Following the Hamidian massacres, the seizure of the Ottoman Bank by Armenian revolutionaries later that year, apparently a naive plea for Western intervention on behalf of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, contributed to stoking Hamidian persecution of Armenians.
In 1909, as the authority of the nascent Young Turk government splintered, Abdul Hamid II briefly regained his sultanate with a populist appeal to Islamism.