The 13 Armenian villages of the sancak had been founded at the turn of the 17th century.[1] According to the Ottoman census of 1914, they had a total Armenian population of 25,380, whereas the statistics of the Armenian Patriarchate at Constantinople mention a higher figure of 28,629. Most of the sancak’s Armenians were Turkophone, unlike the Armenian population of the sancaks of Izmit and Bursa.[2]