Ottoman Armenian Reform movements (Tanzimat era)
The Ottoman Armenian reform movements of the Tanzimat era (1839–76) and after were the political, ecclesiastical and educational current through which the Armenian millet of the Ottoman Empire pressed for civic equality, communal self-government, and security of person and property within the framework of an Ottoman state undergoing reform.
Their canonical achievement was the Nizamname-i Millet-i Ermeniyan, the Armenian National Constitution, drafted by Krikor Odian, Nahapet Rusinian, Servichen and others under the leadership of the Patriarchate, and recognised by Imperial decree on 17/29 March 1863. The constitution converted the millet from an ecclesiastically-governed community into a representative one, with a 140-member General Assembly (20 ecclesiastics, 80 laymen elected by the Constantinople Armenian community, 40 representatives of the provinces), a Religious Council, and a Civil Council, supervising community affairs, schools, hospitals, charities, and tax-collection on Armenian millet members.
The reform programme was not, in its early phase, separatist. It sought protection from Kurdish tribal predation in the eastern vilayets (the so-called Armenian Question of property and security), abolition of double taxation, recognition of Armenian testimony in court, and provincial reform. The provincial dimension produced the Armenian Communal Council's 1872 Memoir of the Armenian Question, which catalogued grievances and which the Patriarchate Mkrtich Khrimian Hayrik carried to the Congress of Berlin in 1878.
Berlin was the inflection point. Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin (replacing the more interventionist Article 16 of San Stefano) committed the Sublime Porte to "improvements and reforms" in the eastern provinces "demanded by local needs" and to "guarantee Armenians' security against the Circassians and Kurds", under European supervision. Khrimian's Iron Ladle sermon, on his return, argued that paper rights without armed power were useless. The reforms were never substantively implemented; the Hamidian massacres of 1894–96 represented the Sultan's countermove. By 1908 the Ottoman Armenian reform movement had largely passed to the revolutionary parties (Hunchak and Dashnaktsutyun), which initially welcomed the Young Turk revolution as a renewal of the constitutional moment but were progressively disabused as CUP policy turned toward Pan-Turkism and culminated in the Armenian Genocide.