IRAN AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE
Abstracts

Zekiyan, Prof. Boghos Levon, Università degli Studi di Venezia "Ca' Foscari", Dipartimento di Studi Eurasiatici, Venice, Armenian Self-Perception Between the Ottomans and the Safavids

Owing to a large extent to the geopolitical position of their homeland, the Armenians, in their millennia-long history, felt themselves almost constantly challenged to face a great diversity of peoples, cultures, and religions: Achaemenids and Hellenes, Romans and Parthians, Sasanians and Byzantines, Arabs, Seljuks, Franks, Mongols, Ottomans, Safavids, Russians, and, in modern times, Western Europeans, to mention only the main political formations around Armenia or in close political and cultural relationship with it.  In most of these cases the Armenians found themselves almost crushed between two superpowers of the moment, as was the case with Parthians and Romans, Byzantines and Sasanians, Ottomans and Safavids, Ottomans and Russians.

Such multifarious relationships with neighbouring peoples, states, and cultures, caused of course numerous problems of very different nature, problems often extremely hard to resolve and going as far as to touch the limits of survival.  In this survival struggle Armenians represent, I think, one of those cases in which we meet a comparatively great number of permanent factors in the everlasting dialectic between continuity and change, tradition and innovation.

In the dialectic of Armenian self-perception between Ottomans and Safavids one of the main components of the question was, no doubt, the religious factor, that is the fundamental difference in religion.  The problem was all the more serious in that, when the Armenians found themselves between the Ottoman Turks and the new Persians, who were no more Sasanians, Christianity had become for them, in virtue of an evolution which had already almost one thousand years of history behind it, an essential, unavoidable part of their identity.

The paper aims to highlight what kind of problems derived from such a confrontation, and how, on which bases, those problems were resolved, when this was possible.

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