Ottoman Armenian population

While the Ottoman Empire had population records prior to the 1830s, it was only in 1831 that the Office of Population Registers fund (Ceride-i Nüfus Nezareti) was founded. To draw more accurate data, the Office decentralized in 1839. Registrars, inspectors, and population officials were appointed to the provinces and smaller administrative districts. They recorded births and deaths periodically and compared lists indicating the population in each district. These records were not a total count of population. Rather, they were based on what is known as “head of household”. Only the ages, occupation, and property of the male family members only were counted.

The official data derived from extending the taxation values to the total population. Because of the use of taxation data to infer population size, detailed data for numerous Ottoman urban centers - towns with more than 5,000 inhabitants - is accurate. This data was collaborated with data on wages and prices. Another source was used for the numbers of landlords of households in the Ottoman Empire – every household was assumed to have 5 residents.[1]

In 1844, the Ottoman government recorded a total of 2.4 million Armenians. Abdolonyme Ubicini, a French historian and journalist, was one of the first to publish the 1844 figure by adding that he considers it an underestimation of the total Ottoman Armenian population.[2] The Armenians inhabiting Ottoman Empire in Europe are scarcely four hundred thousand, of which more than half reside in Constantinople, the others are scattered through Thrace and Bulgaria. On the other hand, Turkey in Asia contains not less than two million Armenians, the majority of whom still inhabit the ancient territory of their forefathers in the neighborhood of Mount Ararat; the three eyalets of Erzeroum, Diarbekir and Kurdistan contain many villages peopled entirely by Armenians, and in these provinces, notwithstanding frequent migrations, the Armenians preserve a numerical superiority over the Turkish and Turkoman races.[2]

Ubicini states:

It is difficult to form an exact estimate of the number of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The statement which I have given from official calculation and which raises the number to an average of two million and four hundred thousand, is only an approximate computation, and probably below the truth [...][2]

A 20th-century Turkish professor, İbrahim Hakkı Akyol, also considers the 1844 as an underestimation of the total Ottoman population because the taxes to be set for each vilayet and kaza would be based on the census result, and the population wanted to avoid them. In 1867, the 2.4 million figure remains unchanged, and was used by Ottoman official Salaheddin Bey in a book published on the occasion of the International Exposition in Paris. On the same occasion, an Ottoman Armenian official named Migirdich Bey Dadian gives a figure of 3.4 million, which the Ottoman government did not contest.[2]

After the internationalization of the Armenian Question, and the Treaty of Berlin that followed in 1878, the idea of a self-governing Armenian nation became a possibility. Thus, census records of the Armenian population became important. The first record of the General Population Administration under sultan Abdul Hamid was half the figure in 1881–82. The Ottoman Empire lost Batumi, Kars and Ardahan in 1877–78. The Armenian population statistics for those regions would have influenced the losses of Armenian population but can not account for the other million or more Armenians that are missing in the records of 1881–82 under the reign of Hamid.

The Armenian National Constitution of 1863 granted by the Ottoman Sultan to the Ottoman Armenians in 1863 authorized the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople to collect population figures of all Armenians in the Empire. A first attempt was delegated to Karekin Vartabed Srvantsdiants in 1878, who made two trips to Armenian vilayets in 1878 and 1879. However, in certain areas, Kurdish tribes that had taken by force the Armenian villages and would not allow him entry. The 1878 attempt was a failure and was not published.[2]

Samuel Cox at the American Embassy in Istanbul from 1880 to 1886, estimated the Armenian population within the empire to be of 2.4 million.[3]

Vital Cuinet was a French geographer who was charged to survey areas and count their population. His figures were also used to establish the ability of the Ottoman Empire to pay its debts, Cuinet eager to get precise numbers was finally forced to conclude that it was not possible to get them, he gives two main reasons for this.

1. The limitations imposed by the Turkish authorities made his researches inconclusive.
2. Because of the lack of control of the Turkish authorities for farther provinces, it was impossible for him to complete his work.

An example often referred by the critics, was Cuinet's statistics drawn from Ottoman authority numbers and information that they provided him regarding the Vilayet of Aleppo (classified in those works as the sandjak of Marash). The number is an impossible 4,300. While only in the city of Marash, the Catholic and Protestant Armenians were numbering 6,008, and this without including the Gregorians. Cuinet at the beginning of his work, cautioned the reader by declaring: "The science of statistics so worthy and interesting, not only still is not used in this country but even the authorities refuses, with a party line, to accept any investigation."

Regardless of what could have been considered as an indirect admission of under counting. Cuinet presented 840,000 for 1891–92, of what was called “Armenian Villayet” a figure higher than the one presented from Ottoman statistics.[5]

Lynch indicated, like Cuinet, that there was a seemly deliberate Ottoman policy of under counting. Nonetheless, Lynch figures were well circulated, but he cautioned the reader regarding the misleading character of the term “Muslim” since many Armenians converted and were counted as Muslim, while they were still practicing Armenian Christians.[6]

The British official figures at the embassy relied upon careful investigations like those of Lynch. When comparing those figures with Ottoman figures, Zamir concludes: "the provinces of Van, Bitlis, Mamuretal-Aziz (Harput), Diyarbekir, Erzerum, and the independent district of Maras, where British figures are 62 percent higher (847,000) compared with 523,065.” For those reasons he was forced to conclude: “The understatement of the non-Moslem figures appears to be intentional."[7]

Britannica itself takes the figure of 1,750,000 as "a reasonable representation of the Armenian population in Anatolia prior to 1915."[8]

• Demographic map
• 
  Armenian population in 1914.

There was no official census in 1914, contrary to some sources, but a mere approximation of figures taken from the 1905-06 Ottoman census based on official yearly birth and date figures (leaving villages unreported) along with a religious grouping as opposed to an ethnic one, equating all Muslims in one single column and undercounting native Christian population growth rates, because of the Ottoman Court's deliberate omission of the Ecclesiastical statistics, which included actual denominational baptism and death rates. The 1905-06 Ottoman census was the last actual Ottoman census.

Armenian settlements, churches and schools in 1914 and 1922:[9]

This set of Armenian Patriarchate figures were published in 1913. The Armenian Patriarch ordered Armenian bishops to take Ottoman statistics and local information from Armenian parishes, correcting them for perceived undercounts.

In 1992, Raymond H. Kevorkian and Paul B. Paboudjian published a book containing figures drawn from the Armenian Archives and based on the archives of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, ranging from February 1913 to August 1914, that contains the figures for each Ottoman province in detail. The figures included here come from their book. For the figure of the entire Ottoman Armenian population, those records indicate 1,914,620.

These figures closely match with the Ottoman statistics for the Western part of the Empire, but diverge in the Eastern zone, where the Ottoman statistics are suspected to have considerably undercounted the Armenian population. In some regions, the actual Ottoman counts were higher.

Figures by the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople from February 1913 to August 1914:

• Geographic and Demographic maps
• 

In 1912, the Armenian population in the six vilayets of the Ottoman Empire according to Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople was 1,018,000. Toynbee settle on between 1.6 and 2.0 million and states that the real number is probably closer to 2 million for Anatolia, pushing the median slightly on the right.

• Karpat, Kemal H. (May 1978). "Ottoman Population Records and the Census of 1881/82–1893". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 9 (2): 237–274. doi:10.1017/S0020743800000088. S2CID 162337621.