Armenian Christianity — the Mekhitarists and the Catholic Patriarchate

Mekhitar of Sebaste founded a religious congregation in 1701 with a purpose as much scholarly as devotional. To gather, edit and print the Armenian inheritance for a people scattered across empires. Driven out of Ottoman territory, he and his monks were given the small island of San Lazzaro in the Venetian lagoon in 1717, and turned it into one of the great centres of Armenian learning — a press, a library of thousands of manuscripts, and the dictionaries and translations that effectively created modern Armenian lexicography. Meanwhile, inside the Ottoman capital, the growing number of Armenians in communion with Rome created a problem the millet system had no room for. In 1742 Benedict XIV confirmed Abraham Petros I as Catholic patriarch of Cilicia, with a seat established at Bzommar in Mount Lebanon in 1750. The Armenian Apostolic Church remained overwhelmingly the larger body, but from that point there were two Armenian churches, and the argument between them was fought out in the politics of Constantinople.