The series of Abdul Hamid era massacres was launched with the 1894 Sassoun massacres . Armenian peasants refused to pay the Kurdish incremental taxes, a double taxation system imposed on the Armenians by Kurdish chieftains. In 1892, the governor of Mus district in Bitlis province (of which Sassoun was a county) encouraged an Armenian resistance claiming that the Armenians: “Couldn't serve two masters at the same time.”

After the resistance of Sassoun, its governor responded by inciting the local Muslims against the Armenians. Abdul Hamid, in answer, decided to send an army and so he armed groups of Kurdish insurrectionists. The historian Osman Nuri , in the second volume of his three-volume biography of Abdul Hamid, accused Sultans military contingent of “torching and killing many people.” The Eastern zone, and many Armenian populated areas, were affected.

On August 26, 1896, a group of Armenian revolutionaries raided the headquarters of the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul after shooting the guards and seizing more than 140 staff members, in an attempt to gain international attention to the plight of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Mobs of Muslim Turks then massacred tens or hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Abdul Hamid's Private First Secretary wrote in his memoirs about Abdul Hamid that he “decided to pursue a policy of severity and terror against the Armenians, and in order to succeed in this respect he elected the method of dealing them an economic blow ... he ordered they absolutely avoid negotiating or discussing anything with the Armenians and to inflict upon them a decisive strike to settle scores.”

The British ethnographer William Ramsay, who visited the Ottoman empire for his own studies, estimated that from 1894 to 1897, 200,000 Armenians fell victim of those massacres. In 1897, Abdul Hamid finally declared that the Armenian question was closed. Osman Nuri write about the issue: “The mere mention of the word 'reform' irritated him, inciting his criminal instincts.”

Most estimates of the victims run from 80,000 to 300,000; Armenophile Johannes Lepsius estimated less than 89,000 but those figures were incomplete and most probably based on other German figures, like those of Emperor William II, who estimated that up to December 20, 1895, 80,000 Armenians were killed. The British Ambassador White, based on the data submitted to him by British consuls, estimated that up to early December 1895, 100,000 Armenians were killed. The German Foreign ministry operative and Turkophile author, E. Jackh, estimated (by including the 1896 massacres) that 200,000 Armenians were killed, 50,000 expelled and one million pillaged and plundered. The most complete figures covering the entire era from 1894 to 1897 were probably provided by the French historian, Pierre Renouvin , the President of the Commission in charge of assembling and classifying French diplomatic documents, in a postwar volume, based on authenticated documents, provided 250,000 as being the total number of Armenians killed. Armenian estimates run from 250,000 as high as 350,000, while Turkish estimates run from 20,000 to 30,000.

These events are recalled by the Armenians as the "Great Massacres". The Armenians believed the Hamidian measures proved the capacity of the Turkish state to carry out a systematic policy of murder and plunder against a minority population. The formation of Armenian revolutionary groups began roughly around the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 and intensified with the first introduction of Article 166 of the Ottoman Penal code 166, and the raid of Erzerum Cathedral. Article 166 was meant to control the possession of arms, but it was used to target Armenians by restricting them to possess arms. Local Kurdish tribes were armed to attack the defenseless Armenian population. Some diplomats believed that the aim of these groups was to commit massacres so as to incite counter-measures, and to invite "foreign powers to intervene," as Istanbul's British Ambassador Sir Philip Currie observed in March 1894. However, the existence of those revolutionaries was the golden pretext used by Abdhul Hamid, as admitted even by some Turkish authors.

In 1897 as Abdul Hamid announced after the massacres, the Armenian question was closed. Armenian revolutionaries had either been killed, or escaped to Russia. Abdul Hamid closed any Armenian societies and restricted Armenian political movements.