ARMENIA: The Survival of a Nation

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Prologue

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1. Theatre of Perpetual War

From the earliest period to the present hour, Armenia has been the theatre of perpetual war – Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. 47.

Millennia ago, as the earth was cooling, parts of its crust had hardened while the rest was still contracting inwards. The regions created by this primal solidification include the vast plains of European Russia and Siberia. The force exerted by the pressure of these immense tracts of unyielding material upon the rest of the shrinking surface threw out the Asiatic mountain chains, as layer was folded upon layer. In two areas, the Hindu Kush and Armenia, the folding was particularly intense. Here the outward thrust from the north was met by a degree of resistance from the south; the mountain ranges were most constricted, and vividly articulated.

The distinctive nature of Armenia's landscape developed from this massive folding of the earth's crust. Her most characteristic physical aspect is of volcanic tablelands, broken up by soaring mountain systems topped by peaks of which Ararat is the highest. Many of the tablelands are over 1,500 metres above sea level; and the soil itself is rich, black laval earth. The folding of the crust too gave Armenia the specific direction of her mountain chains, for since they reared up as a result of pressure from the north meeting resistance from the south, they are spread out in a direction from west to east; so that, although her mountains give the impression of a fortress, it is a fortress exposed on those two sides. Throughout Armenia's history the most serious invasions and the heaviest disruption have almost always come from east or west.

If the conqueror was tempted to invade, the climate did not encourage him to linger. Long, bitterly cold winters result from the extreme elevation of the plateaux, with snow lying for as long as eight months. On several occasions the Armenian winter has trapped rash generals: Lucullus was caught in 68 BC, an Ottoman Turkish army was forced to desist from trying to seize Yerevan from the Persians in 1616, and, most notably, the Turkish war minister, Enver Pasha, taking personal command, was defeated at Sarikamish in 1914–15 less by the Russian army than by the cruel weather of the Armenian highlands. The intense cold has passed into legend, too. The Turkish traveller Evliya Chelebi relates how a dervish, asked whether there was any summer in Erzerum, replied:

By God, I remained there eleven months and nine and twenty days, the people said that summer was coming, but I did not see it. It happened, however, that a cat, which ran over the roofs of the houses, became froze there while in the act of running, and remained so for the space of nine months, when the spring arriving, the cat began to thaw, cried 'Miau!' and fell down.¹

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When winter eventually cracks and slides, a beautiful landscape unfolds in many parts of Armenia. Macdonald Kinneir, writing in a Theocritan vein, described the country thus in 1813:

The country is mountainous, diversified with extensive plains and beautiful vallies, and the inhabitants are blessed not only with the necessaries but even the luxuries of life. Almost every kind of grain is cultivated with success, and the gardens, with which the towns and villages are surrounded, yield abundance of the most delicious fruits, such as grapes, olives, oranges, peaches, apricots, nectarines, mulberries, plumbs, apples, pears, walnuts and melons. Wax and honey are procured from the mountains and raw-silk, hemp and cotton are exported to Constantinople and Russia. The mineral productions are silver, copper, loadstone, saltpetre and bitumen. The country is intersected by innumerable streams of water, the majority of which contribute towards the formation of three great rivers, the Tigris, Euphrates and Araxes.²

This remarkable land has been continuously inhabited by settled, civilised men since before the fourteenth century BC, when the Hittite annals refer to small kingdoms there. It was not, however, until the ninth century BC that the first unitary state emerged there. This was the kingdom of Urartu, whose first king, Aramé or Aramu, established his capital at 'Arzasku', a site that has not been established. His successor moved his capital to Van, where a royal inscription in cuneiform script can be seen today. By the following century the state was extensive and prosperous; and in 782 BC its king, Argishti, built the palace of Erebuni, just outside modern Yerevan, from which, indeed, the capital of the Armenian SSR derives its name.

An invasion by Sargon II of Assyria in 714 BC brought to an end the expansive and wealthy period of Urartu. The kingdom was, however, able to continue until the end of the seventh century BC. In 612 the Medes (of northern Persia), hitherto tributaries of Assyria, overthrew their imperial masters and seized the reins of empire for themselves; two or three years later they sacked the Urartu capital, and incorporated the state into their own.

The same imperial fate greeted the Medes as they had inflicted an Assyria: in 550 BC their empire collapsed, overthrown by its subject Persians, led by the renowned monarch, Cyrus I.

It is at about this time that we first hear of the Armenians in the highlands, amid the people of Urartu. Who they were, where they came from and how they established their power there are questions still open to speculation. Herodotus says that they settled there from Phrygia (western Asia Minor). Other theories hold that they originated further east – that they were indeed native people who perhaps extended their power locally. Their language shows that they were an Indo–European people, kinsmen of most of the Europeans, and of the Persians. By 520 the Urartu people and the Armenians

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were – according to one interpretation of a passage of Herodotus – both paying tribute to the Persians as members of different satrapies, or autonomous regions. It is possible that the Armenians, like the Persians and before them the Medes, were a subject people who had staged a coup against their former masters.

Besides their mysterious origin, the name which they call themselves poses a problem. To this day an Armenian calls himself 'Hai'; Armenia is 'Haiastan'. Hai is traditionally derived from Haik, the heroic patriarch of Armenia, a great archer, who slew the titan Bel in an epic battle beside lake Van. Less colourfully, the word might come from Khayasha, the eastern region of the Hittite empire (pre- 1200 BC). Even more uncertain is the origin of our word 'Armenia', for which no one has produced more than tentative clues.

When Darius the Great became ruler of Persia in 522 BC, he recorded a series of victories on the rock of Behistun (modern Bisitun, in north-west Iran). One of the satrapies of his empire mentioned there is called 'Armina'. From that time until Persia's destruction by Alexander the Great two centuries later, Armenia was part of the Achaemenid Persian empire, and as such flourished and prospered. There is a lively account of Achaemenid Armenia in Xenophon's Anabasis; Xenophon, who passed through the country in 401–400 BC, describes the plenty that he found in the villages (and the local barley wine, which the villagers used to drink through a straw). A few years after Xenophon had led his Ten Thousand through Armenia, the local ruler Orontes was able to set himself up as virtually independent of the Persian empire, and to establish himself as the founder of a dynasty. Nevertheless neither he nor his successors really threw off the empires that surrounded them; a pattern began to emerge, of an Armenia with a wide measure of autonomy within the orbit of whichever great power happened to be in the ascendant.

Alexander the Great's victory over Persia (331 BC) meant an influx of Greek civilisation into Armenia, which had hitherto drawn its culture from the east. This process continued after the death of Alexander (323), an event which signalled the division of his empire among his generals. Armenia became part of the Seleucid empire, an empire suffused with the glow of late Hellenism but whose authority was so shaky that the dynasty which Orontes had founded was able to elevate itself into a royal family.

Monarchy in Armenia had certain features characteristic to it which help explain problems which habitually threatened Armenian political stability. There was no concept of absolute monarchy, or of 'divine right' in Armenia. The monarch emerged from the specific social and geographical conditions of the country. Since Urartian times Armenia's characteristic ruling elite had been the class of dynastic princes; in the words of Professor Cyril Toumanoff, they

were older than kingship, which derived from them. Their principalities were self-sufficient and self-determined, being territorialized tribes and clans of old. And their rights over these states were fully sovereign, including execu-

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Map 1. Armenia in Ancient and Medieval Times

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tive, judiciary, legislative and fiscal independence, control of their own armed forces, and, from the princes' point of view at least, the right to negotiate with foreign powers.³

Thus the Armenian king should never be seen as more than the first among equals.

Seleucid power was undermined by the raw, martial values of Rome after the battle of Magnesia, 190 BC. At about the same time the Armenian Orontid royal dynasty was overthrown by a local ruler named Artaxias (Artashes). His new power was confirmed by the Romans, and he instigated a vigorous period of Armenian history.

Within Persia herself a new power had emerged less than a century after the empire of Darius had been brought to its knees by Alexander. This was Parthia, destined to become the great rival of Rome. Armenia, linked by treaty with Rome but geographically closer to Parthia, was forced to exercise diplomatic skill – a skill which became necessary to her if she was to maintain her autonomy, but which did not stop her seizing the initiative when the moment was opportune in the first century BC.

Parthia at this time was weak. Rome was troubled by internal instability, and with an uncertain foreign policy; she was also unpopular as an imperial power in Asia. The Armenian king, Tigran II (95–55 BC), forged an alliance with Mithradates, the king of Pontus, on the southern shore of the Black Sea.

After a series of victories against Rome, Parthia and the Seleucids, Tigran united all the territories inhabited by Armenians, and added northern Syria and Mesopotamia, as well as Cilicia and Phoenicia to his domains; by 70 BC he had an empire stretching from the Caspian to the Mediterranean. He built himself a new capital, Tigranakert (Armenian: 'built by Tigran'), and adopted the Parthian title of 'King of kings'. The site of Tigranakert cannot be determined with accuracy, but it is probably the modern town of Silvan, to the north-east of Diyarbekir.

But to Rome the massive, if haphazard, empire of Tigran posed a threat; and in the autumn of 69 BC a Roman army, under the command of Lucullus, laid siege to Tigranakert and captured it. (In the following year his forces pursued Tigran, who had fled with his ally Mithradates to the Eastern Armenian capital of Artashat, or Artaxata; but when the winter supervened the Roman legions were forced to withdraw amid frost and sickness.)

In 66 BC Tigran surrendered to Pompey. The brief Armenian experiment in empire-building was over. Armenia reverted to her position as a semi-autonomous state between an eastern and a western empire – in this case, Rome and Parthia. Within Armenia the Artaxiad dynasty spluttered and died out in AD 1.

During a period of Parthian dominance, a new and important dynasty was established in Armenia – one whose name lingers to this day in the memory of Armenians. This was the Arshakuni (or Arsacid) dynasty, AD 53–428. Its first

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representative, King Tiridates (Trdat) I, was the brother of the Parthian monarch. On his gaining the Armenian throne, Rome sensed that Parthia was gaining too great an ascendancy in Armenia, and an army was despatched under Corbulo, whose varying fortunes are vividly described by Tacitus. Eventually the parties compromised; a negotiated settlement was reached and in AD 66 Tiridates was crowned in Rome by Nero.

The balance achieved at this time was destroyed by the emperor Trajan, who, eager to display his military prowess and yearning for victories, attacked Parthia in AD 113 and killed the king of her ally, Armenia. The vigour with which Trajan and his successors conducted their campaigns against Parthia was their own undoing, for it led to the decline of Parthia and its overthrow in AD 326 by the militant and the nationalist Sasanid dynasty.

Sasanid Persia was to prove a serious and implacable foe for Armenia, and to lead her to revitalise her association with Rome. The bases of Sasanid ideology were the re-establishment of the borders of the Achaemenids and the enforcement of the Zoroastrian religion. Armenia and Rome grew close again as a result of Sasanid attempts to bring Armenia wholly within the Persian sphere of influence, and to supplant the deeply held Armenian paganism (which was quite similar to the Greco–Roman type) with Zoroastrian reverence for the 'sacred elements', earth, air, fire and water.

For over 150 years, with the exception of a forty-year period of respite, Armenia was a 'theatre of perpetual war'. The great powers appeared to have lost any ability to compromise. Ultimately, Armenia suffered the pernicious expediency of unyielding superpowers: partition. In AD 387 the country was divided between Rome and Persia, along a line extending roughly from – to give their modern names – Erzerum to Moush. Sasanid Persia received the lion's share. But in the meantime an event of far greater and longer-term significance had occurred in Armenia: the conversion of the country to Christianity.

Christianity had reached Armenia quite early on; tradition relates that Bartholomew (from the Twelve Apostles) and Thaddeus were the first to preach the gospel in Armenia. Their preaching would appear to have taken root, since there were martyrs during the persecutions of the second and third centuries. The Armenian Church can thus be said to be of Apostolic origin, and to have grown up independently of the Greek Church, an important point in the conflicts of succeeding centuries. The date of Armenia's actual conversion to Christianity is usually put at 301; estimates vary between 286 and 314. The actual tale of the conversion, according to Armenian Church tradition, is interesting.

Tiridates III was restored to his throne by the Roman emperor in 287; he thereupon learnt that his father, King Khosrov I, had been assassinated by a member of the Parthian noble family. In the turmoil of the subsequent blood feud Gregory, a young member of this family, was taken to Cappadocia, where he grew up among Christians. Gregory later returned to Armenia, and began preaching the gospel. The king learnt of his return and also found out that he

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was related to the murderer of his father. He ordered Gregory to be tortured and cast into a dungeon. There the Parthian nobleman remained for fifteen years.

One day, the Armenian king spied a young girl who awoke his lust; on her rejecting his advances, he killed her and her companions, 39 in number. Then, according to the chronicler Agathangelos:

losing all contact with humanity, the king took on the appearance of a wild boar, and dwelt among the beasts. He went to a place covered in reeds, where he munched the grass like a wild animal, and rolled in the fields entirely naked.⁴

In other words, like Ferdinand in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, he was afflicted with lycanthropy (albeit of a porcine variety).

Tiridates' sister told him that she believed that none but Gregory could cure him. The prisoner was released from his dungeon, whereupon he healed the king, and converted him. The conversion of the Armenian nobility followed, and Christianity was proclaimed the state religion.

In the long run, the adoption of Christianity had the effect of making Armenia look westward and northward rather than eastward; but at the time it was not a sign of political identification with any power bloc. Rome was at the time still pagan. Christianity had reached Armenia as an Asiatic, Palestinian religion, not as the teachings of missionaries from Europe.

One of the immediate effects of the official adoption of Christianity was to create political division within the country. Tiridates himself was killed while out hunting and the weakness of his successors led to an increase of dissension among the nobility.

As if in defiance of the great-power partition of Armenia in AD 387, and of the feuding nobility, within two decades there had occurred an event which was to unite the Armenians at a profound level. This was the invention in 404 of the Armenian alphabet by the scribe Mesrop-Mashtots. His alphabet precisely reflected the sounds of the Armenian language; it was written from left to right, initially with 36 letters. Armenian rapidly progressed from being a marketplace vernacular – for Greek and Syriac were the languages of scholarship and of the liturgy – to the status of a literary tongue. The alphabet is still in use today, and has unquestionably assisted the survival of the Armenians as a people.

Despite the inner strength that possession of an alphabet gave them, divided Armenia was without clear political direction. The policy of the Byzantine empire – as the dominions of Rome are known from about this time – was to weaken its portion of Armenia, and it enacted a number of measures to that end. In Persian Armenia the damage was self-inflicted, for in 428 the turbulent nobility petitioned the Persian king of kings to abolish their own monarchy – an 'act of political suicide', in the words of Sir Percy Sykes.⁵ Eastern Armenia was thenceforth a province of the Sasanid empire.

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Within a few years the Persians took advantage of Armenia's inner weakness, and launched a campaign to stamp out Christianity there and replace it by Zoroastrianism. Under this common threat the princes and nobility of Armenia rallied, and in 451 under the leadership of Vardan Mamikonian, the Armenians heroically faced the Persians at Avarayr in defence of their faith. Heavily outnumbered, they were defeated; Vardan was killed. But the Armenians stubbornly refused to take the verdict of the battlefield as final, and with the accession of a more conciliatory Persian monarch, an agreement was reached in 485 whereby Armenia was granted liberty of Christian worship.

During the fifth century, the entire Christian world was racked by a series of theological disputes. The point at issue was the nature of Christ: was he both fully God and fully man and, if so, how were the divinity and humanity intermixed?

Nowadays, these questions are usually dismissed by westerners (who seldom bother to think them out) as absurd trifles – 'How many angles can balance on the head of a pin?' But a moment's reflection will show that such disputes are fundamental. The conflict over the nature of Christ concerned the most central teaching of Christianity: the redemption of mankind by the crucifixion. To a profoundly Christian thinking society like that of the fifth century, the significance of this is obvious.

At that time a number of theologians – principally in Antioch – were stressing the practical, working aspects of Christ the man, and separating them from his divine nature. Christ was seen as a human temple in which God dwelt. Now, the danger to redemption posed by this doctrine (which gained the name of Nestorianism) is that it is a short journey thence to believing that it was not really God who died on the cross – it was only the man-part of Christ.

This doctrine was condemned at the council of Ephesus in 431. But the there was a rebound. Another school of theology grew prominent, holding that the divine and human natures of Christ were so close and intermixed that they virtually made up a third nature, neither fully human nor fully divine. This was known as monophysitism. Again, redemption was threatened, since the conditions for its efficacy are that Christ who died be both fully human and fully divine.

The council of Chalcedon was called in 451, to condemn this heresy. Political considerations – the rivalry between Constantinople and Alexandria – meant that the formula adopted swung back considerably towards the two-nature doctrine. The Armenians could not be present, since they were fighting at Avarayr for the very existence of their faith. When they heard of its conclusions they rejected them (as did the bishops of Alexandria), and a schism resulted which endures to this day. But at the same time they rejected the extreme monophysite formula – by which the two natures together become a third; their theology could perhaps be best described as mildly monophysite. The political importance of the schism was that on the one hand it prevented any moves towards the dissolution of Armenian identity within

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Byzantium, but on the other it left the Armenians exposed in the east, at the edge of the civilised world.

Throughout the sixth century the ferocious duel of empires continued; almost the only thing that brought the great powers together was revolt in Armenia, in whose suppression both empires collaborated.⁶ In the seventh century, the imperial struggle assumed apocalyptic proportions: the Persians advanced right through Asia Minor, as far as the eastern shore of the Bosphorus; in the south they captured Jerusalem, and carried away the most holy relic of the True Cross in triumph to Persia (614). But within a few years Byzantium had counter-attacked, and with immense effort hurled the Persians back: the relic of the True Cross was restored to Jerusalem in 629.

Yet hardly had the two imperial giants had tended their wounds than a new conquering force emerged, which was to make their own vast struggles irrelevant. This was Islam. By the middle of the seventh century Islamic armies captured Palestine, Syria and Egypt from Byzantium, and in a series of battles as remarkable as those of Alexander they shattered the Persian empire. After four hundred years the empire of the magi was no more.

Islam, with which the Armenians were to be in contact for the next thirteen centuries, was already a political system by the time the armies swept out of Arabia against the exhausted frames of Rome and Persia. The basis of this system is the Koran, and the Hadith (traditions of the Prophet). Unlike the Bible, the Koran contains a number of political and quasi-political directives, concerning the organisation of a state, and the Hadith point and clarify them. One of the matters dealt with is the position of non-Muslims. This developed from the Prophet Muhammad's own relations with Jews and Christians. As is well known, Islam drew heavily upon Judaism and Christianity, and Muhammad held that these religions, in their purest form, were Islam ('submission', to the will of God), but had become corrupted by their turbulent adherents. The basis for future relations with Jews and Christians who refused to accept Muhammad's message were two treaties that he concluded, one with the Jews of Khaybar and the other with Christians of Najran (both in Arabia). In essence they held that the communities could keep their faith and most of their possessions on payment of a tax.⁷

This policy paid off – in a literal sense – when the Islamic armies conquered Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia, with their vast Christian populations. Non-Muslim monotheists became known as 'protected peoples' (ahl al-dhimma, or dhimmis), and gained that status by payment of their taxes. They were exempt from military service, since only a Muslim could draw his sword in the defence of Islam. Their own civil and criminal courts they were permitted to keep; these were to be run by their spiritual leaders.⁸ As the conquering armies advanced, the populations were in theory given the choice of embracing Islam, of paying the taxes and becoming protected people, or death.

But in practice the alternatives were a good deal cruder. Armies are seldom enlightened with new principles overnight, and the enthusiasm of the soldiery

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for destroying political structures often carried over into their behaviour towards the people themselves.

The Arabs appeared in Armenia first in 640. In 642 they captured the capital, Dvin, and many of the inhabitants were killed. Armenia's struggle was now to maintain her autonomy on the one hand from Byzantium and on the other from the Arab caliphate. It might be imagined that Armenia would automatically side with Christian Byzantium; but the 'Christianness' of Byzantium was largely irrelevant: to Armenia it was a bureaucratic empire which strove to impose its own doctrines on the people and destroy the Armenian feudal structure. The more flexible nature of the caliphate was recognised by many of the Armenian princes, and under the leadership of Theodore Rshtuni a peace was negotiated with Mu'awiya I in 653–4 which recognised Armenia as an autonomous tributary state.⁹

But Islamic rule exhibited a weather-cock inconsistency. Fifty years after the Armenians had concluded a tolerable peace with the Arabs, many of the Armenian nobility were lured to Nakhichevan and slaughtered. A large number of Armenian families fled to the domains of Byzantium as a result. Tragic as this was, it had the rather ironic benefit to the country of narrowing down the field of quarrelsome nobility within Armenia, so that when an opportunity arose, there were fewer families to dispute the leadership. Arab imperial oppression of Armenia was heavy, too, in the century following the Abbasid seizure of the caliphate (750); yet this too contained the possibility of revival. In the words of Professor Toumanoff:

The Saracen insistence of collecting taxes and tribute in money, not in kind, led to an economic revival. The nobility and peasantry found themselves obliged to abandon their autarkic, rural economy and to produce a surplus of raw and manufactured products for sale. Thus commerce and urban economy, stifled during the upheavals of the Sassanid and Saracen domination, recovered; the middle class revived; new cities like Ani, Kars, Balesh (Bitlis), Artanuji, rose beside the old, such as Artaxata, Dvin, Theodosiopolis, Tiflis, Partav (Bardha'a). Caucasia once again became the nexus of trade-routes connecting Europe and Asia, and the prosperity of the medieval period was founded.¹⁰

This splendid medieval period, in which life was good, the economy flourishing and the arts prolific, can be said to begin in 861, when the caliph conferred the title of 'prince of princes' upon Ashot Bagratuni. The Bagratunis (or Bagratids) were among the most skilful diplomatists of medieval times; they understood imperial power, and perceived the constraints that it imposed on them. They held no illusions about Christian Byzantium; rather the reverse – many of them were scrupulously loyal to the caliph. In 885 the Armenian nobility, acting with unanimity forged by the Catholicos, the

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supreme head of the Church, petitioned the caliph to recognise Ashot as king. The caliph, al- Mu'tamid, sent him a royal crown, and fitting regalia.

'After that', says the historian John Catholicos.

Ashot did many fine things: he reestablished order in all the country under his control; he rebuilt family palaces, towns, buildings, and market towns; he reestablished order in the mountainous districts, in the hot valleys, the pleasant plains, all over the countryside, amid fields and sheepfolds; he improved and adorned meadows, vines and gardens; and he neglected nothing that could be useful or necessary to his realm.¹¹

But the deadly spectre of civil strife had not been laid low, and before the end of the century a rival family, the Artsruni, was intriguing with the Muslim emirs of Azerbaijan^* against the Bagratunis. Iron determination and attentive diplomatic skill were needed to secure the continued existence of the kingdom, and it was 922 before the Bagratid king, Ashot II, was able to assume the title 'king of kings', asserting his paramountcy over the other Caucasian monarchs.

A glittering century followed, when life and love blossomed amid the fertile Armenian uplands, when art and poetry flowed like wine. Of the Bagratid capital, Ani, the historian Aristakes of Laztivert wrote:

Princes with joyous countenances sat on the princely thrones; they were clad in brilliant colours and looked like spring gardens. One heard only gay words and songs. The sound of flutes, of cymbals, and of other instruments filled one's heart with the comfort of great joy.¹²

Even today Ani – so massively built, as its walls testify, yet now derelict, forlorn and utterly abandoned after the devastations of savage invasion and earthquake – is a monument to the architecture of the Bagratid period, which was its chief glory. Today, of the many churches, eight remain. Among them is the magnificent cathedral, which was built between 989 and 1001; technically its structure is far ahead of anything that was built in Europe at that date, but what most delights the traveller on visiting it are perhaps details such as the superbly harmonious blind arcading and the triangular niches.^† Ani's other churches, too, as well as the Shepherd's Chapel, outside the city walls, bear witness to the vitality of the culture.

* Almost the only part of the Caucasus in which Muslim power had established itself in a durable way, together with a Muslim population, was Caucasian Albania (modern Soviet Azerbaijan). The Sajid emirs had built a durable state – which was far from being a compliant instrument of the caliphate; it seems to have valued a certain lawless independence above all else. The existence of this Muslim state from quite early on is one reason for Azerbaijan today being a Muslim region, whereas Armenia and Georgia are Christian.

† The architect, Tiridates, was held in such high esteem throughout the eastern Christian world that when the dome of Sancta Sophia in Constantinople was damaged by an earthquake, he was summoned to repair it.

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One other architectural marvel, not at Ani and of a slightly earlier date, cannot pass unremarked. It too shows the Armenian genius in this field, and bears witness to the astonishing artistic fertility of the period. The church of the Holy Cross (915–21) on the island of Aghtamar, in lake Van, lies within the domain of the rival Artsrunis. The outstanding feature of this church is its exterior, which is entirely decorated with sculpted friezes and biblical scenes in relief. The combination of figures of great spiritual dignity and abundant, fruitful vines and lively beasts is uniquely Armenian. These sculptures are a landmark in the religious art – whether Christian or Muslim – in the Near East.

In the early eleventh century Byzantine policy towards Armenia became frankly expansionist and annexationist. The Armenian nobility were bribed to cede their domains to the empire and were rewarded with lands firmly within its borders (mostly in Cappadocia). Mass transfers of the Armenian population took place. Armenian rulers showed themselves to be divisive and eager for short-term gains. The stability achieved by the Bagratids of Ani in the preceding century was rapidly lost. At the same time Armenia was threatened from other directions: the Muslim dynasts from Azerbaijan invaded and – the edge of a shadow that was to lengthen over all Armenia – bands of Seljuk Turks appeared in the Van region.

But principally at this time it was Byzantine pressure that weakened the foundations of Armenia. One by one the smaller independent principalities were extinguished, and the Bagratid king found himself fighting – as had his forerunner five centuries earlier – against the combined forces of west and east, which on this occasion were those of Byzantium and the emir of Dvin, whom the Byzantine emperor had incited against the Armenians.

At this time Byzantium – in the uncertain hands of Constantine IX Monomachus – was almost devoid of any policy except military conquest and annexation. After a few years of flattery, persuasion and force the Bagratid king of Ani was lured into abdication, and his kingdom incorporated into the empire in 1045. The same fate awaited the king of Kars, and other Armenian kinglets. However, to quote Professor Toumanoff again:

If the annexation was a crime, the government of Constantine IX now committed an error that was plus qu'un crime. Needing money, they replaced the feudal levy-in-mass obligations by heavy taxation. Armenia was not only leaderless, but also disarmed.¹³

The Seljuk Turks were rapidly able to overrun Armenia, now fatally weakened by Byzantium. In 1064 they attacked and destroyed Ani. (according to one account, the Turks had a dagger in either hand, and a third held between their teeth.) Too late, the Byzantine empire realised the folly of its policy of weakening vital frontier provinces and after a series of attempts to defeat the Turks the Byzantines themselves were catastrophically defeated at Manazkert in 1071. The emperor himself was taken prisoner. Thereafter all of

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Armenia came under Seljuk Turkish control. Many Armenians fled, becoming pioneers of the world-wide dispersion of Armenians. With them they were careful to take their language, their alphabet and their faith.

In the centuries that followed, the history of Armenia is of almost uninterrupted woe and disaster. Her social organisation was wrecked, her people gradually rendered leaderless except for the clergy. Although northern Armenia revived somewhat during the expansion of Georgia in its golden age – especially under Queen Tamar (1184–1212) – the decline that followed was irreversible.

Perhaps the greatest disaster was the Mongol invasion (1236). Although individual Armenians were esteemed at the court of the Great Khan, the sheer destruction that the Mongol invasions had wrought left the country open to nomadic tribesmen, who flocked in when Mongol power waned.

The Mongol Ilkhanate became Muslim in 1302. Armenia came under the control of Ghazan Khan, ruling from Tabriz. Although this monarch reorganised his domains, and established a sound civil service, ant the local level the adoption of Islam meant a deterioration of the position of Armenians vis-à-vis their Muslim neighbours. How low the Armenians sank in the following decades – deprived of their hereditary lands, heavily taxed, and subject to unstable, capricious rule – can be gauged from the eloquent testimony given in colophons of the ecclesiastical manuscripts copied at the time. These colophons described the circumstances in which the manuscript was copied, and often included an account of the current political situation. A collection of these has been published¹⁴ and the picture that they present is of a people struggling to maintain their very existence in their land. 'In bitter and grievous times' and 'in diminishing days and waning times' are phrases that run like leitmotifs throughout this collection. All the great feudal families, who had negotiated Armenia to its carefully balanced position between the great powers, had virtually disappeared, and the later ones (such as the Orbelians) were losing even the little authority that remained to them. Moreover the quality of the imperial dynasties that surrounded her was vastly inferior to anything Armenia had ever been ruled by before. The Seljuks, Mongols and (especially) the Turkoman tribesmen who ruled Armenia in these dark centuries had nowhere near the level of culture or sophistication of any of the past empires, stretching right back to Achaemenid Persia. It was indeed tragic that as Europe was beginning her renaissance, Armenia was sunk beneath semi-barbarian conquest.

The most violent and destructive conqueror of Armenia was Timur-lenk (Tamerlane). His campaigns of 1386–8 in north Persia and the Caucasus brought devastation and death on a scale hitherto unknown. Yet neither Timur (who died in 1405) nor his successors could be said to have ruled Armenia or what remained of it; power lay rather with two Turkoman dynasties, the 'White Rams' (Ak-Koyunlu), based at Diyarbekir, and the 'Black Rams' (Kara-Koyunlu), based at Van. Both dynasties emerged as sovereign in 1378,

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Their power was to a great extent circumscribed by their relations with their powerful eastern neighbour, the empire that Timur left; but as this empire declined into mediocrity, so local dynasts were able to strengthen their authority. Ultimately, too, their day was spent: the Black rams were vanquished by Uzun ('Tall') Hasan of the White Rams in 1469, and the White Rams were themselves extinguished by the new, dynamic power of Safavid Persia, when they confronted Shah Ismail in battle at Sharur, Armenia, in 1502.

With the rise of Safavid Persia we reach the dawn of the modern era in Armenia. In the thickening darkness of the preceding centuries perhaps the only glimmer of light was the return of the Catholicos, the head of the Church, to Echmiadzin^* in 1441 – and this was not to prove its benefit to the Armenian nation as a whole for several centuries. The colophons mentioned above are eloquent testimony to the utter collapse of Armenian social organisation as it had evolved over the preceding two millennia. All that remained was the clergy – often mercilessly harassed – and the people.

Within the medieval period Armenia – perhaps uniquely – shifted her sovereign power some six or seven hundred miles to the south-east. During the tenth century a large number of Armenians had been settled in Cilicia by the Byzantines, following the Byzantine victories over the Muslims. Others followed, as conditions worsened in Greater Armenia and as the Byzantine emperors encouraged them to move. The new arrivals in Cilicia were dominated by two families, Hetum and, later, Rupen. By 1080 Prince Rupen considered himself strong enough to declare his independence from the Byzantine empire. Cilician Armenia^† was to last until 1375. Diplomatically, Cilician Armenia showed the same scepticism towards her two powerful neighbours, the Byzantine empire and the Muslim caliphate. Her leaders sought strange alliances with powers beyond her immediate neighbours, apparently not realising that great powers remain great powers even when not proximate, entertain the same coercive tendencies, and are subject to the same whimsical changes of policy. One such diplomatic infatuation was for the Mongol Court, by which Cilician Armenia hoped to outflank the caliphate. Even if we disregard the immense distance from Cilicia to the court of the Great Khan at Karakorum, this proved to be a political error when the Mongols adopted Islam in 1302. The other alliance that Cilicia struck up was with the Crusaders. Predating that with the Mongols, it had the same motive:

* Political circumstances had compelled the catholicosate to move with the moving fortunes of the Armenian people: thus although established at Echmiadzin (which means 'the Decent of the Only-Begotten') in 301, it had moved to Dvin in 485, to Aghtamar in 927, to Argina (near Ani) in 947, to Ani itself in 992. Thence the ecclesiastical office had moved to Cilicia.

† Sometimes called Lesser Armenia, a term which more usually denotes the area of Armenia north-west of the Euphrates, whose main town is Sebastia (Sivas). Confusingly, this latter territory is also known as Lower, or Upper, Armenia.

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to outflank the neighbouring big power. Although this exploit certainly helped Cilician Armenia to establish itself in the late eleventh century, in the longer term it meant that the state was denied more than a brief period of existence. Moreover, the energetic courting of the Franks left a legacy of division within the Armenian community; for the Europeans were as Chalcedonianly 'orthodox' as the Byzantines (although they were less intelligent, and unable to understand the finer theological points), and hence were as keen as Byzantium on making Armenians apostasise from their Mother Church and accept the authority of Rome.

Nevertheless, throughout the twelfth century the Armenians steadily consolidated their position amid the craggy mountains and fertile plains of their new homeland, and in 1198 Prince Leo II was crowned king in the cathedral of Tarsus, receiving his crown, significantly from Cardinal Conrad of Wittelsbach, archbishop of Mainz.

Yet already the fortunes of the Crusader states were waning. Islam has assumed a more militant garb with the establishment of the Zangid dynasty in Mosul in 1127, and the overthrow of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt in 1171 by Saladin. From there this renowned Kurdish soldier turned his attention to Syria and Palestine, seizing the former in 1174 and going on to reduce the Frankish kingdoms in the Holy Land. Jerusalem was recaptured in 1187, and by Saladin’s death in 1193 all that was left to the Franks in Palestine was a narrow coastal strip. Within about fifty years the Mamluks, Saladin’s successors in Egypt, were pressing at the southern approaches of Cilicia. Temporarily checked by the Mongols, they were in control of Syria by 1260.

Much of the twelfth and early thirteenth century was, despite the darkening omens to the south of her, a period of stability and cultural development for Cilician Armenia: the epoch of Kings Leo (1186–1219) and Hetum I (1226–69) has been called Armenia’s Silver Age. Economically Cilicia flourished as the main entrepôt for east–west trade, exporting spice, perfume and silk to Europe. Culturally, perhaps most notable was the religious poetry of Catholicos Nerses IV Shnorhali (‘the Gracious’), the manuscript illuminations of Toros Roslin, and the medical advances of Mëkhitar Heratsi. But in the late thirteenth century, as repeated assaults were launched upon Cilician Armenia from Seljuks in the north and the Mamluks to the south, the country’s prosperity evaporated and political nightmares materialised into reality.

Cilicia itself was a prey to internal dissension during the fourteenth century; rival members of the ruling family struggled for the throne, and pro- and anti-Latin factions fought for supremacy. The fruits of Cilician Armenia’s dependence on the Franks were harvested, with the papal insistence that the Armenian Church submit to the authority of Rome. Some of the leaders complied, giving us the origins of Catholic Armenians today, but the mass of the people remained loyal to their own Apostolic Church.

In 1342 the strife intensified, when the Armenian throne passed, through the

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female line, to Guy de Lusignan. Armenia was now a Frankish state. Two years later, the populace, violently demonstrating their rejection of the Latin connection and clamouring for a policy of peace with the Muslims, murdered Guy and 300 Frankish knights.

But his successors were unable to create a new policy, and by 1373, when the last king of Armenia, Leo V (VI), ascended the throne, Cilicia was little more than the vicinity of Sis and Anazarbus. Sis itself was captured by the Mamluks in April 1375; there appears to have been dissension to the last, with, according to the historian Jean Dardel, the Catholicos and his supporters preferring the temporal domination of a Muslim to the spiritual supremacy of the Pope¹⁵ – which, in the context of the fourteenth century, was a perfectly acceptable attitude and by no means ‘traitorous’, as later historians, bemused by the seductive mythology of the nation-state, have branded it.

The end of Armenian political sovereignty in Cilicia did not, of course, mean the end of the Armenian population there. Although, with the end of the Crusader states, the Levantine Franks virtually disappeared from history, the Armenians of Cilicia, a state which so resembled the Frankish states, demonstrated again their people’s stubborn ability to survive. Many remained as peasants and migrant workers in the Cilician plain until this century; a few stuck firm to their mountain fastnesses, maintaining a turbulent and defiant independence until the catastrophes during and after the first world war. Even today, one or two Armenian villages remain, which could be said to be the legacy of Cilician Armenia, notably Kessab, in northern Syria. In view of the chasm of disaster between the medieval period and the present day, it is astonishing that anything at all has endured.

Notes

1. Evliya Efendi, Narrative of Travels …, trans. J. von Hammer (London, 1850), vol. II, p. 114.

2. J. M. Kinneir, A Geographical Memoir of the Persian Empire (London, 1813), pp. 319–20.

3. C. Toumanoff, 'Armenia and Georgia', Cambridge Medieval History, vol. IV (1966), Part I, p. 596.

4. Agathangelos, in V. Langlois, Collection des historiens anciens et modernes de l’Arménie…(Paris, 1867), vol. I, p. 150.

5. Sir Percy Sykes, A History of Persia (London, 1915 and reprints), vol. I, p. 468.

6. Toumanoff, ‘Armenia and Georgia’, p. 604.

7. M. Rodinson, Mohammed (London, 1971), pp. 254, 271.

8. Avedis Sanjian, The Armenian Communities in Syria under Ottoman Dominion (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 5.

9. Toumanoff, 'Armenia and Georgia', p. 605.

10. Ibid., p. 606.

11. Jean VI (Catholicos), Histoire d’Arménie …, trans. M. J. St. Martin (Paris, 1841), p. 125.

12. Quoted in S. Der Nersessian, Armenia and the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), p. 10.

13. Toumanoff, ‘Armenia and Georgia’, p. 620.

14. Avedis Sanjian, Colophons of Armenian Manuscripts, 1301–1480: a Source for Middle Eastern History (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).

15. Jean Dardel, ‘Chronique d’Arménie’, Recueil des historiens des croisades (Paris, 1906).

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