The Great Armenian Flight: Migration and Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Abstract The seventeenth century was a turning-point in the cultural and demographic history of the Ottoman Empire. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, Ottoman-Armenian subjects began to flee en masse from the Celali Revolts, war with Persia, and famine in Eastern Anatolia to more secure territories in Western Anatolia, Istanbul, and Thrace. This article documents the arrival of Armenian refugees in Thrace using Ottoman Turkish court records from the coastal town of Rodosto (Tekirdağ). After describing the micro-history of an Armenian refugee crisis, this article suggests that these migrations played a catalyzing role in the rise of a distinct “Western Armenian” culture and society, which developed for the first time in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. The rise of this new society was an event of great importance in Ottoman history, as the Armenians would become a critical part of Ottoman economic and cultural life in the empire’s coastal trade cities.