Читать книгу Bleeding Armenia - M. Smbat Gabrielean - Страница 7

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It was in the year 850 that the most awful calamities fell upon this devoted race. Bogha the Tyrant, marched with a vast army to the utter ruin of Armenia. Everywhere terror and consternation prevailed as at their first entrance into the upper valleys, they cut off utterly every living soul they found. The Armenians who inhabited the summits of the mountains, beholding the awful massacres, rushed down in great numbers to attack their enemies, but the Saracens taking possession of all the passes cut off their retreat. A great many were killed, and many more were taken alive. These were bound with ropes and dragged into the presence of the governor. Bogha selected the finest looking men and put them in confinement, intending to force them to renounce their religion; the remainder he ordered slain before his eyes.

This horrible carnage was repeated in several provinces. One of the most famous chiefs sought to make his peace with costly gifts, but was seized with his wife and children and sent in chains to Bagdad. Then Bogha marched his army into the province of Vasburagan with orders to seize and bind all who were able to carry arms. Separating the finest men again for confinement and torture, the others were inexorably consigned to death. The slaughter was immense, as the records state, human blood fertilized the land, and the valleys were choked up with the bodies of former inhabitants. Those whom he had spared resolutely refusing to deny their faith were tortured with fiendish ingenuity until death relieved them of their sufferings.

In the extremity of their anguish they cried out: “How long O Lord? How Long?” A thousand years has brought no adequate reply. You recall the exclamation of Sojourner Truth’s humble piety when Frederick Douglas was fiercely lamenting the death of Abraham Lincoln, “Frederick, is God dead?” and we wonder how the faith of the harried Armenians lived when to swear by Mohammed would have delivered them from their horrible sufferings.

Is the heart of this nation dead? Are we so taken up with the greed for gold, the establishment of commerce, the extension of trade, the rivalries of political ambitions, that the bleeding arms of the Armenians are still stretched forth in vain, and their cries drowned by the din of business or the revels of pleasure.

But no deliverer was nigh. The mountains and the rocks reëchoed in vain their cries for help, their appeals for mercy.

Bogha was drunk with blood. The nation must perish. Province after province was swept of its cities, many thousands slain and massacred; and still the nobles and the chief men were spared for torture. Many were tortured to such an extent that scarcely a feature remained by which to distinguish them. When every art, device and glittering promise had failed to induce them to apostatize, and the cruel ingenuity of their tormentors could devise no more appalling agony, they were crucified.

The persecutions lasted almost without intermission for five years till the earth itself was sickened with the blood of innocent men. When almost the whole land lay desolate and many provinces were more like slaughterhouses than inhabited countries, Bogha gathered multitudes of captives for slavery, and the noblest, bravest men for sacrifice, and set out for Bagdad. In the presence of the Caliph and the chief and flower of Saracenic nobility, the most horrible scenes were reënacted in the capital of the Saracens. This only now remains for the Sultan of Turkey, the head of the Mohammedan religion to do, to equal in barbarity the deeds of Bogha the tyrant; and perhaps this alone will rouse all Christendom, viz: Drive the miserable and starving remnants left in his eastern provinces in chains to Constantinople and repeat in the eyes of all Europe the awful crimes with which in the blazing light of modern civilization he has darkened the face of all the East.

The Caliph gave these hapless victims but one alternative—the only alternative Islam ever offers when it has the power, viz: either to renounce Christianity and embrace Islamism, or be put to torture and to death. We shall learn what torture is when we come to rehearse in your tingling ears the devilish cruelties under which upwards of sixty thousand Armenians have perished within the last few months.

Many outwardly renounced Christianity as the sight of the prolonged tortures lacerated their hearts and smote them with weakness. Many others, more firm, gloriously died in defence and confirmation of their faith.