Bagratid Armenia

A crown from Baghdad

formationDrafted from (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997)

The Armenian kingdom of the Arsacids ended in 428, partitioned between Rome and Persia. What followed was four centuries in which Armenia was a province of somebody: Sasanian, then Byzantine, then, from the 640s, of the caliphate, which governed it through a resident governor at Dvin and through the Armenian noble houses it found already in place.

Those houses are the continuity. The nakharars were hereditary lords holding their own districts with their own fortresses and their own cavalry, and they had been there under the Sasanians and were still there under the Abbasids. One of them, the Bagratuni, made themselves the caliphate's principal intermediary — collecting the tribute, holding the title of prince of Armenia, and being useful.

In 884, with Abbasid authority collapsing in every province at once, the caliph al-Mu'tamid sent Ashot Bagratuni a crown. Constantinople, not wanting to be outbid, sent another.

That is the founding act, and it is worth pausing on how ordinary it was at the time and how odd it looks now. An Armenian Apostolic Christian king, whose church had rejected Chalcedon and was therefore heretical to Constantinople, took his crown from a Muslim caliph in Baghdad, who was content to have a reliable Christian tributary on the Byzantine frontier rather than a province he could no longer garrison.

The kingdom that resulted was less a state than a settlement: the Bagratuni as first among the noble houses, with a title from outside that none of the others could match.

Dvin, Ararat province, Armenia · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Vardouhie Ghazarian · CC BY-SA 4.0

Ani

peakDrafted from (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997)

In 961 Ashot III moved the capital to Ani, a triangular promontory in a bend of the Akhurian gorge with cliffs on two sides, and for the following eighty years his family built on it.

Ani, Kars province, Turkey · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Francesco Bini · CC BY-SA 4.0

The double walls of Smbat II still stand. So do parts of the cathedral, finished around 1001 by an architect named Trdat — who is one of the few named architects of the period anywhere, and who had shortly before been called to Constantinople to rebuild the dome of Hagia Sophia after the earthquake of 989. The church of St Gregory built by Gagik I was a rotunda modelled on the seventh-century cathedral at Zvartnots; the church of the Holy Redeemer held a fragment of the True Cross; the church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents has fresco cycles that are among the best surviving Armenian painting.

Ani, Kars province, Turkey · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Francesco Bini · CC BY-SA 4.0

Ani, Kars province, Turkey · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

The medieval Armenian sources call it the city of a thousand and one churches, which is a formula and not a count. What is not a formula is the scale: Ani in the early eleventh century was one of the larger cities in the world, comparable to Constantinople's rivals rather than to a regional capital, sitting on the trade between the caliphate, Byzantium, the Caucasus and the steppe, with a population that included Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Muslims and Kurds.

It is also, and this belongs on the page, a ruin standing on a closed border. The Akhurian is the frontier between Turkey and Armenia, and it has been shut since 1993; the city can be walked through from the Turkish side and only looked at from the other one.

The building is what the kingdom spent its hundred and sixty years on, and it is the answer to what the kingdom was for. Political weight and cultural output come apart all the time; Ani is the version where the output is architecture and the weight was never there at all. The kingdom that built this could not raise an army capable of defending it, and had been divided among cousins for most of the period the cathedral was going up.

The houses

aside?What aside meansDrafted from (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997)

The Armenian nobility was organised in nakharar houses: hereditary lineages holding defined territories with their own fortresses, their own retainers and their own cavalry, whose obligations to a king were customary rather than granted. The Bagratuni were one of them. So were the Artsruni, who ruled Vaspurakan around Lake Van and took the title of king themselves in 908; so were the Siwni in the south-east, the Mamikonian who had produced Armenia's great military families under the Sasanians, and a dozen more.

Akdamar island, Lake Van, Turkey · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

A king in that system does not create his nobility and cannot dismiss it. He is the senior house, holding a title from outside — which is what the crown from Baghdad was for — and his authority over the others is a negotiation conducted annually. His army is not his: it is what the other houses owe him under an obligation he did not invent and cannot revoke.

The consequence follows directly. A kingdom that is a settlement among houses divides whenever the settlement is renegotiated, and this one divided repeatedly: Vaspurakan under the Artsruni from 908, Kars as a separate Bagratid kingdom from 963, Lori-Tashir from 979, Syunik afterwards. By the eleventh century there were four or five crowned Armenian rulers, all of them related, and none able to command the others. Both of the empires on either side found that useful, and neither of them had to engineer it.

Sanahin, Lori province, Armenia · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: VardanMn · CC BY-SA 4.0

The church is the other permanent institution and it cuts the other way. The Armenian Apostolic Church had rejected the Council of Chalcedon in the sixth century, which made Armenians heretics in Constantinople's eyes and made Byzantine protection something to be feared as much as sought — Byzantine policy in Armenia consistently included pressure towards Chalcedonian conformity, and Armenian resistance to it is a constant of the period. It is why a kingdom squeezed between a caliphate and an empire kept choosing the caliphate: Baghdad wanted tribute, and Constantinople wanted the church.

The kingdom given away

contractionDrafted from (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997)

Basil II spent the early eleventh century pushing the Byzantine frontier east, and he did it by document as much as by campaign.

In 1021 Senekerim Artsruni, king of Vaspurakan, handed his kingdom to the emperor and accepted estates in Cappadocia in exchange, moving himself and a reported fourteen thousand of his people west. The reason he gave was Turkmen raiding, which had begun appearing on the eastern frontier and which nobody yet understood the scale of.

The following year Hovhannes-Smbat of Ani, under Byzantine military pressure and with his own brother Ashot IV disputing the throne, undertook to leave the kingdom to the emperor on his death. He then reigned for another nineteen years.

When he died in 1041 Constantinople produced the document. The Armenians at Ani crowned Gagik II instead; Byzantium invaded, failed twice, then invited the young king to Constantinople to negotiate and did not let him leave. Ani was surrendered in 1045 and Gagik spent the rest of his life on an estate in Cappadocia, where he was eventually murdered.

It was a conquest, and the instrument was a will.

Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice (Ms. gr. 17, fol. 3r) · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Artist unknown · Public domain

The strategic judgement behind it deserves to be stated without hindsight and then with it. Byzantium in the 1020s was the strongest state in the region and had just finished absorbing Bulgaria; annexing the Armenian kingdoms removed a zone of quarrelling client-kings and replaced it with imperial administration and imperial troops. It was coherent policy.

What it also did was dismantle the Armenian noble military system on the frontier and replace it with a Byzantine provincial establishment that was, twenty years later, comprehensively unable to do the job. The Seljuks took Ani in 1064, and Manzikert was in 1071. Everything that happens in Anatolia for the next nine hundred years follows from those seven years.

The keys

contractionDrafted from Lastivertsi, History Regarding the Sufferings Occasioned by Foreign Peoples (1985)

Ani was taken in 1045, and the Armenian who wrote the account had been alive for it. His first sentence about it is the verdict: the city was taken not through warfare but through treachery.

The Byzantine approach was an oath. The emperor's people persuaded the young king Gagik, swearing on the Cross, that the emperor needed only to see him — after which the kingdom would be returned and a document written giving him his land and his city in perpetual inheritance. Aristakes cannot decide why Gagik believed it, and offers three possibilities without choosing: the oaths and the Cross, or immaturity, or a timid nature. What he supplies instead are two proverbs, which is what a man reaches for when he cannot explain something. The wise man swears and the fool believes. The words of liars are as succulent as cheese, and fools gulp them down.

Before going, Gagik gave the keys of the city to the catholicos Petros, and entrusted him with the affairs of the land under great conditions and oaths. He did not listen to Vahram and the nobles who had put him on the throne. He listened to the party advising him to go, and went — in Aristakes' phrase, like a fish caught on the line, or a bird in a trap.

The emperor, on seeing him, forgot the oath and the Cross, kept him, and proposed a trade: give me Ani and take Melitene and the districts round it. Gagik refused, and went on refusing.

What broke was everything underneath him. Grigor, son of Vasak — a man Aristakes plainly admired, sagacious and without equal in theology — worked out that Gagik would never be let home, went to the emperor himself, and handed over the keys of Bjni and the whole of his patrimonial inheritance; he was made a magister and given cities and villages on the Mesopotamian frontier, in writing, under a golden seal, to hold from generation to generation until the end of time. The leading citizens of Ani, seeing the king detained, began considering which neighbouring ruler to hand the city to — a prince of Dvin, or the king of Abkhazia. And the catholicos, understanding that the city was going to be given to somebody, wrote to the Byzantine official at Samosata with a question: find out what the emperor will give us in return if I surrender the city and the other strongholds of this land.

The emperor, Aristakes records without comment and with complete precision, satisfied him with treasures and authority. And thus did they rule Ani, and the entire land.

Ani, Kars province, Turkey · Lastivertsi, History Regarding the Sufferings Occasioned by Foreign Peoples (1985) · Photograph: Francesco Bini · CC BY-SA 4.0

He then sets the two settlements side by side, which is the cruellest thing in the chapter. The emperor, out of compassion, gave Gagik the place he asked for, which was greatly inferior in value to Ani or to the lands he had lost. The catholicos, from whom they had taken the city, they recompensed with thanks and rewards.

The administration that followed did what such administrations do. The first Byzantine lieutenant honoured the patriarch extravagantly, subdued the country, and marched on Dvin, where a great many men were killed at the gate — including Vahram, the great prince of Armenia, and his son, which Aristakes says caused the Armenians great mourning. His successor did not honour the patriarch at all, wrote accusing letters about him to the emperor, and got him out of the city with a fabricated order to go and live at Karin.

Nineteen years later the Seljuks came and took Ani by storm, and Aristakes wrote that chapter too. But the kingdom was not there to lose by then. It had been handed over, in pieces, by the men holding the keys, each of whom had asked first what he would be given.

What went to Cilicia

endDrafted from (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997)

Alp Arslan took Ani in 1064 and the city was sacked. Descriptions of it survive in the Armenian and Arabic sources and are not gentle. The Seljuks held it, then granted it to a Kurdish dynasty, the Shaddadids, and Ani spent the rest of its life as a provincial town changing hands until an earthquake and the Timurid period finished it.

What moved was people. Armenian populations had been moving west into Cappadocia since Basil's annexations, in organised transfers that the emperors intended and paid for; after 1064 the movement was flight rather than policy. The Armenian nobility that had held the highland districts dispersed, and a substantial part of it ended up in the Taurus mountains and on the Cilician plain, in country Byzantium held loosely and would shortly hold not at all.

That is where the Rubenids appear — an Armenian noble family connected to the last Bagratid court, established in the Taurus in the 1080s, whose descendants built the kingdom of Cilician Armenia and held it until 1375. It absorbed the remnants of this one, in people and in claim.

Consider what that means for the shape of Armenian history. The Bagratid kingdom ends in 1045 and the Cilician kingdom begins in 1080; they are in different countries, one on the Armenian highland and one on the Mediterranean coast three hundred miles away, with a Seljuk sultanate between them. An Armenian state existed continuously from 884 to 1375, and it did so by moving house.

The highland did not get another one. Ani passed among Shaddadids, Georgians, Mongols and Turkmen; the Armenian church kept its seat there and then moved that too. The next Armenian state on the highland is in 1918.

Ani, Kars province, Turkey · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

A town where fruit was grown

afterlifeDrafted from Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905)

Alp Arslan took Ani in 1064. Three centuries later, when Hamdallah Mustawfi compiled the standard Persian geography of the Ilkhanid world, he had occasion to mention it, and what he wrote is this: Ani, the older capital of Christian Armenia, is a town in the mountains where much fruit is grown.

That is the whole entry.

What is not in the entry

The double walls of Smbat II. The cathedral finished around 1001 by the architect Trdat, who had been called to Constantinople to rebuild the dome of Hagia Sophia after the earthquake of 989. The rotunda of St Gregory modelled on Zvartnots. The frescoes of Tigran Honents. A city that the Armenian sources called the city of a thousand and one churches, on the trade between the caliphate, Byzantium, the Caucasus and the steppe, with Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Muslims and Kurds living in it.

None of that is wrong in Mustawfi's account. It is simply not what the place was any more, and he was writing a gazetteer rather than an elegy. Ani had passed from the Seljuks to the Shaddadids to the Georgians to the Mongols; an earthquake did the rest; and by the fourteenth century it was a place in the hills with orchards, worth one line in a list.

Where the rest of Armenia went, in the same geography

Read on in the same book and the country is all there, under other names, doing other things.

Dvin — Dabil to the Arabs, the seat of the caliphate's governor and the older capital — is a walled town with three gates, larger than Ardabil, where a Friday mosque and a church stand side by side. Muqaddasi says the population was Kurdish and that the Christians had the upper hand. Its woollens, dyed red with the kermes insect, were famous.

Ararat stands over it across the Araxes, and the Muslims called it Jabal al-Harith, the mountain of the ploughman, because they located Noah's ark elsewhere, on Jabal Judi in upper Mesopotamia. Istakhri says both summits were always under snow and neither could be climbed. The people of Dvin cut firewood on the slopes and hunted there, and Muqaddasi reckoned a thousand hamlets lay among the spurs of it.

Ararat plain, Armenia · Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

On Lake Van they caught a herring called tirrikh in enormous numbers, salted it, and sold it as far as Mesopotamia and Khurasan — Yaqut says he bought some of this Armenian salt fish in Balkh, two thousand kilometres away.

The shape of the afterlife

Put those together and the finding is not a melancholy one, or not only.

The kingdom lasted a hundred and sixty-one years and its capital lasted rather less. The country went on for a thousand: farming, dyeing wool, salting fish, cutting wood on Ararat, worshipping in the same church, under Byzantine and Seljuk and Mongol and Turkmen and Ottoman and Persian government in turn, with the Christians having the upper hand in Dvin under a Muslim governor because that is who lived there.

Ani is the ruin and the country is the fruit trees. Both entries are accurate.