. According to Armenian sources, during the final years of White Sheep rule, Christians could not use saddles, could not ring church bells, and had to wear a white belt as a sign of inferiority. After the death of Uzun Hasan in 1471 the Aq Qoyunlu faced a new threat: the Safyan sheikhs of Ardabil. Shiites by faith, the latter had already begun to exert a strong moral influence over various Türkmen tribes. In 1488 the White Sheep attacked Ardabil, defeated the Safyan allies known as the Qizl Bashi or red heads -- after the color of their headdress -- and killed the sheikh, whose young children, we are told, took refuge with Armenian monks in the Aght'amar region. The youngest of these children, Ismail, was, in less than a dozen years, to head a new Türkoman coalition and to found the new Safavid dynasty of Persia.

When Columbus reached the Americas the White Sheep were still in power in Armenia, but before the century closed they succumbed to the new threat from the east. At Columbus' death in 1506, Shah Ismail, after vanquishing the White Sheep clan faced only a single power to the west, the Ottomans.

The Safavids, also of Türkoman origin, were religious as well as secular rulers. Unlike their Ottoman and Uzbek kinsmen they opted for Shi'i Islam. This religious distinction gave Iran (until then predominantly Sunni) an identity apart.

During the sixteenth century Armenians suffered terribly from the wars between the new Iranian dynasty and an Ottoman empire advancing east. The Black and White Sheep buffer state between Ottomans in the west, the successors of Timur Lang in the east, and Mamluks to the south was now gone. The superpowers -- Ottomans and Safavids -- confronted each other directly. However bad the fifteenth century appeared in social, economic, and cultural terms, the sixteenth century in Armenia was to be worse.

The Qizl bashi ravaged great sections of Armenia while consolidating the Persian position in the Caucasus. According to colophons of 1501 and 1504, many Armenians sought refuge in Georgia. But by 1509, the Safavids had captured much of Georgia and Shirvan and had seized Derbent on the Caspian Sea Former White Sheep areas, all the way to Sebastia, came under Safavid control or were subject to their raids. Sufi and dervish elements provided the Qizl bashi with sympathizers in these western areas.

From the Ottoman viewpoint the new rulers of Iran presented a complex danger on the eastern frontier, mainly because of their shi'ism, a form of Islam that appeared less rigid to many Muslims. Sultan Selim, Ottoman historians call him, Selim the Grim, was determined to neutralize this threat while extending the boundaries of the Empire. In 1514 in a matter of weeks, he massacred some 40,000 Sufis and dervishes of Shi'i leaning in his eastern provinces. This brutal policy was to serve future sultans well as the normal expedient when confronted with any group that was deemed undesirable, for instance the destruction ofthe Janissary Corps in 1826. In the same year, Selim took Erzinjan, Kemakh, and Erzerum, he crossed the Arax River above Khoy, and engaged Shah Ismail on the plain of Chaldiran. With superior artillery, the Ottomans defeated the Safavids and advanced as far as Tabriz, which was held for eight days. On Selim's return to Constantinople, he took lands in the Taurus and beyond, bring the central and southern areas of Armenia into the Ottoman Empire, including the cities of Malatia, Aintab, Mush, Birejik, Diyarbekir, and Antioch. Large numbers of Armenians from Tabriz, Erzerum, and surrounding areas were taken to Constantinople. The Safavids almost immediately responded by a military offensive, establishing a pattern of attack and counterattack for the entire sixteenth century.

In the 1520s the Safavids made raids as far as Kars, Erzerum, and Terjan, provoking the first of the three campaigns by Sultan Suleyman, Suleyman the Magnificent as he was known in the west, into Armenia and Georgia against the Iranian Shah Tahmasp, but the outcome of the campaign of 1533 gave little more to the Ottomans than the area around Van.

A second campaign began in 1547-8 with the Ottoman seizure of Van. In 1549, the Georgian army was destroyed, and the western part of the country, along with Armenia, began to be considered part of the Ottoman Empire. During the following three years, Shah Tahmasp made vicious counterattacks against Basen, Bardzrhayk', Vaspourakan, and Tourouberan. Suleyman reacted by officially annexing Van and Diyarbekir as provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

During this phase of the rivalry, sources concur that the Armenians and Georgians preferred as a group the Persians to the Ottomans. The immediate consequence of the war of 1547-1552 was a severe famine in Armenia, caused by the peasants' reluctance to work distant fields and the requisitioning of whatever stocks were left by the opposing armies.

Just before the third eastern campaign, Shah of Iran in 1553 seized the fortresses of Akhlat and Ardchesh and the country around Basen, Bayburt, Erzinjan, Terjan, Erzerum, Khnous, and Mush. Erzerum, Van, and Artzke were laid waste. Then, receiving word that an Ottoman army had reached Sivas, he embarked on a deliberate scorched-earth policy in order to retard an army he could not beat on its progress through Armenia.

The Turkish attack of 1553-1555 was one of the most consciously violent recorded in the annals of the Ottoman Empire. In 1554, Erevan, "the glory of all Persia," as it was described at the time, was seized and burned. Nakhidjevan was taken, and all provinces between Tabriz and Maragha were totally destroyed. The Karabagh was also seized. Pechevi, the Ottoman chronicler of these campaigns, described in great detail the willful destruction and devastation of Armenia carried out by the Turks. Under the year A.H. 962/1553-4 A.D. he writes in part:

The army, thirsty for booty, again looted and destroyed not leaving one stone upon another. Besides this, for a distance of four to five days' march from the main route, all villages and hamlets, fields and construction were destroyed and ruined to such a degree that not a trace of building or of any life remained.

On May 29, 1555 at Amasia, this phase of a senseless war was concluded with the first treaty of peace. The Shah kept the Caspian provinces and Tabriz. Suleyman received or kept Mosul, Marash, Van, Alashkert, Bayazid, and western Georgia, leaving the Ottomans the rulers of Armenia, Georgia, and the Kurds.

In 1578, the Grand Vizier Mustafa Pasha at the head of an army of some 200,000, started the century's longest and last campaign; it was, unfortunately, not the final one of the war. Tiflis was taken and destroyed. Ganja was sacked. Shirvan and Derbent were pillaged. Yet little was accomplished against the Persians who asked for peace, but it was refused. Karabagh, Gegharkuni, and Erevan were reoccupied. By 1584 the Ottomans had stabilized their control over northern Armenia, Georgia, Shirvan, and Dagestan. In 1585 Tabriz fell, but the Safavids retook it the following year, forcing the Ottoman army to retreat to Van, and in 1588-9 the Persians occupied Ganja, Nakhidjevan, and the Karabagh.

When young Shah Abbas (1588-1629) succeeded to the throne in 1588, he sued for peace. By the terms of the treaty of 1590, the Ottomans kept Armenia and Iraq, and the Safavids gave up Tabriz, Shirvan, and Georgia. Unfortunately, after the demobilization following the peace of 1590, bands of disgruntled landowners and landless peasants called jelalis began to live by plundering; they were joined by Kurdish and Turkish nomads. These bandits took advantage of the Ottoman Empire's inability to organize and rule its eastern provinces properly. From 1590 to 1610, Armenian, Cappadocian, and Anatolian towns and villages were continually set upon.

Shah Abbas took advantage of the anarchy prevailing in Armenia and Anatolia by recapturing Tabriz, then Erevan, and in 1605, Baghdad. To meet the expected Ottoman counterattack, he imitated the scorched earth policy used by Shah Tahmasp in 1553. Starting in the summer of 1604, Eastern Armenia was systematically laid waste. Armenians from Vayotz Dzor, Sevan, Lori, Aparan, Shirakavan, Kars, and Alashkert were assembled on the Ararat plain, where they were joined by those from Julfa, Nakhidjevan, and the surrounding area. Most died on the forced march to Iran. One group survived to establish the suburb of New Julfa at Isfahan.

Hostilities between the Ottomans and the Safavids only ended in 1639 when the Treaty of Qasr-i Shirin finally stopped a century and a half of war. The treaty gave the Ottomans Iraq, with Baghdad and Mosul, the Van area, and Armenia up to Kars. Erevan and the Caspian provinces with Tabriz went to the Safavids. Thus the bare facts of "what happened" in Armenia during the centuries of Columbus.

THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF ARMENIA

Our interest, however, is with the consequences of these events. How was life structured in Greater Armenia in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries without kings or autonomous states? Apparently, Armenians had learned well how to continue life under non-Armenian and non-Christian rule. They took advantage of any benevolence offered by charitable governors, put aside something for worse days which they knew were sure to come, and always prayed for a better future.

Armenians in large numbers opted for migration to more secure lands. The major centers they chose were the Crimea, thence to Poland and central Europe, the larger urban centers of western Armenia, Cappadocia, and Anatolia, and Christian Georgia. In the sixteenth century immigration gradually moved east into Iran and west toward Constantinople and cities in the Ottoman empire with already established Armenian communities.

In Armenia agriculture, trade, and craftsmanship were the means of livelihood. As the wars continued, agriculture became further and further circumscribed. In the fifteenth century the still partially nomadic Türkomen and Kurds, were quick to turn any abandoned or temporarily untended fields into pasturage for their flocks. Through this process many large holdings were permanently removed from cultivation. Siunik' and the Karabagh -- mountainous areas where terracing was common and water was abundant without the need for irrigation -- continued, however, to provide sustenance for their limited populations. This reduction of the agricultural lands continued even after Ottoman absorption of Armenia in the sixteenth century, as evidenced by the small number and the reduced size of land grants (timars) recorded in Ottoman registers. In addition, the policy begun by Ottoman sultan Selim in the sixteenth century of favoring the Kurds as an orthodox force against the heterodox Shi'i Qizl bashi contributed further to the reduction of agricultural lands while increasing the Kurdish population in Armenia.

The great Silk Route that passed from Iran through northern Armenia down the Mediterranean coast in Cilicia, a transit which had in part been responsible for the wealth and prosperity of Armenia in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, became virtually inoperative after the fall of the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia. The alternate route from Tabriz through Armenia to Erzerum and on to Trebizond on the Black Sea, also became drastically curtailed after the fall of Trebizond to the Ottoman Turks in 1461.

Yet surprisingly, despite the devastating invasions, accompanied by pillaging and enslavement, despite taxes on a level never before imposed, despite recurring famines, occasional plagues, locusts, and a relatively large number of earthquakes during the period, Armenians also stayed in Armenia. As colophons and other sources testify, they tried to maintain Armenian life as they understood it, and at times even to improve on it. Sometimes the struggle must have seemed insurmountable, especially in the first-half of the sixteenth century when traditional institutions were most in danger of total collapse.

The collected colophons -- the memorials left by the scribes copying manuscripts -- testify to the continued activity of traditional artisans and craftsmen throughout Armenia in the fifteenth century. In addition to scribes, illuminators, and binders responsible for producing the manuscripts to which the colophons belong, goldsmiths, weavers, blacksmiths, coppersmiths, doctors, shoemakers, farriers, millers, and tailors are mentioned. Over one hundred varpets or master craftsman are cited by name and an equal number of traders and merchants. Information for the sixteenth century has not yet been made accessible.

Armenian merchants continued their activity. Iranian silk became more and more exploited by Armenians in the sixteenth century (both in the Ottoman controlled areas and Iran) well before Shah Abbas gave the Armenians a virtual monopoly over the trade in the early seventeenth century. Benefiting by commercial contacts with diasporan communities in Europe, Armenians from Erzinjan, Sivas, Kayseri, Bitlis, and Julfa took advantage of moments of peace to engage in trade.

The Armenian brotherhoods of merchants and craftsmen established in medieval times, perhaps as early as the eleventh century in Ani, continued to flourish in our period in the Crimea, Poland, Istanbul, Aleppo, and the Van area.

By the mid-fifteenth century, sources speak regularly of provincial Armenian merchants called khodjas who had become sufficiently wealthy, mostly through trade, to endow -- at times modestly -- churches and monasteries. By the sixteenth century, these khodjas had established themselves east in India, south in Aleppo, north in Russia, and west in Constantinople, the Balkans, Italy, the Baltic region, and elsewhere. Contemporary sources mentioned hundreds of them by name. They had become the dominant class in Armenian society. Later I shall speak further about the imnportance ofthis class.

The Türkmen wars of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman-Persian wars of the sixteenth century, and the forced migrations instigated by the Ottomans and by Shah Abbas had their effect on the demography of Armenia. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, little is heard of the many Cilician centers active during the flourishing of the Armenian kingdom there in the thriteenth and fourteenth centuries. The few references found are to Sis, still the residence of the catholicos or supreme patriarch. In the north Ani still existed as a village. Kars, however, was virtually dormant in the fifteenth century and presumably in the sixteenth too, until its fortress was rebuilt by the Ottomans in 1584. Siunik, Lori, and the area up to and including Tiflis were active during the early fifteenth century, with Tat'ev in Siunik as the leading monastic institution of the area. Haghbat and Sahanin were also very dynamic monasteries, and, unlike Tat'ev in the south, were able to sustain themselves as active centers in later centuries. Etchmiadzin was virtually dormant until the re-creation of the catholicosate in 1441, but even then, travelers' accounts of the sixteenth century describe it as nearly abandoned. Vagharshapat maintained itself reasonably well, and Erevan began its steady ascendancy in the sixteenth century. In the fifteenth century Nakhidjevan and Julfa on the Arax were only occasionally mentioned. Julfa became more important in the second-half of the sixteenth century, only to be destroyed at the end of the century by Shah Abbas. The seventeenth century historian Arakel of Tabriz says that of the 20,000 Armenians from Julfa deported in 1604-5 only one-fifth survived to settle in New Julfa. The Iranian cities of Tabriz, Maku, Khoy, Maragha, and Salmast had Armenian communities, though that of Tabriz was incontestably the most active. The Karabagh, Artzakh, Gandzasar, Artaz, Gegharkouni, and the cities of Shirvan were also animated centers, but it was in the mountainous Karabagh that local Armenian rule seems to have survived best during the dark days of the sixteenth century.

The most thriving center of Armenian culture in the fifteenth century, and perhaps in the sixteenth too (though we shall not be certain until the sixteenth-century colophons are published), was around Lake Van. With its own catholicos, Lake Van's cities and monasteries were the most dynamic of any in Armenia. Bitlis, Khizan, Van, Ardchesh, Varag, Artzke, Akhlat, Berkri, and Mush were all active towns.

At the end of the sixteenth century, Isfahan-New Julfa, Tabriz, Amid, and Diyarbekir were all important Armenian centers. Aleppo grew throughout the sixteenth century, benefiting by the settlement of important merchants from cities like Julfa on the Arax.

In the west, the Armenian population of Constantinople dramatically increased but only starting in the sixteenth century as a result of the Ottoman conquest and devastation of Armenia. In 1604 the Polish-Armenian cleric Simeon Lehatzi, reported just eighty old time Armenian households, but added there were 40,000 Armenian emigrant foyers. There is little doubt that in later centuries Constantinople became the most populous Armenian city in the world, but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the most active diaspora communities were in the Crimea and Poland.

ART AND CULTURE IN THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH

Constant warfare, destruction, and the loss of royal patrons had their predictable effect on the arts. The result was palpable in all intellectual and cultural activities of the time. Of the two centuries, the sixteenth and especially its first three-quarters, was far worse off than the fifteenth.

The great building activity in northern Armenia of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries came to a rude halt during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Monasteries in Siunik', Karabagh, and Ayrarat struggled to keep existing structures in repair; in the period only three or four churches are known to have been constructed mostly in Siunik' during the better moments of the first-half of the fifteenth century. None of the collected inscriptions from the monasteries of Tat'ev, Haghpat, and Sanahin speak of construction or reconstruction in the period. In the central areas around Lake Van and Diyarbekir/Amid, the situation was somewhat better in the fifteenth century, with several new chapels. As for the sixteenth century, the only construction recorded anywhere is a domed chapel of 1555 at St. Karapet vank' at Mush .

In no other century had Armenian architecture been so adversely affected by the conditions of the time. On the other hand, building activity flourished in diasporan colonies, with new churches in Constantinople, Lvov, the Crimea, Moldavia, and Russia.

A further sign of the decline in the arts of the period is the paucity of new manuscripts. For the first time since the ninth century there was a decline in the number of codices copied from one century to the next: perceptibly fewer sixteenth century manuscripts exist than fifteenth century ones. A survey of dated Armenian manuscripts shows a dramatic drop in production from 1500 to 1520, during the years of Sultan Selim's eastern campaigns, and another sharp drop during the wars of Süleyman in the late 1530s and early 1540s. In both of these periods almost no manuscripts were copied. The half-century from 1500 to 1550 was definitely the lowest point ever in the productivity of Armenian scriptoria until printing completely replaced hand written books in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, if one were to exclude manuscripts copied in the Crimea, Constantinople, and other cities outside of Armenia during the Age of Discovery, the situation would appear even bleaker.

It is perhaps not coincidental that the Armenian venture into printing in 1511-2 coincided with the absolute low point of manuscript production. In Venice where an Armenian merchant colony had been established centuries earlier, Hakob Meghapart was able, with the help of Italian printers, to produce five titles in those years, just six decades after printing was invented. This in itself demonstrates that Armenians were alert to new discoveries and were quick, individually and collectively, to exploit innovation.

In the literature of the period a strong elegaic undercurrent is found; I have already alluded to the absence of historical writing, normally a popular Armenian literary form.

An assessment of life in Armenia and for the Armenians in the Age of Columbus reveals two parallel historical forces at work. In a striking manner, they invoke the same dual and clashing consequences unleashed by the movement we associate with Columbus in the Americas. The Ottoman wars and the subsequent colonial oppression shattered Armenia, destroyed its ancient culture, and decimated its population just like Europe's conquest of America had enslaved and annihilated the Indian nations, and ravaged their ancient and rich culture.

But unlike the natives of America, Armenians had endured foreign conquest for centuries; they had learned the ways of survival. Some Armenians even profited from the Age of Discovery, venturing ever farther away from home with their wares. A vast Armenian trading network was forged. Individual commerce now provided wealth traditionally associated with land-owning and state control of trade routes. A new class of merchants, the khodjas, replaced the feudal nobility and clergy as the major source of cultural patronage; they gradually evolved into a dynamic and wealthy middle-class. The khodjas, active wherever trade could turn a profit, became the motivating force behind increased relations with the west; they also inspired a curiosity toward science and new technology.

The existence of a middle-class of merchants engaged in international trade was an important factor in the process of modernization. As a group, the khodjas were responsible for the accumulation of wealth, the importation of luxury items, the adoption and banalization of new inventions such as printing, the creation of a reserve of individuals competent in commercial relations and versed in foreign languages, and the conduit for enterprising persons seeking their fortunes in an Armenian world where the traditional base of power -- land ownership -- was no longer a productive possibility.

In the America of European colonialism only the conquerors prospered, the Indians suffered. In Armenia, people dependent on the land proper likewise suffered the ravages of war and the oppressive subjugation of a callous empire; however, those engaged in trade or those able to flee to Aleppo, Kayseri, Constantinople, or to centers outside the Sultan's reach -- in Iran, the Crimea, Poland -- prospered.

The gradual destruction of the old ruling classes in Armenia during the bitter years of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the evolution of the khodjas as a class were the most important factors in the nation's survival in the face of the Turkic onslaught. By assuming the traditional patronage of the defunct nobility toward the church, the khodjas quickly gained national prominence and respectability. That is why after the ruinous forced migration of 1604, the merchants of New Julfa, with skills developed in the sixteenth century in Armenia, and wealth acquired by old Julfa's commerce, were able in such a short time to prosper.

The formation of a merchant class is a symbol of the transformation of feudal society, and a reflection of its social mobility. The rapid rise of Armenian khodjas in the urban centers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries strengthens the case for choosing the epoch of Columbus as the moment of transition in Armenian life from the late medieval world to the modern one. This view is further reinforced by the extraordinary renaissance in the arts and letters in the seventeenth century under merchant patronage.

In the end, however, though both American Indians and Armenians suffered immeasurable physical destruction during the era of colonial conquest, the Armenians or at least some Armenians were able to utilize the new opportunities in commerce of the period to create a clear, if selective, prosperity, and establish a new urban class capable of providing the resources necessary to revive in the seventeenth century a ravaged culture and to lead the nation as it coped with the challenges of modern society.

Unfortunately, this was not a sufficient safe guard for Armenians to escape the curse of genocide. Just as the exploration and conquest of the Americas led to the destruction of the Indian nations, so too the permanent conquest of Armenia ultimately provoked the willful destruction of its native population. Thus, Armenia in the age of Columbus was simultaneously devastated and propelled into the modern world, to profit by its discoveries, but to suffer belated annihilation in our century at the hands of the ruthless leadership of a disintegrating Ottoman Turkish colonial empire.

Ironically, the American Indians still live on parts of their ancestral lands. The Armenians cannot: their nation was destroyed and their homeland taken away. The tiny bit of Armenia that is now an independent but suffering republic was outside the reach of Ottoman colonialism. May it survive.