Rise of the Western Armenian Diaspora in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Henry R. Shapiro is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and he also teaches courses on early modern Islamic history and the Classical Armenian language at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes on the histories of non-Muslims in the early modern Islamic empires, particularly in the Ottoman Empire. Shapiro completed his PhD in History at Princeton University, his MA at Sabancı University, an MDiv at Harvard Divinity School, and his BA in Classics at Brown University. He has published articles in the Journal of Early Modern History and Iranian Studies.

• Part I: Migration and Refugee Crisis1. Armenians and the "Seventeenth-Century Crisis" in the Ottoman Empire2. Kemah and the "Great Armenian Flight"3. An Armenian Refugee Crisis in Ottoman Rodosto (Tekirdağ)Part II: Integration and Renaissance4. Grigor Daranaḷts‘i and the Crisis of Leadership and Infrastructure in the Early Seventeenth-Century Western Armenian Diaspora5. Eremia K‘eōmurchean and the Foundation of the Western Armenian Intellectual Tradition in Ottoman Istanbul6. Eremia K‘eōmurchean and the Establishment of an Armeno-Turkish Translation Movement in Ottoman IstanbulConclusions: Legacies of the Great Armenian Flight

Henry Shapiro opens the gate to a new way of writing the 17th-century Ottoman Empire. He masterfully integrates the hitherto poorly known story of the Great Armenian Flight into Ottoman history as one of the central incidents of the period, which had a profound impact on the social and cultural life of the empire in the following centuries. Shapiro’s extraordinary command of both Ottoman-Turkish and Ottoman-Armenian sources makes this an exemplary history of a multilingual empire.