“Before Islam violently conquered eastern Anatolia (Asia Minor) in the eleventh century, Armenia was significantly larger than today. Beginning a thousand years ago, however, Turks chipped away at and absorbed ethnically Armenian territory. What is happening today is simply part of that continuum. The Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa (d. 1144), an Armenian historian who lived close to the initial conquests, makes all this clear. According to this valuable historical resource, in 1019, ‘the first appearance of the bloodthirsty beasts … the savage nation of infidels called Turks entered Armenia … and mercilessly slaughtered the Christian faithful with the sword.’ Three decades later the raids were virtually nonstop. In 1049, the founder of the Turkic Seljuk Empire himself, Sultan Tughril Bey (r. 1037–1063), reached the Armenian city of Arzden, west of Lake Van, and ‘put the whole town to the sword, causing severe slaughter, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons.’ Other contemporaries confirm the devastation visited upon Arzden. ‘Like famished dogs,’ writes Aristakes (d. 1080) an eye witness, the Turks ‘hurled themselves on our city, surrounded it and pushed inside, massacring the men and mowing everything down like reapers in the fields, making the city a desert. Without mercy, they incinerated those who had hidden themselves in houses and churches.’ Eleven years later, in 1060, the Turk’s laid siege to Sebastia (which, though now a Turkish city, was for the preceding 400 years Armenian). Six hundred churches were destroyed, ‘many and innumerable people were burned [to death],’ and countless women and children ‘were led into captivity to Persia.’ Between 1064 and 1065, Tughril’s successor, Sultan Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri–known to posterity as Alp Arslan, one of Turkey’s unsavory but national heroes–laid siege to Ani, the fortified capital of Armenia, then a great and populous city. The thunderous bombardment of Muhammad’s siege engines caused the entire city to quake, and Matthew describes countless terror-stricken families huddled together and weeping. Once inside, the Islamic Turks ‘began to mercilessly slaughter the inhabitants of the entire city and piling up their bodies one on top of the other. Innumerable and countless boys with bright faces and pretty girls were carried off together with their mothers.’”
“Why Concessions to Islam Never work,” PJMedia, Nov. 19, 2020
