Ascetics, Missionaries, Lovers: Interconfessional Confrontation and Interaction in Seventeenth Century Ottoman Armenian Eyewitness Narratives

Abstract Seventeenth-century Armenian historiographic accounts, chronicles and diaries demonstrate an increasing prevalence of the first-person narrative over the ‘neutral’ third person and authorial narratives. This provides significant insights into the daily interpersonal, intra-communal and inter-communal relations between different religious and confessional groups within the Ottoman empire. Relying on unedited and understudied written sources, I identified several hermeneutical tools that may be useful to assess the complex dynamics of identity construction that marked the relations of Armenian individuals and groups with other co-existing confessional and religious local communities within and on the northern and eastern fringes of the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the seventeenth century.