UCLA

This study examines a growing religious divide within the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire around 1700—a divide that reshaped the culture, institutions, and politics in their communities for the next 200 years. Before the late seventeenth century, essentially all Ottoman Armenians belonged to the traditional Armenian Church. Over the course of a few decades, however, many converted to Catholicism while others developed a trenchant, anti-Catholic group identity. This study identifies four key factors that drove these twin transformations: the expansion of Roman Catholic missionary efforts in the Ottoman Empire; the unprecedented availability of Armenian-language books through printing and long-distance circulation; the shifting diplomatic relations between the Ottoman and French governments; and the complexities of Ottoman imperial administration. Through its analysis and argumentation, this study contributes to the fields of Ottoman confessionalization, global Catholicism, and global early modernity. It thus offers a multicausal explanation for the bifurcation of one religious community into two and argues that an array of sacred as well as secular, local as well as long-distance themes must be taken into consideration to explain it. To reveal and analyze these themes, it draws from primary sources written in Classical Armenian, vernacular Armenian, Ottoman Turkish, and French and stored in more than a dozen archives and libraries.