Karabakh

Karabakh is a geographic region in southwestern Azerbaijan and eastern Armenia, extending from the highlands of the Lesser Caucasus down to the lowlands between the rivers Kura and Aras. It is divided into three regions: Highland Karabakh, Lowland Karabakh, and the eastern slopes of the Zangezur Mountains.

Etymology

The name, transliterated from the Russian version of the word Карабах, derives from the Azerbaijani Qarabağ, which is generally believed to be a compound of the Turkic word kara and the Iranian word bagh, literally meaning "black garden." However, there are some other hypotheses.
Russian Orientalist Vladimir Minorsky believed that the name possibly connected to an extinct Turkic tribe of the same name. By comparison, there are similar toponyms in Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan.
According to Iranian linguist Abdolali Karang, kara could have derived from kaleh or kala, which means "large" in the Harzani dialect of the extinct Iranian Old Azeri language. The Iranian-Azerbaijani historian Ahmad Kasravi also speaks of the translation of kara as "large" and not "black." The kara prefix has also been used for other nearby regions and landmarks, such as Karadagh referring to a mountain range, and Karakilise referring to the largest church complex in its area, built mainly with white stone, the Monastery of Saint Thaddeus. In the sense of "large," Karakilise would translate to "large church," and Karabakh would translate to "large garden."
Another theory, proposed by Armenian historian Bagrat Ulubabyan, is that, along with the "large" translation of kara, the bagh component was derived from the nearby canton called Baghk, which at some point was part of Melikdoms of Karabakh within modern-day Karabakh – Dizak and the Kingdom of Syunik. In this sense, Karabakh would translate to "Greater Baghk."
The placename is first mentioned in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in The Georgian Chronicles, and in Persian sources. The name became common after the 1230s when the region was conquered by the Mongols. The first time the name was mentioned in an Armenian source was in the fifteenth century, in Thomas of Metsoph's History of Tamerlane and His Successors.

Geography

Karabakh is a landlocked region located in the southeast of Armenia and the west of Azerbaijan. There is currently no official designation for what constitutes the whole of Karabakh. Historically, the maximum extent of what could be considered Karabakh was during the existence of the Karabakh Khanate in the 18th century, which extended from the Zangezur Mountains in the west, following eastwards along the Aras river to the point where it meets with the Kura river in the Kur-Araz Lowland. Following the Kura river north, it stretched as far as what is today the Mingachevir reservoir before turning back to the Zangezur Mountains through the Murov Mountains. However, when not referring to the territory covered by the Karabakh Khanate, the northern regions are often excluded. During the Russian Empire, the eastern lowlands where the Kura and Aras rivers meet were also excluded, but most pre-Elisabethpol maps include that region in Karabakh.

Zangezur

Highlands or mountainous region

Lowlands or steppe

History

Antiquity

The region today referred to as Karabakh, which was populated with various Caucasian tribes, is believed to have been conquered by the Kingdom of Armenia in the 2nd century BC and organized as parts of the Artsakh, Utik and the southern regions of Syunik provinces. However, it is possible that the region had earlier been part of the Satrapy of Armenia under the Orontid dynasty from as early as the 4th century BC. After the partition of Armenia by Rome and Persia in 387 AD, Artsakh and Utik became a part of the Caucasian Albanian satrapy of Sassanian Persia, while Syunik remained in Armenia.

Middle Ages

The Arab invasions later led to the rise of several Armenian princes who came to establish their dominance in the region. Centuries of constant warfare on the Armenian Plateau forced many Armenians, including those in the Karabakh region, to emigrate and settle elsewhere. During the period of Mongol domination, a great number of Armenians left Lowland Karabakh and sought refuge in the mountainous heights of the region.
File:Shah Abbas the Great hunting in Karabakh, Safavid Iran, 17th century.jpg|thumb|right|Persian miniature depicting Shah Abbas the Great hunting in Karabakh. From an illustrated history created in 17th-century Safavid Iran
From the 11th century onwards, Karabakh became home to numerous Oghuz Turkic tribes, the ancestors of the modern Azeris, who stuck to the nomadic way of life, circulating between the winter pastures in Karabakh lowlands and the summer pastures in Karabakh highlands. These tribes dominated the region, and were key allies of the Safavid Empire, which ruled over Karabakh from the 16th to early 18th century.
In the fifteenth century, the German traveler Johann Schiltberger visited Lowland Karabakh and described it as a large and beautiful plain in Armenia, ruled by Muslims. Highland Karabakh from 821 until the early 19th century passed under the hands of a number of states, including the Abbasid Caliphate, Bagratid Armenia, the Mongol Ilkhanate and Jalayirid Sultanates, the Turkic Kara Koyunlu, Ak Koyunlu, and Safavid Iran. Armenian princes of the times ruled as vassal territories by the Armenian House of Khachen and its several lines, the latter Melikdoms of Karabakh. The Safavid Shah Tahmasp I appointed the family of Shahverdi Sultan, who hailed from the Ziad-oglu branch of the Qajar tribe, as governors of Karabakh. It was also invaded and ruled by Ottoman Empire between 1578–1605 and again between 1723 and 1736, as they briefly conquered it during the Ottoman-Safavid War of 1578-1590 and during the disintegration of Safavid Iran, respectively. In 1747, Panah Ali Khan, a local Turkic chieftain from the Javanshir clan, seized control of the region after the death of the Persian ruler Nader Shah, and both Lower Karabakh and Highland Karabakh comprised the new Karabakh Khanate. Qajar Iran reestablished rule over the region several years later.

Early Modern Age

In 1813, under the terms of the Treaty of Gulistan, the region of Karabakh was lost by Iran to the Russian Empire. Under Russian rule, Karabakh was a region with an area of 13,600 km², with Shusha as its most prominent city. Its population consisted of Armenians and Muslims. The Russians conducted a census in 1823 and had tallied the number of villages and assessed the tax basis of the entire Karabakh khanate, which also included Lowland Karabakh. It is probable that the Armenians formed the majority of the population of Eastern Armenia at the turn of the seventeenth century, but following Shah Abbas I's massive relocation of Armenians in 1604–05 their numbers decreased markedly, as they eventually became a minority among their Muslim neighbors.
According to the statistics of the initial survey carried out by the Russians in 1823 and an official one published in 1836, Highland Karabakh was found almost overwhelmingly Armenian in population. In contrast, the population of the Karabakh khanate, taken as a whole, was largely made up of Muslims. A decade after the Russian annexation of the region, many Armenians who had fled Karabakh during the reign of Ibrahim Khalil Khan and settled in Yerevan, Ganja, and parts of Georgia were repatriated to their villages, many of which had been left derelict. An additional 279 Armenian families were settled in the villages of Ghapan and Meghri in Syunik. Though some of the returning Armenians wished to settle in Karabakh, they were told by Russian authorities that there was no room for them. This took place at the same time as many of the region's Muslims departed for the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran. The population of Karabakh, according to the official returns of 1832, consisted of 13,965 Muslim and 1,491 Armenian families, besides some Nestorian Christians and Romani people. The limited population was ascribed to the frequent wars and emigration of many Muslim families to Iran since the region's subjection to Russia, although many Armenians were induced by the Russian government, after the Treaty of Turkmenchay, to emigrate from Iran to Karabakh.
Censuses and surveys, which were conducted in winter, did not count tens of thousands Azeri nomads, who stayed in the lowlands during winter and were migrating en masse to the summer pastures in Mountainous Karabakh during the warmer months. Seasonal demographic changes were significant, as e.g. in 1845 in historic Karabakh the population included 30,000 Armenians and 62,000 Muslims, of whom approximately 50,000 were nomads, who circulated between Lowland and Mountainous Karabakh.
In 1828 the Karabakh khanate was dissolved and in 1840 it was absorbed into the Kaspijskaya oblast, and subsequently, in 1846, made a part of Shemakha Governorate. In 1876 it was made a part of the Elisabethpol Governorate, an administrative arrangement which remained in place until the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917.

Modern era

Independence and Soviet era

After the dissolution of Russian Empire Karabakh, Zangezur and Nakhchivan were disputed between newly established republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Fighting between two republics broke out. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, British troops occupied the South Caucasus. The British command affirmed Khosrov bey Sultanov as provisional governor-general of Karabakh and Zangezur, pending a final decision at the Paris Peace Conference. The local council representing the Karabakh Armenian community consented to this decision until, in August 1919, the region was made subject to Azerbaijan military jurisdiction in advance of Azerbaijan's prospective annexation of Karabakh. Karabakh Armenians accused Azerbaijan of violating the letter of the 1919 agreement and, with the support of emissaries from Armenia, in March 1920 launched an ill-fated rebellion in Shusha. The Azerbaijani forces quickly suppressed the uprising, massacring and expelling the Armenian population of Shusha and establishing control over the main centers of Karabakh, although fighting in the countryside of Mountainous Karabakh continued. In April 1920, the Red Army occupied Azerbaijan and in December, Armenia. The issue of Karabakh's status was taken up by the Soviet authorities. In 1921 after the heavy trilateral negotiations, the Bolsheviks decided that Karabakh would remain within the borders of the new Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.
In 1923, the Armenian-inhabited parts of Mountainous Karabakh were made a part of the newly established Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, an administrative entity within the Azerbaijan SSR. According to the first census of this administrative unit the population was 94% Armenian, however, this census did not count a considerable Azeri nomadic population. The NKAO consisted of the Armenian-dominated part of historical Mountainous Karabakh and many Azeri villages of this region were administratively excluded from the former.
During the Soviet period, several attempts were made by the authorities of the Armenian SSR to unite it with the NKAO but these proposals never found any support in Moscow.