"...[T]he Turks have almost always over-stated the numbers of their Christian subjects. I have known of cases where the census had been fairly taken. The Armenians or the Greeks came, let us say, to 12 per cent. The Armenian or the Greek patriarch called upon the Turkish Governor and protested that his people were full 20 per cent, threatening to make a row about it if the estimate was not corrected. The governor, knowing that his people are not great at figures, and wishing to avoid a scandal, yields the point which seems to him of slight importance. The patriarch then tells the foreign consuls interested: ‘You see the Turks themselves have put us down at twenty—they naturally under-estimate us for their own purposes—the figure is, of course, much nearer forty per cent.’”

Marmaduke Pickthall, “The Truth at Last,” The New Age, July 17, 1919, Vol. XXV. No. 12.



On this page, we will examine numbers regarding [1] The Armenians, and (just for the heck of it, at bottom) [2] The Turks.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1)   Pre-War Ottoman-Armenian Population figures
1a) Further figures, including nine vilayets
1b) Arnold Toynbee
2)   From an "Honest" Patriarchate Member
3)   Rate of Armenian Immigration to the USA
4)   Nubar, Patriarch, Hovannisian on survivors
4a) Armenian delegation stat on refugees: 700k
5)   The Ottoman Census
6)   1 million Armenians lost to Ottomans, 1886
7)   Patriarch breakdown of bloated 2.1 million
8)   Lepsius & Walker: Patriarch said 1.85 million
9)   Frenchman vouches for 300,000 dead
10)  Near East Relief: 1.7 mil survivors in 1917
11)  Sam Weems
12)  Stanford Shaw
13)  Various Estimates from a Turkish Web Site
13a) Armenian deleg.: 1.6 mil pre-war pop., min.
14)  Justin McCarthy
15)  A "Reliable" Armenian Count
16)  Anti- Turks: 1) Churchill 2) Harbord 3) Rockwell
        4) Toynbee 5) Montgomery
17)  Three Computations for 300,000 Mortality
18)   Le Figaro: Only 15,000 Massacre Victims
19)  How Many Relocated, How Many Massacred
19a) Boghos Nubar's 1918 Letter to French Minister
19b) Postwar Armenian Worldwide Pop. Figures
19c)  More Armenian Mortality Estimates
19d) Yusuf Halacoglu
20)  Talat Pasha's "Black Covered Book"
21)  Armenian Reactions to the Numbers
22)  The Old Armenian "Duck & Dodge"
23)  How Many Turks Died
24)  Turk-Unfriendly Estimates on Turkish Dead
25)  Documentation for 520,000 Turkish Mortality

The various sources calculating the number of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire shortly before the time of the "Genocide": 

From Sam Weems' book, "ARMENIA: Secrets of a "Christian" Terrorist State."  Looks like the Ottoman census is a good, reliable median figure. ("Lepsius" was a vicar and President of the German-Armenian society, with no sympathy for Turks; he added a quarter-million to the above figure in 1921; Patriarch Malachia Ormanian's figure is from the early 20th century, shortly before the war; the source is Esat Uras. In Kemal Cicek's "The Ottoman Armenians: The Question of Relocation and Immigration During WWI," there is a different Ormanian figure, from 1913: 1,915,651.) If around 1,300,000 Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, it would be a little difficult to have "exterminated" 1,500,000 of them. This is the figure most often quoted by Armenians, regarding the victims of the "Genocide"... but it's not that uncommon to come across figures of two million, three million.... sometimes even "four millions."

 

Ludovic de Constenson (who gives the 1913 Ottoman-Armenian population as 1,400,000 from chart above:1,150,000 Asiatic + 250,000 European), also calculated 1,550,000 Russian-Armenians and 3,100,000 as the world-wide figure.

 

Vital Cuinet...................................... 1,475,000 (Among foreign sources, Cuinet researched the Ottoman population [on behalf of the Debt Commission, taking twelve years] more than anyone. The French recognized these figures as official enough to use them for their Yellow Book. Cuinet's research was primarily based on information from local churches, which tended to exaggerate, and these statistics were from before the 1894 revolts, after which hundreds of thousands of Armenians emigrated. The above figure is for Asian Turkey. Hovannisian adds that "Cuinet utilized (La Turquie d’Asie, Paris, 1890-95), showing only the Vilayet of Bitlis did Armenians constitute more than 30% ofthe population." Citing a Kevork-Mesrob footnote in his 1967 book (p. 37):“Cuinet himself had confessed that his statistics were unreliable and complained that Ottoman officials had refused to make available much pertinent information.")

 

Sari, the Frenchman......................... 1,475,011 (Taken, it appears, from Cuinet's French Yellow book figures.)

 

Clair Price........................... 1,000,000? or 1,500,000

Alexander Powell..................................... 1,500,000 (3,000,000 world, 1,000,000 Russia)

Lynch ....................................1,325,246 (The six provinces: 387,746; rest of Asian Turkey: 751,500; European Turkey: 186,000; the 1901 figure in chart above might allude to the 1,058,000 from nine provinces, as Lynch footnoted on p. 10 of his book. Perhaps next to Cuinet, Lynch carried on the most detailed study.)

Britannica Almanac / Yearbook, 1917.............. 1,056,000

The latter offers the same figure as the one for the 1912 British Blue Book, in the table above. Also from that table, there is an asterisk (*) for the  Ormanian reference; it most likely alludes to the source: Esat Uras, Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni Meselesi, Armenians in History and the Armenian Question , Istanbul, 1987. This work is also the source for Cuinet, who based his numbers from the information provided by Armenian churches. Sari, and the above table's Lepsius. Thanks to "Armenian Claims and Realities," Dr. Hüsamettin Yildirim, Ankara, 2001.

Larousse (1898; from the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907) .......
1,548,000 Christians in Asia Minor (& 7,179,000 Moslems)

Erik J. Zurcher...................................1,500,000
("Turkey, A Modern History" Tauris Publishers, London, p.120. "Estimates of the total number of Armenians in the empire vary, but a number of around 1.500.000, some 10% of the population of Ottoman Anatolia, is probably a reasonable estimate.")

Nicole and Hugh Pope...................................1,500,000
("Turkey Unveiled," Overlook Press, NY. p. 43)

Hester Donaldson Jenkins........................nearly 2,000,000 in almost the world; the figure refers to Armenians who were "Russian, Persian and Turkish subjects." ("Armenia and the Armenians," National Geographic Magazine, Oct. 1915, p. 329)

David Magie........................ 1,479,000 (exc. European Turkey, 1914)

Luigi Villari ...........................................................1,500,0)0
("Fire and Sword in the Caucasus," 1906, p. 147; also, Russia: 1,200,000, and "only a few hundred thousands remaining in Persia and other parts of the world.")

The Minneapolis Morning Tribune (10-8-1915)...........1,500,000 (Affairs of Our Turkish Ally; "It is not likely that anything will be done to stop the slaughter of a nation of a million and a half of people, 800,000 of whom are said to have perished already by the sword, by starvation and by exposure.")

F. Tournebize (1900).............................................. 1,300,000
(Histoire Politique et Religieuse de L'Armenie, Paris 1916)

Dr. M. Symbad Gabriel.............................................. 1,500,000
(Gabriel [Gabrelian] was the propagandistic president of the Armenian General Progressive Association in the USA. From 450,000 Armenians Reported Massacred, Dallas News, Aug. 25, 1915 [Also NYTimes, 9-25-15]. Along with 450,000 massacred, he estimated 600,000 "rendered homeless or exiled.")

Encyclopedia Britannica (1911)............................... 1,500,000
(1.5 million Armenians in Russia, as well. 1953 Britannica edition:  2,500,550. The writer: an Armenian.)

Halil Berktay ................................................................ 1,500,000
(2005 Hurriyet Newspaper Interview; see below)

Miss Emily C. Wheeler ................................................. 1,500,000 (Secretary of the National Armenia and India Relief association, having "spent eighteen years in Armenia": "Out of the Armenian nation, 1,500 000 people, 800,000 have boen killed or deported." Fort Wayne News, "Enver Pasha's Boast of Bloody Butchery," Oct. 7, 1915.)

LORD JAMES BRYCE............................................... 1,500,000
(Sven Hedin, Bagdad, Babylon, Ninive, 1918; his source is p. 11 of a Danish translation of a brochure written by Arnold Toynbee, containing an Oct. 6, 1915 speech delivered by Bryce to the House of Lords; described as a "memorandum" by Bryce, so perhaps it wasn't from the speech itself. In the speech, Bryce claimed 250,000 Ottoman-Armenians deserted to the Russians.)

MSHAK (Armenian newspaper, Tiflis)......................... 1,200,000
(As reported in the New York Times, "Only 200,000 Armenians left in Turkey," Oct. 22, 1915: "The figures of the Mshak are based on the estimate of the Armenian Patriarch at Constantinople that 850,000 Armenians have been killed or enslaved by the Turks. In addition to which 200,000 Armenians are believed to have fled to Russia.")

Arshag Mahdesian ..................................................... 1,100,000
(As reported by the self-described "Armenian Editor and Publicist" in the New York Times, Oct. 28, 1915 ["The Light That May Go Out in Turkey"]: "The whole population of the Turkish empire is estimated at 32,000,000, of whom only 1,100,000 are Armenians.")

George Montgomery (source below)..................... 1,600,000

Arnold Toynbee ......................................1,000,000-1,100,000
(See box below for source. In his 1916 "Treatment" report, he settled on 1,600,000, the midway point between what he thought was the Ottomans' 1.1 million, and the Patriarch's 2.1 million.)

Sidney Whitman .................................................... 1,500,000
(Turkish Memories, 1914, ca. p. 69: "...In that mysterious country which Europeans are in the habit of calling Armenia... making every allowance for the unreliability of statistics, can scarcely exceed a million and a half...")

"Ex-Attache" .................................................... 1,200,000
(Author of "The Armenian Race," an insightful article appearing in The Washington Herald, August 25, 1907.)

German Embassy report...........................Less than 500,000
(From the British Archives, 1914, as published in Armenia: Political And Ethnic Boundaries 1878–1948, 1998; for eight provinces. Copy.)

Charles Lloyd.......................................................... 566,297
(Lloyd was the pro-Armenian British consul in Erzurum; these figures are for the "Non-Moslems" — which included Greeks; see following listing — of the five provinces, Van, Bitlis, Diarbakir, Harput and Erzurum, for 1890. The Sublime Porte figures are also provided in this report that the Armenian Patriarch had a hand in, which wasn't far off at 512,372. Copy.)

British Archival report..........................................1,097,960
(Affaires Arméniennes 1893-1897, for Asia Minor. Copy. Thanks to TurkishPAC for these last three listings.)

M. N. Vendiand....................................................1,500,000
(Terror in Adana, The Frankfurter Zeitung, 13 June 1909.)

 

The 1920 Paris edition of Population Armenienne is reported to have attributed to the Armenian Patriarchate the figure of 1.02 million Ottoman-Armenians in 1912 (which bears research, as patriarchs had a way of claiming astronomical numbers; like the Patriarch at the time of the Berlin Conference, who expected the world to swallow a whopping 3 million. He later "revised" to 1,780,000. The greater the number, the better with which to persuade European imperialists to give them free land.

FROM AN "HONEST" MEMBER OF THE PATRIARCHATE

Cuinet wrote: "An Armenian clerical writer (Vahan Vardapet in an Armenian newspaper published in Constantinople, the Djeridei Sharkieh, dated 3/15 December 1886), who appears not to err on the side of exaggeration, has placed the entire Gregorian population, that is the great bulk of his countrymen in Turkey, at 1,263,900 souls. It is reasonable to suppose that the Armenian subjects of the Sultan number upwards of one and a half millions."

Cuinet based his research on church records, and Vardapet's figure, while probably still exaggerated in typical Patriarch style, at least didn't fly off the page, as with the Armenian Patriarch's claim of 3 million a few years earlier (later revised to a still exaggerated 1.78 million.) Late 19th century figures are not irrelevant, as hundreds of thousands of Armenians emigrated after the mid-1890s revolts, and more continued doing so with the reforms of 1908. Given the difference of this balance, the population statistics of the late 19th century was fairly in line with the Ottoman-Armenian population just before the outbreak of the war.

   

The terror of 1895 and 1896 spurred thousands of Armenians to emigrate to the U.S. where they later helped their government to take an active interest in the diplomacy dismembering the Ottoman Empire. The trickle of 2.000 Armenian immigrants into U.S. before 1895 had become a gush of 20.000 by 1914. The Protestant Armenian church in Harput in 1 year alone lost 25% of its 3.000 constituents as immigrants. Joseph L. Grabill, PROTESTANT DIPLOMACY AND THE NEAR EAST, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971, p. 42. And it wasn't only the USA that Ottoman-Armenians were emigrating to; even Armenian historians agree there was a huge number of Armenians who left the Ottoman Empire after the turmoil of the 1890s. Making up for increases in population, what this means is that such an outflow allowed for the population to remain fairly constant. The roughly 1.5 million Armenians Vardapet indicated above could not have changed significantly.