Caucasian Albania

The third country

Drafted from Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (1963)formation

There were three Christian kingdoms in the Caucasus and most accounts carry two. Armenia and Georgia have modern states, modern churches and modern national historiographies to keep them in view. Albania has none of the three, which is the only reason it is unfamiliar.

The name is a Roman and Greek one and has nothing to do with the Balkans. In Armenian it is Aluank; in Arabic and Persian, Arran. The country is the eastern end of the isthmus — the plain between the Kura and the Caucasus mountains, and the Caspian coast running north to the pass at Derbend — which is roughly northern Azerbaijan and southern Daghestan today.

A kingdom is attested there from about the second century BC. Its population was not one people: the classical sources describe a couple of dozen languages, and the modern descendant of the language its literature was written in is Udi, still spoken by a few thousand people in two villages. The royal house was a branch of the Arsacids, as the Armenian one was — which is a fact about the Parthian habit of putting relatives on neighbouring thrones rather than about a shared nationality.

Its history for eight centuries is the history of being between: Rome and Parthia, then Rome and the Sasanians, then Byzantium and the Sasanians, then the Khazars to the north and the Arabs to the south. Toumanoff's book is about what made that survivable, and the answer for all three Caucasian countries is the same: hereditary noble houses holding their own districts with their own retainers, which an empire could conquer and could not remove.

An army raised that way belongs to the men who bring it. It is a poor instrument for a king who wants to do something his nobles dislike, and an exceptionally durable one against an outsider who wants to govern the country, because there is no single thing to capture. It is the standard arrangement across the whole isthmus and it is why there is still an Armenia and a Georgia.

Javanshir

Drafted from Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (1963)peak

The Sasanians abolished the Albanian monarchy in 510 and governed through a marzban, as they had done in Armenia in 428 and would do in Iberia in 580. All three Caucasian crowns were removed by the same empire inside a hundred and fifty years.

In all three the nobility survived, and in Albania it produced a new dynasty. The Mihranids were of Sasanian noble descent, established in the country in the late sixth century, and they took the old Albanian princely title of Arranshah and governed as princes rather than kings.

Javanshir ruled from about 637 to 680, and he came to power in the exact decade the world he had been born into ended. He fought for the Sasanians against the Arabs at Qadisiyya, and watched the empire he had served disappear within five years. What followed was fifteen years of about as exposed a diplomatic position as a small country has ever held.

He submitted to Byzantium and took a title from Constans II. He negotiated with the caliph Mu'awiya and obtained terms — reduced tribute, autonomy, his own church left alone. He fought the Khazars coming down through the Derbend pass, lost, and married a daughter to the khagan to stop them. In a decade and a half he acknowledged three empires and was governed by none of them.

He was assassinated by his own nobles in 680, which is the other permanent feature of a polity built on hereditary houses.

The eulogy composed for him by Davtak the Melodist survives — in Armenian, in the History of the Albanians — and is one of the earliest datable poems in Caucasian literature. It is an acrostic, and it is about a man who kept a country by agreeing with everyone.

The elephant and the parrot

Drafted from Dasxurantsi, History of the Aghuans (2010)contraction

Between about 636 and 680 the prince of Albania kept his country in existence by being personally useful to every power that arrived, one after another, and the history written by his own church records how it was done.

The Sasanian empire went first, and Juanshir helped it go: he fought for it, beat a Persian general badly enough that the man sent the prince of Siwnik to swear a mighty oath and beg for an alliance, and then, reflecting on the decline of the great Persian kingdom, went home to his own district. What came next was Byzantium. He wrote to the emperor Constans as Juanshir, sparapet and prince of Aghuania, together with his vassal land of the East, and got back a treaty, the titles of ex-consul and first patrician, and insignia enough for twelve thousand men to distribute among his own followers. Summoned to meet the emperor in Media, he was taken out of the mourning clothes he was wearing for his wife and dressed in royal robes, and used the moment to ask for a piece of the True Cross, which he got, and for which he then built a church.

Then the Khazars came over the Kur, and he beat them; and in a later winter the king of the Huns invaded with many thousands of cavalry and afterwards wanted to see Juanshir's face. The chronicler dwells on this because of what it meant to his readers: no king of Persia had ever managed to look upon the king of Turkestan in person. Juanshir prostrated himself before the Cross and went, with his retinue, and the king of the Huns came out in a boat to meet him.

The last power to arrive was the caliphate, and here the history is at its most detailed and least comfortable. Juanshir watched Byzantium rendered helpless, became greatly worried about his country, and when the caliph sent messengers with mighty oaths and promises of countless gifts, he prepared magnificent presents and went south. He was received extremely well. The caliph tested his intelligence and concluded, the chronicler says, that of all the lords and leaders of peoples in his service there was none in whom he had such confidence. Juanshir went a second time, and this time was seated at the caliph's own table and asked to conduct the peace negotiations with the envoys who had come from Constantinople — which he did in a way the Byzantines were grateful for afterwards, because he spent the talks advising the caliph in their favour.

He was sent home with an elephant, a well-trained and gigantic beast out of India, and with a parrot. He was also offered the principality of Siwnik and pressed to take Atrpatakan across the river as well, and he refused both: the history says he preferred to devote his thoughts to helping his own country. The one thing he did ask for was a reduction in the tribute, which weighed heavily on his realm, and he got it, and came home.

What finished him was none of the three empires. In about 680, back at Partav after a summer in the mountains, he was persuaded out into the palace gardens at the first hour of night by a man of his own household whose father's house he had loaded with honours and gifts. The guards were at the gate, unconcerned, some asleep. The prince had a sword and no shield. In the middle of the garden he heard the clink of armour worn under the other man's robe and understood, and turned back towards the palace without saying anything, and was cut down from behind. He got his sword into the assassin's shield and could not pull it out. He lived several days, long enough to tell his sons what he was leaving each of them, and died of the wounds.

The chronicler's grief is the grief of a country that knew what it had lost: the whole land assembled and mourned him, and the mob armed itself, and there was no small amount of disturbance in Aghuania. There was nobody to inherit the arrangement, because the arrangement was not an institution. It was one man that three empires happened to trust at the same time, which is not a constitutional position and cannot be handed on.

An alphabet recovered from under other people's writing

Drafted from Mahé, Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi: Series Ibero-Caucasica 2 (2008)aside?What aside means

Caucasian Albania had its own alphabet, of fifty-two letters, made in the fifth century — the Armenian tradition credits Mesrop Mashtots, who had shortly before made the Armenian one, working with a local priest. It was made for the same reason the Armenian and Georgian alphabets were: a newly Christian country needs scripture in a language its congregation understands.

Then the church was absorbed into the Armenian one in 705, the manuscripts stopped being copied, and the script was lost completely. Not partially — for about a thousand years no one could read it and no substantial text in it was known to exist.

It came back in three stages, and the manner of the recovery is worth setting out, because it is the evidence and not an anecdote about it.

In 1937 a Georgian scholar, Ilia Abuladze, found a list of alphabets in a fifteenth-century Armenian manuscript, one of them labelled Albanian. That established the letterforms and gave nothing to read.

In 1975 a fire at St Catherine's monastery on Sinai led to the discovery of a walled-up room containing manuscripts nobody had catalogued. Among them were Georgian palimpsests — parchment scraped and written over — and in 1996 Zaza Aleksidze identified the erased under-layer of two of them as Caucasian Albanian.

Reading it took another decade, an international project and multispectral imaging, and the result was published in 2008: a lectionary and a Gospel of John, the oldest and effectively the only Caucasian Albanian texts in existence. They established that the language is ancestral to modern Udi, which is spoken by a few thousand people in two villages in Azerbaijan and Georgia.

The Albanian alphabet has no descendants. It was adapted for no other language, inherited by no successor church, and it died with the institution that commissioned it. That is not the same as saying nobody has looked — scholarship has now looked very hard indeed, with multispectral cameras, and the answer is none.

Compare the South Arabian alphabet of Saba', devised for another frontier kingdom, which is the ancestor of the script Ethiopia writes in this morning. Two alphabets made for two Christian kingdoms on the edge of two empires. One is on shop signs. The other had to be read off the parts of a page that somebody failed to scrape clean.

Arran

Drafted from Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (1963)end

The Arabs took the country in the 650s and did not abolish it. The Mihranid princes went on governing under Arab suzerainty for another century and a half, paying tribute and keeping their houses and their church — the same terms a dozen frontier principalities from the Caspian to the Atlas were living on.

Two things ended it, at different times and in quite different registers.

In 705 the Albanian catholicosate was subordinated to the Armenian one under Arab authority. For a country whose distinctness rested on having its own church, with its own scripture in its own script, that is the decisive act. Whatever the princes still governed, there was no longer an Albanian Christianity for a country to be about. The manuscripts stopped.

And then the line ended, in a way its own history records almost in passing.

Who killed the last one, and who got the country

Movses Dasxuranci gives it in a single sentence dropped into a year's worth of raids and locusts. The lord Nerseh son of Philippe killed Varaz-Trdat son of Step'annos, slaughtered his son on his mother's breast, and took everything he owned. Dasxuranci adds the identification, because by his time it needed one: this Varaz-Trdat was of the Mihranid family, which had inherited Albania from father to son, and he was the eighth ruler after Varaz-Grigor, the first prince.

That is the end of the princely line, around 822. It is not the end of the country's own government, which is the part usually left out.

Within about fifteen years the principality had passed to another Albanian house. Sahl i Smbatean, of the Eranshahik family, captured Babak — the leader of the great Khurramite revolt, whom the caliphate had spent twenty years failing to catch — and delivered him to the caliph. His reward, in Dasxuranci's words, was sovereignty over Armenia, Georgia and Albania, to rule authoritatively and regally over all three. His descendants held Khachen, in the highland country east of Lake Sevan, and the Albanian catholicosate went on existing in that corner long after the church as a whole had been put under Armenian authority.

So the succession is not nothing. It is a native house receiving its own country back from Baghdad as payment for a police operation, holding it in a mountain district, under a name almost nobody outside the region used.

What continued, and under what name

The lowland went on as Arran: a province with a large Christian population, which was gradually reclassified as Armenian because after 705 there was no other category available for it, fought over by whichever dynasty was strongest — eventually the Shaddadids, who were Kurds and had nothing to do with any of this.

Armenia and Georgia lost their crowns earlier than Albania did, and both got them back. Albania kept a princely house in the mountains and lost its church, and the church was the thing that could not be recovered. A country whose distinctness had consisted of a liturgy in its own script, with the script gone, had nothing left to be distinct with.

What it left is a language spoken today in two villages, a body of Armenian-language historical writing about itself, and fifty-two letters that had to be recovered from a fire in a monastery on the wrong continent.

The Lord's day market

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

Barda'a — Partav to the Albanians, the royal seat and the catholicos' see — was still the largest city in that part of the world three hundred years after there was anybody left to call it Albanian.

Ibn Hawkal describes it in the tenth century as a league across, by far the biggest place in the region, built square, with a fortress, standing three leagues from the Kura on the bank of its tributary the Tharthur. In the Kura they caught a fish called shur-mahi, salt-fish, which was salted and sold on to every town round about. The district was called al-Andarab, and it was a day's journey of continuous gardens and orchards in every direction, producing chestnuts, filberts and figs. They reared silkworms. The Friday mosque had a roof carried on wooden pillars and walls of burnt brick under stucco, and there were a great many bathhouses, and in Umayyad times the provincial treasury was kept in the town.

The name of the market

And every Sunday there was a market outside the town at the Gate of the Kurds, and the market ran for a league along the road.

It was called, locally, al-Kurki. The word is Greek. It is kyriakos, of the Lord — the ordinary Christian word for Sunday — and it had come through into local speech so completely that, the geographers say, Sunday itself was known there as the day of the Kurki.

Set that beside the dates. The Albanian church was dissolved into the Armenian one in 705. The alphabet stopped being copied and was lost so thoroughly that nobody could read a letter of it for a thousand years. The last prince was killed around 822. And two centuries after that, in a country under Muslim government, the biggest market of the week was named with a Greek Christian word for the Lord's day, and the day was named after the market.

Nobody planned that. Nobody was defending it. It is what is left when an institution goes and the habits it created do not.

And then even that went

Barda'a did not last either. By the time Yaqut was writing in the thirteenth century it had already fallen into ruin, though Mustawfi a century later still calls it a town of some size on the Tharthur. The capital of Arran moved south to Baylakan, of which nothing at all now remains above ground.

Baylakan's end is worth recording for the manner of it. In 1220 the Mongols came, and finding no stones anywhere in the surrounding plain for their mangonels, they cut down the plane trees, sawed the trunks into blocks, and shot those at the walls and the houses. Then they plundered and burned it. The population came back afterwards and rebuilt, and the place recovered; Timur took it at the end of the fourteenth century and rebuilt it again, and dug it a canal six leagues long from the Aras.

Now there is nothing there, and Le Strange notes that not even the ruins appear on the Russian ordnance map.

So: a kingdom whose script had to be read out from under other writing, whose church was absorbed, whose capital fell into ruin, and whose second capital was knocked down with tree trunks and has left no mark on a map. What survived longest was the name of a market, and it was in the wrong language.