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Pied-Noir

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Any ideas? I can't find any good maps or links on this subject. Specifically I wish to know why and when Greeks and Armenians were forced from the peninsula. I think this was during the 14th and 15th centuries, but it probably started earlier and I don't really know the details.

Also, I am not so much talking about the events of the 20th century in Armenia itself, but those who lived in 'little Armenia' in the south.
 
There were some earlier threads about the general topic (Turkification of Anatolia / why Anatolia was important for the Byzantine Empire / ...) you might find them using the nifty forum search function.

AFAIK there was no mass exodus, not in the 11th century and not in the 14th or 15th century. There was however quite some chaos and upheaval following the initial Turkish invasion after Manzikert (where Turkish groups ranged as far as the Aegean coast), and the Komnenos emperors later made efforts to round up Christian populations and bring them out of Turkish land whenever they campaigned into the Anatolian interior.

Lots of Greeks (and other Christian populations) converted though, and did not leave. Perhaps the larger part even. This is AFAIK well attested from contemporary chronicles which write about Greek speaking Muslim populations that the Komnenos emperors encountered in their campaigns.
 
In 1896, the population of Armenian Cilicia was still about 40% Christian and Armenian. They didn't go anywhere until the 20th century.

220px-Armenian_population_map_1896.jpg
Larger version

(Though the Wikipedia article about Cilicia does mention that 30,000 of the aristocracy and wealthy middle classes fled Cilicia for Cyprus in c. 1300 to escape from Timur.)
 
Thanks, Stephen.

Any idea about Greeks in central and western Anatolia?
 
Unfortunately I need earlier data, but thanks.
 
Anatolia turned Firmly Greek in the 4th-5th centuries as Greek bibles became readily available in the countryside and the mess of different languages disappeared. Armenian Cilicia was a diaspora of Armenians from Old Armenia fleeing from invasions by Turkomans and Seljuks who settled in the Taurus mountains. One group, the Roupenians, were able to extend hegemony over the Tarsus plain and create Cilician Armenia.
 
Yes, but when did central and western Anatolia stop being Greek and start being Turkish? :D
 
Honestly, I think you're working from a false premise. Greeks and Armenians were only "forced from the peninsula" in the 1910s and 1920s, not earlier. Modern Turks share at least 70% of their DNA with other inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin, such as the Greeks, and less than a quarter with the Turkic tribes of Central Asia.

The Seljuk and Ottoman Turks were a small ruling class governing a large cosmopolitan population, who gradually converted to Islam and learned Turkish because of the social benefits, prestige and lower taxes conversion offered. That probably happened faster in central Anatolia because even under the Byzantines it was a thinly-populated region, more suited to pasture than intensive arable farming. It was economically important, because the Byzantine nobility had large estates there where they bred cattle; but not many people lived there. The incoming nomadic Turkish tribes, for whom this type of land suited their lifestyle ideally, would have quickly outnumbered the local population without needed to drive them out. But Anatolia's coastal regions, with the bulk of the population, remained 'Greek' and only gradually changed in culture, as an organic process.
 
And going even further back most of these Greeks would have had Lydian, Carian, Galatian, etc., etc., ancestors
 
Ive also had limited success trying to uncover more data about this topic, there is very little data to operate from so we're reduced to mostly speculation and presumption. I personally tend to regard race in the biological sense as being almost entirely irrelevant in this matter, even today, Anatolia remains a melting pot of different racial and genetic combination, yet by in large, people would identify themselves fiercely as Turkish.

Instead, language and to a lesser degree, religion, are perhaps more useful as an indicator of the kind of demographic changes which the peninsula underwent. In 1071, the year of Manzikert, Anatolia might be seen as an almost exclusively Greek and Armenian speaking region, with a healthy dose of geographically isolated minorities, foreign traders and settled Imperial mercenaries thrown into the mix.

By the time of the Ottoman pre-WW1 censuses, Greeks constitute maybe 15% of the population in areas like Pontus, the Western Coasts and Cilica, half that in Konya and Kappadocia and are almost non-existent elsewhere. Armenians are in a similar boat, concentrated in the eastern half of the peninsula, where they made up 20-35% of the population, whilst being almost non-existent outside that region (the exception being Izmir, on the western coast).

At the end of the Greco-Turkish War in 1922, the two countries agreed to exchange minorities (excluding the region of Thrace in both countries, leaving Greece with a population of 8 million, predominately Greek and Turkey with some 22 million, predominately Turkish. The Armenian population didn't fare so well, being reduced by about 1 million during the Armenian Genocide (insert various interpretations here), bringing a bloody conclusion to the wide-scale presence of Armenians in eastern Anatolia. Interestingly, the Armenian SSR began with a population of a mere 750,000, but was gradually reinvigorated with members of the Armenian diaspora.

That appears to be the extent of our knowledge on Anatolia's demographic history, people were Grecified and Armenianised, then the Turks came and Turkicised and eventually most minority populations were evicted along 1922 boundary's. Sadly, the biggest question, the one the OP posed and one I've wondered myself, is how the process of Turkification proceeded, at what point did the populations go from mostly Greek to mostly Turkish. We've had some insight into the process as elaborated by other posters, sadly the details and hard numbers are beyond us.
 
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There's a book called "The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor" by Speros Vryonis. The Internets give a warning: "it must be pointed out that 224 of the 253 primary sources utilized in the 2219 footnotes are quoted from the writers' original Greek, Latin, French, German, Arabic and Turkish — a demanding range of languages for the average (or even scholarly) reader". Therefore I've remained hesitant to get my hands on it. :)
Here's a summary though: http://islamnz.com/vryonis.html
 
There's a book called "The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor" by Speros Vryonis. The Internets give a warning: "it must be pointed out that 224 of the 253 primary sources utilized in the 2219 footnotes are quoted from the writers' original Greek, Latin, French, German, Arabic and Turkish — a demanding range of languages for the average (or even scholarly) reader". Therefore I've remained hesitant to get my hands on it. :)
Here's a summary though: http://islamnz.com/vryonis.html
Wow, seems like that book looks is the definite work on the topic. Should be stickied perhaps? (The topic of the thread comes up time and time again after all)
 
Interesting find, if accurate this would mean by about 1500, only 10% of the population of Anatolia was classed as Christian - would this Translate into only 10% Greek speakers and the remainder Turkish I wonder, or would there have been a period of Greek Muslims?
 
Interesting find, if accurate this would mean by about 1500, only 10% of the population of Anatolia was classed as Christian - would this Translate into only 10% Greek speakers and the remainder Turkish I wonder, or would there have been a period of Greek Muslims?

If you mean the article i posted it says that you should miltiply the houses with 5 and add another 10% since its tax register and they probably missed some. Mind you that Sancak of Kefe is part of anatolia according to Otto system so you need to have take that in considiration

The article also says that Islamization was pretty recent in Anatolia, so if Timur had not burned down the Otto tax archives after battle of Ankara, the picture would be much different for early 1400s and earlier...

As for your question AFAIK the (orthodox)greeks of Anatolia started to speak turkish pretty fast. Most of them that were exchanged in 1924 couldnt speak a single word of greek when they were forced to Greece.
 
I would not be so sure about adopting languages pretty quick. Here's an example from France:

"the French language has been essential to the concept of 'France', although in 1789 50% of the French people didn't speak it at all, and only 12 to 13% spoke it 'fairly' – in fact, even in oïl language zones, out of a central region, it wasn't usually spoken except in cities, and, even there, not always in the faubourgs [approximately translatable to "suburbs"]. In the North as in the South of France, almost nobody spoke French."

And with huge number of multi-ethnic kingdoms and empires at hand it would seem that diversity of languages of subjects wasn't really an issue till at least classical modernity.

The Turkish republic had to launch "Citizen, speak Turkish" campaign (starting in 1928 iirc) and "names and surnames law" somewhere in the 1930s. Here's another quote:

"Although the Armenian deportation of 1915 and the Greek-Turkish population exchange in 1924 had greatly homogenized the population within the borders of the new state, a considerable number of linguistic and religious minorities still lived in Turkey. According to the first population census of the Republic, conducted in 1927, Turkey's population of 13.6 million held around 2 million people for whom Turkish was not the main language."


It's interesting to draw parallels. Because it would seem to be fair to assume ~3 centuries to have majority of population to switch religions. +/- a century. And "majority" does not necessarily mean "overwhelming majority". Egypt/Syria, Prussia/Livonia and, apparently, Anatolia, seem to fit in.
 
France wasn't overrun by foreign invaders, though. Anatolia was, and the summaries of Vryonis' book also claim that there was a transformation in lifestyles (from sedentary to nomad and semi-nomad) happening throughout the Seljuk period, which when it ended left rural Anatolia a very different place (economically and lifestyle-wise) from what it had been in Byzantine times. I can easily see this going along with a fairly rapid language change, even if biologically it's still more or less the same people living there.
 
[...]
It's interesting to draw parallels. Because it would seem to be fair to assume ~3 centuries to have majority of population to switch religions. +/- a century. And "majority" does not necessarily mean "overwhelming majority". Egypt/Syria, Prussia/Livonia and, apparently, Anatolia, seem to fit in.
Out of curiosity, when did people in England stop speaking Anglo-Saxon?
 
Anglo Saxon is just Old English without any French influences. So a couple of generations after the Norman conquest.