 This infuriated the Sultan 'Abdu'l-Hamid II who viewed the small resistance as a threat to his power.In the 1890s, up to 300,000 Armenians had been massacred on the implicit orders of Sultan Hamid, massacres commonly known as the Hamidian massacres.The Armenian Revolutionary Federation sought to stop the murder of Armenians and planned the bank takeover to gain the attention and intervention of world powers.