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YEAR OF THE SWORD
 JOSEPH YACOUB

Year of the Sword

The Assyrian Christian Genocide,
A History

Translated by
James Ferguson

A
 A
Oxford University Press is a department of the
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Published in the United States of America by
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Copyright © Joseph Yacoub 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Joseph Yacoub.
Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide, A History.
ISBN: 9780190633462

Printed in India on acid-free paper

“I am determined to record the martyrdom of a small people, the
most worthy of interest yet at the same time the most abandoned,
arising out of a great empire of the world’s most ancient civiliza-
tion, whose country, like Armenia, was the stage for Turkish
abominations in which men were tragically murdered, women,
children and the aged deported into the desert, pillaged, martyred
and subjected to the worst atrocities.
This people is the Assyro-Chaldean people.”
Joseph Naayem, 11 November 1919

“The persecutions and sufferings that the Nestorians undergo

from time to time are similar to those that have been endured by
the Armenians and the Jews, and their treatment by the hostile
nations is identical. Of the troubles of the Armenians and the
Jews, however, we hear quite often, while the Nestorians in Persia
and Turkey, probably due to their small number and lack of liter-
ary representatives, have excited almost no interest.”*
Abraham Yohannan, September 1916
To my paternal grandparents, Yacou Auchana and Mariam, from the
village of Khosrava in Persia, massacred by the forces of hatred in
1915.
To my paternal aunt, Angèle, who shut herself in a tanoura (a clay
bread oven) for a week, trying to escape the carnage. When she
emerged from her hiding place she discovered, to her stupefaction,
that nobody was left alive in the village. Forced into exile, she fol-
lowed other fugitives from her community towards Iraq and then
Syria, where she was reunited with my father at Hassakeh, in 1933.
To my maternal grandparents, Gaurié and Sara, from the village of
Pataver, near Khosrava, who in January 1915 took the gruelling road
of collective exodus towards the Caucasus, where they found sanctu-
ary in Tiflis (Tbilisi) in Georgia, together with other members of the
family who had preceded them.
To my father Paulus (Bablo), who died in Beirut in July 1974 after a
long sojourn in Syria and Lebanon, via Georgia, Argentina and
France, always homesick for his native land. Wandering across oceans
in search of work, he had not seen the village of his birth since 1911.
To my mother, Bosha, who found her last resting place in Lyon in
November 1975. Happy with her children and grandchildren in Syria
and Lebanon, she always carried within herself the sadness of having
been separated from her parents, whom she never saw again after 1922.
To the Assyrians-Chaldeans-Syriacs, three parts of the same people,
who have been ceaselessly migrating since 1915, the fateful Year of
the Sword (farman, seyfo), which saw half of this resilient nation anni-
hilated by the murderous madness of Ottoman power, driven by a
hideous form of unbridled nationalism and by a tyrannical strain of
religious fanaticism.
To Claire, my wife, who has been part of this work from its conception
to publication. Her presence can be felt within the pages of this book.
 CONTENTS

Preface xi
Author’s Note xvii
Introduction: A Forgotten Genocide? 1
Nation, people and churches 2
On the eve of the massacre 6
The genocide of 1915 13
Contemporary documentation 16
Ethnocide and extermination 18
Oblivion and its causes 21
An international issue 22
Renewal and memory 28
1. Witnesses to Genocide 33
A terra incognita? 33
Reporting the genocide 37
The range of witnesses 67
The Paris Peace Conference, 1919 86
International solidarity 88
The national and international press: an essential 95
intermediary
Humanitarian aid 98
2. The Scenes and Acts of the Tragedy 101
A centuries-old persecution 101
The first centuries 102
Ottoman antecedents to the 1915 massacres 108
ix
 1915: historic Mesopotamia 113
Overview of the massacres 120
The invasion of Hakkari by Turco-Kurdish forces 124
The Syriacs 133
Extermination and deportation: the children
of the Desert 138
3. Strategy and Methodology of Eradication 145
Genocide and ethnocide 167
Lamenting a tragedy 170
The massacres and the United Nations 172
4. After 1915: The Tragedy Continues 177
1918: from Salmas and Urmia towards Hamadan
and Iraq 177
Assyrians at arms 179
The Assyrian Levies 184
The Turkey-Iraq frontier (1925) 186
Fleeing Turkey 194
Conclusion: Returning to the Stage of History 207
The impact of the diaspora 209
Preserving memory 211
Iraq: homeland or safe haven? 214
Notes 219
Bibliography 245
Index 253
 PREFACE

I am delighted to be able to write this preface for an

English-language edition of this book. In 2015, mankind
commemorated the centenary of the Armenian and
Assyro-Chaldean genocides perpetrated by Ottoman
Turkey in 1915. Both of these peoples have known the
adversity of fate and the iniquities of history. The echoes
of this tragedy still sadly persist.
Known under different names—Assyrians, Chaldeans,
Syriacs, Nestorians, Jacobites, Arameans, and sometimes,
erroneously, Syrians—called Aïssors or Assoris by the
Armenians, Suriyani by the Turks, the Assyro-Chaldeans
consider themselves the descendants of the peoples of
ancient Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and
Euphrates whose history reaches back 5,000 years. Living
since time immemorial in this scarred land, they have
always been known as a nation, a people, and for their
Churches. Differences in denomination can be traced
back to mainly theological divisions in which several fac-
tors were mixed (notably the 431 AD Council of Ephesus
and the 451 AD Council of Chalcedon), but these no
longer apply, since collaboration and ecumenism based on
common principles of faith now prevail.
This people of Aramean culture lived on the periphery
of both the Persian and the Ottoman Empires, their
ancestral territory in the north-west of present-day Iran
xi
 PREFACE

and in eastern Anatolia—Hakkari, Bohtan, Tur Abdin,

Midyat, Mardin, Diyarbakir, Urfa (Ourhai) and Nusaybin—
and in the north of Iraq: Mosul and the Nineveh
Governorate. The Anglo-Saxon world knows them best
under the name of Assyrians—the term used in this
book—because of longstanding historic ties between the
Archbishop of Canterbury and the Assyrian Church of
the East, a link reinforced by their political relations with
Britain under the British Mandate in Iraq and before. The
British had also established a relationship with the Syriac
Orthodox Church from the nineteenth century. British
religious, political and diplomatic support was hence
important and persists in this people’s memory. As a case
in point, the Anglican William A. Wigram (1872–1953),
a well-known specialist in the Church of the East, enjoyed
considerable esteem, and his work, translated into Arabic,
continues to attract interest among Assyro-Chaldean and
Syriac intellectual circles, not least his short, evocatively
titled Our Smallest Ally: A Brief Account of the Assyrian
Nation in the Great War.
Elsewhere, the material concerning the Assyrian mas-
sacres in the official “Blue Book” published by the British
government in 1916, The Treatment of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire, 1915–16, edited by the MP, historian
and statesman Viscount James Bryce (1838–1922) with
the assistance of the young historian Arnold Joseph
Toynbee (1889–1975), remains a seminal work of refer-
ence. In his preface to the English translation of Father
Joseph Naayem’s book (Shall this Nation Die?) Lord Bryce
wrote in July 1920: “It was the sufferings of the Armenians
that chiefly drew the attention of Britain and America
because they were the most numerous among the ecclesias-
tical bodies, and the slaughter was, therefore, on a larger
xii
 PREFACE

scale. But the minor communities, such as the Nestorian

and Assyro-Chaldean churches, were equally the victims of
the plan for exterminating Christianity, root and branch…”
The massacres took place over a large area from January
1915 to July 1918, in eastern Anatolia, northern Persia, the
province of Mosul and elsewhere, almost in the same places
and in the same way as those inflicted on the Armenians,
and according to a similar plan that aimed to homogenize
the Ottoman Empire and Turkify the country by eradicat-
ing all non-Turkish and non-Muslim groups.
The physical genocide and the seizure of land and prop-
erty were accompanied by grievous attacks on the Assyro-
Chaldean-Syriac cultural patrimony, as is now happening
in Iraq and Syria. Historic monuments were destroyed and
left in ruins, churches were profaned and schools destroyed.
Libraries containing rare books and valuable manuscripts
were vandalized and robbed, such as those of the Chaldean
Diocese of Siirt or the Assyrian patriarchal seat at
Kotchanes, a little village in Hakkari since abandoned, or
of the Syriac monasteries of Tur Abdin. In the vilayet
(province) of Diyarbakir (Amid) alone, more than 156
Syriac churches and monasteries were ruined. Through
such sinister methods, an attempt was made to destroy the
cultural heritage of a people.
After 1915, a fresh tragedy occurred: the fearful exodus
from Persia towards Iraq in July 1918, observed by British
military and political representatives and mentioned in a
League of Nations report of 1935, which concluded: “In
the end, after having lost 20,000 among them, the survi-
vors reached Hamedan and made contact with the British
troops.” Further disaster lay in the flight from Urfa and
the villages of Tur Abdin in the direction of Syria, towards
xiii
 PREFACE

Aleppo and Djezireh (Hassakeh, Qamishli, Amuda, etc.)

in the 1920s.
Since then, the people’s history has been punctuated by
sufferings and privations, as in Iraq in 1933. Fifteen years
after arriving in Iraq in 1918 to escape Ottoman persecu-
tion, the Assyrians were again subjected to mass killings
widely reported by the international, and especially the
British, press. This tragedy unfolded in the village of
Simele and in other places in northern Iraq in August
1933. From there, survivors fled to Syria, their second
place of refuge.
Now once more under threat—this time from the so-
called Islamic State (Daesh)—the children of these refu-
gees live in the north-east of Syria on both sides of the
River Khabur, in thirty-five villages between the towns of
Hassakeh and Ras al-Ayn, like their Syriac and Chaldean
compatriots at Hassakeh and Qamishli. Again under
attack since 2014, many have had no choice but to take
the road into exile, like those from Mosul and the valley of
Nineveh, driven out by the same Islamist, jihadist and
Takfiri organization. In June 2015, the Assyrian families
of the Khabur and Hassakeh were again scattered.
Yet today, despite such developments, the descendants
of those who survived the 1915 genocide are speaking out,
asking questions and seeking answers from the political
world and international organizations. Many monuments
have been erected around the world—from Armenia to
Australia—to commemorate the victims. Parliaments are
now beginning to recognize the atrocities for what they
were, a genocide, and in 2014 the Armenian parliament
unanimously voted to condemn the massacres perpetrated
by the Ottoman Empire against the Assyrians and Pontic
Greeks. On 9 April 2015, the Dutch parliament voted by
xiv
 PREFACE

a large majority to recognize both the Armenian and the

Assyrian genocides. Two weeks later, the president of
Germany, Joachim Gauck, spoke in Berlin on the fate of
the Armenians and Arameans: “Indiscriminately, men and
women, children and old men were deported, sent on
death marches, exposed to the desert without any protec-
tion and without any food, burned alive, hounded, beaten
and shot to death.”
Other countries such as France have entered the debate,
with many different initiatives under way. More broadly,
the movement towards recognizing the genocide has
assumed global proportions and has thus become the cen-
tral element of Assyro-Chaldean-Syriac demands for jus-
tice. Through the centenary of 2015, publications and
media interest have burgeoned; conferences and debates
have taken place from Lebanon to Armenia, in Belgium,
Switzerland, Milan, Rome, Berlin, Lyon and Paris.
In this context, some words of hope reached us on
Sunday 12 April 2015, when Pope Francis, in his speech
on the Armenian genocide,1 referred directly to the
Assyro-Chaldean-Syriac experience: “In the past century
our human family has lived through three massive and
unprecedented tragedies. The first, which is widely consid-
ered ‘the first genocide of the twentieth century’ ( John
Paul II and Karekin II, Common Declaration, Etchmiadzin,
27 September 2001), struck your own Armenian people,
the first Christian nation, as well as Catholic and Ortho­
dox Syrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Greeks. Bishops
and priests, religious women and men, the elderly and
even defenceless children and the infirm were murdered.”
On Saturday 29 August 2015, Mgr Flavianus Michael
Malke, Syriac Catholic Bishop of Cizre ( Jezireh), who was
murdered on 29 August 1915 in odium fidei, was beatified
xv
 PREFACE

at the Patriarchal Convent of Our Lady of Deliverance in

Harissa (Lebanon) by Patriarch Ignatius Youseff III
Younan, following Pope Francis’ decree of 8 August, offi-
cially recognizing him as a “blessed martyr”.
On 2 June 2016, a major development took place in the
German Bundestag. A resolution was adopted, almost
unanimously, recognizing the genocide (Völkermord) of
Armenians and other Christian minorities subject to
deportations and massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman
Empire in 1915–16. This resolution was entitled Erinnerung
und Gedenken an den Völkermord an den Armeniern und
anderen christlichen Minderheiten in den Jahren 1915
und 1916, which translates to “Remembrance and com-
memoration of the genocide of Armenian and other
Christian minorities in the years 1915 and 1916”. The text
of the resolution, though primarily concerned with the
Armenians, also explicitly names the Arameans, Assyrians
and Chaldeans as equal victims of the genocide.
This resolution had been foreshadowed in a speech
given in Berlin on 23 April 2015 by the German president,
Joachim Gauck, who used the term Völkermord (geno-
cide) during a religious ceremony marking the centenary
of the Armenian massacre; he also mentioned the Assyrian
and Aramean genocide, and that of the Pontic Greeks.
Will this ordeal ever end?
Joseph Yacoub
Lyon, June 2016

xvi
 AUTHOR’S NOTE

The transcription of place names is problematic, as topon-

ymy has varied according to historic periods and political
nomination (Ottoman, Persian, Kurdish, Arab) as well as
differing between English and French usage. Turkey has
also conducted a policy of Turkification, changing many
names of villages and towns. The Assyrian people, moreo-
ver, have their own toponymy in the Aramaic language.
Faced with a plethora of competing place names and spell-
ings, we can only aim for consistency.

xvii
 BU LG A R IA B l a c k S e a RUSSIAN
EMPIRE

Edirne
Vilaye t of C a
Vilaye t
Bosphorus Batum u c
Is t an b u l Vila yet o f a
of E d irn e Kastamonu Trebizo n d s
Vilayet o f
u
Istanbul Samsun s
Gallipoli Kas t a mo nu Kars
Trebizond
Vila yet o f
Ankara Erzeru m
Eskişehir Sivas
Vila yet Erzerum Bayazit
o f An ka ra
Vilaye t Vila yet
of Bu rsa o f Sivas Vila yet o f
Smyrne Kharput PERSIAN
Bitlis Van
Kayseri EMPIRE
Vila yet o f Sasun Vila yet Salmas
Vilaye t Konya Zeitun M a mu ret Diyarbakir o f Va n
of Ayd in - ü l- Aziz

a
c Vila yet o f Hakkari Urmia

i
Vilayet
of Kon ya l i Urfa Diya rba kir
Antalya C i Vila yet o f
Aleppo
Vila yet Mosul
o f Ada na Alexandretta

Aleppo Vila yet o f

M o sul
Deir ez-Zor

CYPRUS
M
e
d N
it
er
ra
nea
n Se
a
0 150
km
© S Ballard (2016)

Map 1: Anatolia c.1915

© S Ballard (2016)
N
RUSSIAN
EMPIRE
Black Sea
Batum
C a
u
c
Samsun a
s
Trebizond Kars

u
Vilayet of Trebizond

s
Erzerum
Sivas
Erzincan Vilayet of Erzerum Bayazit

Vilayet of Sivas
Vilayet of Bitlis
PERSIAN
Moush EMPIRE
Kharput L. Van Van
Sasun
CILICIA Vilayet of Kotchanes
Vilayet of Diyarbakir
Mamuret-ül-Aziz
Salmas
Siirt
Zeitun
Diyarbakir Hakkari
TUR ABDIN Urmia
Marash Vilay et of Van
BOHTAN
Urfa Mardin
Nusaybin
Vilay et of Mos ul
JEZIREH
Vilayet of Aleppo
Hassakeh Mosul
Aleppo
NINEVEH

0 120
Deir ez-Zor
km

Map 2: Eastern Anatolia

 INTRODUCTION

A FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE?

“The crime was the crime of the Ottoman nation and of the
Stamboul Caliphate, and the criminals are still rejoicing in the
success and impunity of their crime.”
Rev. William A. Wigram and Sir Edgar T. A. Wigram,
The Cradle of Mankind: Life in Eastern Kurdistan, 1922
“The Armenians are not the only unfortunates; the Syrians
(Assyrians) also have been decimated.”
William Walker Rockwell, “Current History”, The New York
Times, November 1916
There are peoples who in the past have met a tragic fate,
but who have been brought back to life by contemporary
history. This is not yet the case with the Assyro-Chaldean-
Syriac people, who have on many occasions endured the
vicissitudes of history.
The year 2015 marked the centenary of the Armenian
and Assyrian genocides under the Ottoman Empire. In
1915 the Assyrians faced the ordeal of the desert; not that
of contemplation and meditation in the tradition of their
spiritual Fathers, but a forced desert: that of privation and
death.1 In the broadest sense, the twentieth century will
remain for this people, and for its civil, cultural and reli-
gious institutions, the century of great tragedy; the extent
of the desolation has been vast.
1
 YEAR OF THE SWORD

Nation, people and churches

History attests to the existence of an Assyro-Chaldean-
Syriac nation and people. Living from time immemorial in
that wounded land of historic Mesopotamia, they are
always depicted in terms of a nation, a people, and of
churches. This people existed on the periphery of the
Ottoman and Persian Empires, on its ancestral territory to
the north-west of present-day Iran, in eastern Anatolia—
Hakkari, Tur Abdin, Mardin—and in northern Mesopo­
tamia, the present-day north of Iraq (Mosul, etc.).
Known by different names—Assyrians, Chaldeans,
Syriacs, Nestorians, Jacobites, Arameans2—the Assyrians,
called Aïssors or Assoris by the Armenians and Suriyani by
the Turks, are the descendants of the Assyrian, Babylonian,
Chaldean and Aramean peoples of ancient Mesopotamia,
a land situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers
whose history dates back more than 5,000 years.
One of the major cradles of human civilization, Meso­po­
tamia contributed significantly during its historical develop-
ment to the advancement and progress of knowledge and
practice in the fields of religion, philosophy, science and
politics as well as government. It is notably credited with
the Code of Hammurabi (approximately 1,750 BC), a col-
lection of 282 legal articles which represents the first ever
legislation concerning social organization. Its traces can still
be seen today in the Louvre in Paris, in London’s British
Museum and in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum.
Since the fall of Nineveh, Babylon and the Aramean
kingdoms some 2,500 years ago, the Assyrians have been
deprived of a state to protect them from age-old persecu-
tions, which often took dramatic form from the Persian
Sassanid period onwards. The Eastern Orthodox Church
2
 INTRODUCTION

and the Syriac Orthodox Church were thus subjected to

massacres and humiliations inflicted not only by the
Persians, but also by the Romans, the Byzantines, the
Mongols, the Turks and many other conquerors. Indeed,
authors who have written about the 1915 massacres have
often drawn parallels with the sufferings endured by the
same community in previous centuries. Like their Armenian
brothers, the Assyrians have become familiar with the
adversity of fate and the iniquities of history.
After the loss of their state and the advent of Christianity,
the Church was the institution that became the people’s
protector and the cement that maintained their cohesion.
Speaking Aramaic (also known as Syriac), these Christians
mostly belonged to one of two Churches. One was the
“Jacobite” Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch and all the
East. The other was the Ancient Church of the East; its
remnants, the “Nestorians”, are also called Assyrians,
Syriacs or Arameans, while those former members now in
union with the Catholic Church are known as Chaldeans.
Both Churches once flourished in Mesopotamia and
much of Asia, stretching as far as India and China.
There are some theological and doctrinal differences
between the Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox
Church, which have led in the past to Christological con-
troversies. To understand them, we must refer to the
Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), where
the Christian dogma was defined and the code of the
Christian creed adopted.
The Church of the East has wrongly been called the
Nestorian Church. This conflates the Church’s doctrine
with the Dyophysite doctrine of Patriarch Nestorius of
Constantinople (381–451), who identified two separate
persons in the Christ (Divine and Human); regarding the
3
 YEAR OF THE SWORD

Virgin Mary, Nestorianism used the term Christotokos

(Mother of Christ), rather than the Ephesus Council’s
term, Theotokos (Mother of God).
Meanwhile, the Syriac Orthodox Church has errone-
ously been referred to as Monophysite (Christ as solely
divine in nature), because it rejected the Chalcedon
Council’s teaching on the person of Christ (neither sepa-
ration nor confusion of the Divine and Human natures of
Christ), and it called the Virgin Theotokos. In fact, the
question is more complex, for cultural and political rea-
sons. Both Churches trace their origins to early (first cen-
tury) Christianity, prior to Ephesus and Chalcedon, and
the two Churches reject the Dyophysite/Monophysite
labels. Though adherents of the Church of the East feel a
certain affinity for the Nestorian thesis, they are not truly
Nestorians, and are correctly known as non-Ephesians.
Nevertheless, henceforth this book will refer to this reli-
gious group as “Nestorians”, as the easiest and most unam-
biguous shorthand.
The two Churches’ respective liturgies are distinct from
one another, and date back to the first centuries of
Christendom. Both Churches pray in Aramaic, which is
divided into two branches, Western and Eastern, still spo-
ken both in the Middle East and by the diaspora.
As for links with the Armenians, the Assyro-Chaldean
Churches maintain essentially good relationships with the
Armenian Apostolic Church. Due to doctrinal positions,
the Armenian Church is more closely tied to the Syrian
Orthodox Church than to the Church of the East.
The two Churches have differing dogmas and rituals,
but ethnically they belong to the same Mesopotamian
background. Their Christianity is autochthonous and
4
 INTRODUCTION

apostolic; known for their schools and places of learning

(Edessa, Nusaybin, etc.), their translations from Greek
and their monasteries, these Christians, endowed with
their own liturgy, produced a rich literature in many fields
of thought both religious and profane.3
In the twelfth century, the “Nestorian” Church of the
East reached from the eastern Mediterranean as far as
Peking and claimed some sixty million faithful.4 The
Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church still
have followers in India today.
From the sixteenth century, the two mother Churches—
the Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church—
underwent internal schisms that led to the creation of
separate Churches united with Rome. This was the case in
1522 of the “Nestorian” Church, which witnessed the
advent of the Chaldean Catholic Church of Babylon; in
1783 it was the turn of the Syriac Orthodox Church to be
rivalled by the Syriac Catholic Church. Moreover, due to
the influence of American, British and Russian missiona­
ries, there have also, since the nineteenth century, been
Protestants, those close to the Anglican Church and
Orthodox worshippers among the Assyrian people.
Despite these differences, it is important to point out
that the documentation on the massacres clearly deals
with this community as a distinct ethnic and religious
entity. It exhibits territorial, national, linguistic, cultural
and religious characteristics that fit the criteria of a nation.
Despite the oppression and persecutions, this autoch-
thonous nation left a strong imprint on its land, not least
through place names and cultural, architectural and reli-
gious traces. The land is littered with Aramean-influenced
churches. Writing of the district of Hakkari, in the
5
 YEAR OF THE SWORD

extreme south-east of modern-day Turkey, holy place of

Mesopotamian Christianity, the Dominican intellectual
Jean-Maurice Fiey noted of Mosul in 1964:
We found the dioceses of Hakkari well established by the
beginning of the fifth century: the shrines with the legends of
their saints can be traced back to Christianity’s entry into the
apostolic era and its definitive spread in the fourth to the fifth
centuries thanks to a host of monks. This seems to suggest
clearly that the “Assyrian” people already lived in large numbers
in these mountains at the beginning of our era.5
This sense of a people with deep and long-lived roots
was strongly felt at the beginning of the twentieth century
and was expressed in the titles of books published on the
genocide. For instance, even the subtitle of Assyrian pro-
fessor Abraham Yohannan’s book, The Death of a Nation
(New York, 1916), is significant: The Ever-Persecuted
Assyrians or Nestorian Christians. Joel Warda entitled his
work The Flickering Light of Asia, subtitled Or the Assyrian
Nation or Church. Father Joseph Naayem of Urfa chose as
the title of his book on the 1915 massacres the names of
the two victim peoples: Les Assyro-Chaldéens et les
Arméniens. But in the English-language version, entitled
Shall This Nation Die?, he refers only to his own commu-
nity, namely the Assyro-Chaldean (Assyrian) nation.
Moreover, reports and published works often interchange
notions of religious and national identity, using terms
such as “Christian Assyrians”.

On the eve of the massacre

In the first decade of the twentieth century the Assyrians
were living largely in tribal groups, in their ancestral
homeland on the periphery of the Ottoman and Persian
6
 INTRODUCTION

Empires—in north-west Persia (Persian Azerbaijan), in

eastern Anatolia (Hakkari, Van, Bohtan, Tur Abdin,
Diyarbakir, Mardin, Bitlis and Siirt) and in present-day
Iraq (Mosul, the plain of Nineveh and Kirkuk). In Persia,
a population estimated at 100,000 (including those set-
tled in Russia and the Caucasus) inhabited more than
180 villages, mainly in the rich and fertile province of
Urmia—described as “Persia’s promised land” by the
Orientalist Eugène Boré—around the salt lake of the
same name, from Salmas (Diliman) and Khoy to Senah
and Tabriz. The extensive Salmas plain, surrounded by
mountains, with its plentiful water and orchards, con-
tained thirteen villages including Khosrova, Pataver, Ula,
Chahara, Zilajouk, Satoura, Karilann and Haftvan, the
last being mostly Armenian. To the south-east of Salmas,
the beautiful village of Khosrova was exclusively Assyrian,
with 1,400 inhabitants in 1844 and 2,500 in 1885. The
mountains encircling the plateau of Urmia were princi-
pally home to Kurds, the Assyrians’ nearest neighbours,
with whom they maintained a complex and shifting
relationship.
Those living within the Ottoman Empire were most
numerous in the provinces of Mosul, Bitlis, Siirt, Diyarbakir,
Mardin, Shirnak, Van and Tur Abdin. Here, the Syriacs
alone accounted for more than 250,000 people. In the
Bhotan district they were concentrated in several villages
around the town of Jezireh. Forming an enclave within
three provinces (Bitlis to the north, Diyarbakir to the east
and Hakkari to the west), Bohtan contained some
100,000 Assyro-Chaldeans. The Van vilayet (Ottoman
administrative province) stretched south from the city of
Van to Amadiya, today in the Kurdish region of Iraq. The
7
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 The Chronicles being thus under suspicion, we must go for
our main knowledge of the story to record sources, many of
which are fortunately accessible in print. Palgrave’s Kalendars
and Inventories of the Exchequer, i. 251–99 (Record Commission,
1836), publishes the writs appointing the two commissions of
enquiry and the verdicts of the juries empanelled by them. The
writs are also in Rymer’s Fœdera, i. 956, 959 (Record
Commission). The confession of Richard Pudlicott is printed in an
English translation in H. Hall’s Antiquities of the Exchequer,
pp. 25–8, and also in L. O. Pike’s History of Crime in England,
Vol. i. The French original can be read in Exchequer Accounts,
K. R., 332/8. Cole’s Records (Record Commission, 1844) prints
the indenture in which Droxford, the Keeper of the Wardrobe,
specifies the jewels lost and recovered. Some entries in the
Calendar of Patent Rolls and the Calendar of Close Rolls usefully
supplement the continuous records.
There are several fairly full modern accounts, the majority of
which are not quite satisfactory. That in Dean Stanley’s Memorials
of Westminster Abbey is more eloquent than critical. H. Harrod’s
article in Archæologia, lxiv. 375, “on the crypt of the chapter
house at Westminster,” is valuable for its clear identification of the
crypt under the chapter house with the scene of the robbery.
Equally useful is J. Burtt’s important paper “On some discoveries
in connexion with the ancient treasury of Westminster,” published
in G. G. Scott’s Gleanings from Westminster Abbey, pp. 18–33.
The two fullest modern accounts are in L. O. Pike’s History of
Crime in England, i. 199–203 and 466–7, and Hubert Hall’s
Antiquities of the Exchequer, pp. 18–33. The latter is perhaps the
better because, though telling the story in a book dealing with the
exchequer, it recognises that the treasury robbed was the
treasury of the wardrobe. There are, however, materials for a
more detailed critical narrative than has hitherto been attempted.
 II. Note on the Illustrations.

The two rough drawings, figured in the text, are reproduced

from f. 192d of a Manuscript Chronicle in the British Museum
[MS. Cotton, Nero, D. ii.]. The first, opposite p. 19, represents the
story of the robbery of the treasury of the wardrobe “by a single
robber,” which this chronicle, following the Westminster version,
adopts. The second, opposite p. 20, depicts the outrage on
Boniface VIII by the agents of Philip the Fair at Anagni, in
September, 1303. This picture of the attack on the pope
emphasizes the comparison made by the sympathetic monastic
writers between the scandal of Anagni and the analogous outrage
on the church by the imprisonment of the monks of Westminster.
The photographs were taken by the permission of the Principal
Librarian of the British Museum by the Artists Illustrators, Limited.
The rough plan of Westminster Abbey and the adjoining royal
palace is taken from that published in Hall’s Antiquities of the
Exchequer, p. 31. I am indebted to my friend Mr. Hubert Hall and
to his publisher, Mr. Elliott Stock, for permission to reproduce this.
Transcriber’s Note
Capitalisation of “christianity” and “Wardrobe/wardrobe” retained
as printed.
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