home | publications | my photos | historical pictures | travel snap shots | monuments | 19th century sources | research tools | links | contact
H.F.B. Lynch, "Armenia. Travels and Studies" (1901)
The Hamidiye were Sultan Abdulhamid II's version of the Russian Cossacks. Tribes (mainly Kurds, but also Arabs and some Turkomans) provided cavalry regiments to support the regular army. The Hamidiye gained a very bad reputation for harassing civilians, especially Armenians, as it gave the tribes a kind of blank cheque to do whatever they wanted with the weapons supplied by the government. The formation of the Hamidiye also led to many inter-tribal conflicts.
The members of the hamidiye held their supreme commander, the sultan, in high esteem, but they rarely obeyed orders, let alone those of the powerless local civilian authorities.
Lynch, who took a particular interest in the hamidiye, considered them rather useless in times of war.
Reading suggestions: Janet Klein, The margins of Empire: Kurdish militias in the Ottoman tribal zone (Stanford University Press, 2011)→
left: "Group of Kurd Hamidiyeh cavalry", picture taken in Karakilise (currently Ağrı, capital of Ağrı→ province).
below: "Hamidiyeh Cavalry at Gumgum" (presently Varto, district of Muş province)
Hamidiye regiments