Abdulhamid II—often referred to as simply Hamid—was also the perpetrator of the first wave of mass killings that were the lead-up to the Armenian genocide. The slaughter sparked international outrage and he was branded “The Red Sultan.”

“The Great Assassin,” former British Prime Minister William Gladstone also called him.

But the sultan of the show Payitaht Abdülhamid is not monstrous. He is magnificent, a symbol of greatness to those who yearn for a return to the time of empire.

“Witnessing the struggle of the country with Sultan Abdülhamid Khan, the series promising to be presented as a gift to the children of a powerful nation who is carried on day today and to our future history, ‘Struggle!’” reads a Google translation of a review of the series in AKSAM News.

The actual facts of the Armenian genocide and Abdul Hamid’s role in it are put forth in the book Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. Henry Morgenthau—grandfather of legendary Manhattan prosecutor Robert Morgenthau and noted historian Barbara Tuchman—served as the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. His memoir describes Abdul Hamid as “the man who was chiefly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians.”

“Abdul Hamid apparently thought that there was only one way of ridding Turkey of the Armenian problem—and that was to rid her of the Armenians,” Morgenthau writes. “The physical destruction of 2,000,000 men, women, and children by massacres, organized and directed by the state, seemed to be the one sure way of forestalling the further disruption of the Turkish Empire.”

Morgenthau goes on, “For nearly thirty years Turkey gave the world an illustration of government by massacre. We in Europe and America heard of these events when they reached especially monstrous proportions, as they did in 1895-96, when nearly 200,000 Armenians were most atrociously done to death. But through all these years the existence of the Armenians was one continuous nightmare. Their property was stolen, their men were murdered, their women were ravished, their young girls were kidnapped and forced to live in Turkish harems.”

Morgenthau further reports, “Yet Abdul Hamid was not able to accomplish his full purpose. Had he had his will, he would have massacred the whole nation in one hideous orgy.

“He attempted to exterminate the Armenians in 1895 and 1896, but found certain insuperable obstructions to his scheme. Chief of these were England, France, and Russia… It became apparent that unless the Sultan desisted, England, France, and Russia would intervene and the Sultan well knew, that, in case this intervention took place, such remnants of Turkey as had survived earlier partitions would disappear. Thus, Abdul Hamid had to abandon his satanic enterprise of destroying a whole race by murder, yet Armenia continued to suffer the slow agony of pitiless persecution.”

Hamid was deposed during the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. The Young Turks moved to institute a multi-party democracy and spoke of tolerance and justice. These noble notions did not extend to the Armenians.

“The Young Turk regime, despite its promises of universal brotherhood, brought no respite to the Armenians,” Morgenthau writes. “Much as [the Young Turks] admired the Mohammedan conquerors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they stupidly believed that these great warriors had made one fatal mistake, for they had had it in their power completely to obliterate the Christian populations and had neglected to do so. This policy in their opinion was a fatal error of statesmanship and explained all the woes from which Turkey has suffered in modern times.”

The Young Turks decided it was unnecessary to murder all the Armenians.

“The most beautiful and healthy Armenian girls could be taken, converted forcibly to Mohammedanism, and made the wives or concubines of devout followers of the Prophet. Their children would then automatically become Moslems and so strengthen the empire,” Morgenthau writes. “Armenian boys of tender years could be taken into Turkish families and be brought up in ignorance of the fact that they were anything but Moslems. These were about the only elements, however, that could make any valuable contributions to the new Turkey which was now being planned. Since all precautions must be taken against the development of a new generation of Armenians, it would be necessary to kill outright all men who were in their prime and thus capable of propagating the accursed species. Old men and women formed no great danger to the future of Turkey, for they had already fulfilled their natural function of leaving descendants; still they were nuisances and therefore should be disposed of.”

Thanks to an alliance with Germany, the Young Turks felt free to commit genocide without outside interference.

“Unlike Abdul Hamid, the Young Turks found themselves in a position where they could carry out this holy enterprise,” Morgenthau writes. “Great Britain, France, and Russia had stood in the way of their predecessor. But now these obstacles had been removed.”

And, mass murder was often accompanied by state-sanctioned tortures such as crucifixion and evisceration with red-hot pincers.

“One day I was discussing these proceedings with a responsible Turkish official, who was describing the tortures inflicted,” Morgenthau writes. “He made no secret of the fact that the Government had instigated them, and, like all Turks of the official classes, he enthusiastically approved this treatment of the detested race. This official told me that all these details were matters of nightly discussion at the headquarters of the Union and Progress Committee. Each new method of inflicting pain was hailed as a splendid discovery, and the regular attendants were constantly ransacking their brains in the effort to devise some new torment. He told me that they even delved into the records of the Spanish Inquisition and other historic institutions of torture and adopted all the suggestions found there.”

One of the champion torturers was Djevdet Bey, the governor of Van province in the East Anatolia region.

“Djevdet was generally known as ‘The Horseshoer,’” Morgenthau writes. “This connoisseur in torture had invented what was perhaps the masterpiece of all—that of nailing horse shoes to the feet of his Armenian victims.”

Djevdet issued a written order:

“The Armenians must be exterminated. If any Muslim protect a Christian, first, his house shall be burned; then the Christian killed before his eyes, and then his [the Moslem’s] family and himself.”

At one point, some of surviving Armenians of Van took a stand against a vastly superior contingent of the Turkish army.

“The whole Armenian fighting force consisted of only 1,500 men; they had only 300 rifles and a most inadequate supply of ammunition, while Djevdet had an army of 5,000 men, completely equipped and supplied. Yet the Armenians fought with the utmost heroism and skill; they had little chance of holding off their enemies indefinitely, but they knew that a Russian army was fighting its way to Van and their utmost hope was that they would be able to defy the besiegers until these Russians arrived.”

Morgenthau makes particular mention of, “The self-sacrificing energy of the Armenian children, the self-sacrificing zeal of the American missionaries, especially Doctor Ussher and his wife and Miss Grace H. Knapp, and the thousand other circumstances that made this terrible month one of the most glorious pages in modern Armenian history. The wonderful thing about it is that the Armenians triumphed. After nearly five weeks of sleepless fighting, the Russian army suddenly appeared and the Turks fled into the surrounding country, where they found appeasement for their anger by further massacres of unprotected Armenian villagers. Doctor Ussher, the American medical missionary whose hospital at Van was destroyed by bombardment, is the authority for the statement that, after driving off the Turks, the Russians began to collect and to cremate the bodies of Armenians who had been murdered in the province, with the result that 55,000 bodies were burned.”

A producer might well be inspired by the tale of Doctor Clarence Ussher and his wife and Miss Grace H. Knapp and their hospital in Van. Stockwell says that the Turkish producers he dealt with “wanted the story to take place at the mission in Van.” The one in The Ottoman Lieutenant is staffed by two doctors, a world-weary one played by Kingsley and a young idealist played by Hartnett. The younger doctor is sympathetic enough to the Armenians that he lets them store weapons there.

Even so, the first Armenians the audience encounters in the movie are bandits who steal a load of medical supplies that the leading lady is bringing from Philadelphia. And, save for the death march toward the end, most of the other Armenians are portrayed as insurgents who initiate the violence.

In The Ottoman Lieutenant, the Russians are not saviors, but brutish bad guys. The ultimate villain in this movie is war itself and the suggestion is that it is responsible for atrocities of the time. There is no indication that the killing was the result of government-instituted genocide. Nor is there a suggestion that the Turkish government used a supposed uprising as a pretext for mass murder.

The Promise stays true to history, including an encounter between Morgenthau and Mehmet Talaat, known as Talaat Pasha, one of the triumvirate then ruling Turkey. Morgenthau writes in his memoir, “One day Talaat made what was perhaps the most astonishing request I had ever heard. The New York Life Insurance Company and the Equitable Life of New York had for years done considerable business among the Armenians. The extent to which this people insured their lives was merely another indication of their thrifty habits. ‘I wish,’ Talaat now said, ‘that you would get the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders. They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money. It of course all escheats to the State. The Government is the beneficiary now. Will you do so?’”

Morgenthau further reports of Talaat, “His antagonism to the Armenians seemed to increase as their sufferings increased. One day, discussing a particular Armenian, I told Talaat that he was mistaken in regarding this man as an enemy of the Turks; that in reality he was their friend. ‘No Armenian,’ replied Talaat, ‘can be our friend after what we have done to them.’”

The Promise also features a love triangle—this one involving an Armenian medical student, an Armenian woman who has been living in Paris, and an American reporter. And there are remarkable similarities of setting and plot and imagery. Both movies are set in the same region of Turkey. Both feature a chase scene with a group of fleeing innocents, crammed into the back of a truck in The Ottoman Lieutenant, in the back of a wagon in The Promise. Both have an underwater host of a major character slipping down into a watery grave in the final minutes.

But all that only makes the divergence in historical narrative more apparent. A genocide denier would likely point out that The Promise was produced by Survival Pictures, founded by billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, who was the son of Armenian immigrants. The Survival logo features a four-petaled forget-me-not that symbolizes the directions the surviving Armenians scattered. Kerkorian died in 2015, before The Promise was completed.

The truth is still the truth and if you believe Morgenthau and other eminently reliable sources, it is decidedly on the side of The Promise, no matter who bankrolled it. A Holocaust movie would not likely be challenged simply because its primary backer was Jewish.