A Political Consul in Nineteenth-Century Armenia

Abstract

At the end of 1891 a young British consul called Gerald Fitzmaurice was sent to eastern Anatolia — a remote region of the Ottoman Empire which abutted the Russian and Persian frontiers — as what today might well be called a ‘field diplomat’.¹ An Irish Catholic who at one time had seemed destined for the priesthood, Fitzmaurice had been a member of the elite Levant Consular Service for a little over three years. He was short in build but had a large head topped with red hair. His face was strong and bony with a striking hooked nose, deep-set blue eyes, and a fashionable drooping moustache. Though it did not jar on his listeners, his voice was hoarse, no doubt because he was a great talker and smoked too many cigarettes. A man of high intelligence and exceptional linguistic skills, hard working, resourceful, and self-confident, Fitzmaurice had been the star of his intake into the Levant Service. Following his time at the small training school at Ortakeui on the European edge of the Bosphorus, therefore, he had been grabbed by the British ambassador in Constantinople, Sir William White, to work in his hard-pressed dragomanate. The engine room of the embassy, this contained its Turkish-speaking members — interpreters, political advisers, and intermediaries with the mysterious Ottoman administration.