Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia

Armenia, six hundred miles away

formationDrafted from (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013)

There was an Armenian kingdom in the thirteenth century and it was six hundred miles from Armenia.

The Armenian highlands were annexed by Byzantium in the 1040s and overrun by the Turks after Manzikert in 1071, and the population moved. A great many went south-west into Cilicia, the well-watered plain between the Taurus and the Mediterranean, where Armenian communities and Byzantine garrison commanders of Armenian origin were already established. In 1080 a lord named Ruben took a castle in the mountains above it and refused to acknowledge anybody, and his descendants spent a century taking the passes, the plain and the ports.

Gülek, Mersin, Turkey · (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013) · Photograph: Volker Höhfeld · CC BY-SA 4.0

What they built was an Armenian national state — the Armenian church and the Armenian language at the centre of it, the nobility Armenian, the chronicles Armenian — on ground that had never been Armenia, constructed by refugees within two generations of arriving. Very few displaced populations manage that. Most of them are absorbed, and the ones that are not usually spend centuries as a minority under somebody else's crown.

Its position made it necessary to everybody. Cilicia holds the Cilician Gates, the pass through the Taurus by which armies enter Syria from Anatolia, and its port at Ayas was where the overland route from Tabriz reached the Mediterranean. Crusading armies came through in 1097 and every crusade afterwards; Byzantine emperors campaigned to recover it; Genoese and Venetian merchants took quarters at the port.

The Rubenids played that position for a century with considerable skill, and in 1198 it paid: a refugee lordship was acknowledged as a kingdom by the Latin and the Greek worlds at once, and it was paid for in the currency the Armenian church valued most.

Carried off to Constantinople

formationDrafted from Edessa, Chronicle (2017)

Ruben's own descendants ruled as mountain lords rather than crowned kings for more than a century after his death, and the contemporary Armenian chronicler Matthew of Edessa - a priest writing from nearby Edessa through the worst of it - recorded their succession as a running story of alliance, betrayal and, twice within a single generation, outright capture by a hostile Byzantine emperor.

A house built one prince at a time

Ruben was succeeded by his son Kostandin, and Kostandin by his own son Toros I, each generation extending Rubenid authority further out of the mountains and into the Cilician plain by the same methods - marriage alliances with the crusader states to the south, careful distance from whichever Byzantine or Turkish power was strongest that year, and outright war against rival Armenian and Byzantine lords still holding fortresses in the region. Toros allied closely enough with the crusader principality of Antioch that he fought alongside its army against the Muslim states to the east; his own brother Levon succeeded him and pushed Rubenid authority further still, seizing Byzantine-held towns in the plain that no mountain lord before him had controlled.

An emperor who came in person

That expansion provoked the response Byzantium had been building toward for years. In July 1137 the emperor John II Komnenos marched into Cilicia in person, besieged Levon's own city of Anazarbus for thirty-five days under sustained catapult fire, and took it when the defenders judged further resistance hopeless. John carried off everything of value to Constantinople - the treasury, an icon of the Mother of God the Armenians particularly venerated, and Levon himself along with his sons and wife, all transported across the sea into Byzantine custody. Levon died there, a prisoner in the city that had once been the crusaders' own unwitting benefactor at Nicaea forty years before, never seeing Cilicia again.

Kızkalesi, Mersin, Turkey · Edessa, Chronicle (2017) · Photograph: Zeynel Cebeci · CC BY-SA 4.0

A recovery, and a second captivity threatened

Rubenid authority did not end with Levon's capture. His son Toros II escaped Byzantine custody and returned to Cilicia to rebuild what his father had lost, contesting the plain against Byzantine governors for the rest of his own long reign and maintaining enough independent standing that Sultan Kilij Arslan II of Rum himself traveled to Constantinople under the reigning Manuel I Komnenos to swear a personal oath of obedience rather than risk the same fate Levon had suffered. The pattern set in these two generations - Rubenid princes extending their reach into the plain, provoking a Byzantine or Turkish response, and rebuilding after every setback - repeated for another sixty years before a descendant of the same house was finally crowned king in 1198.

The crown and the church

expansionDrafted from (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013)

On 6 January 1198, in the cathedral at Tarsus, Levon was crowned king of Armenia by the Armenian catholicos, in the presence of a papal legate and an envoy of the western emperor, with a crown that had been sent from Germany and another that arrived from Constantinople.

That is an extraordinary sentence for a dynasty that had begun as mountain lords a century earlier, and every element of it had a price.

The Latin recognition was the expensive one. The papacy did not crown schismatic kings, and what was agreed was a union of the Armenian church with Rome. The Armenian church is one of the oldest national churches in the world, it had been out of communion with both Rome and Constantinople since the fifth century over the definition of Christ's nature, and it was the institution that had kept Armenian identity together through six hundred years of having no state. Levon's clergy and his population did not accept the union. Some bishops refused it outright; the catholicos who negotiated it was resented; and for the following two centuries every Cilician king had to manage a court that needed western help and a church that regarded the price as apostasy.

Halfeti, Turkey · (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013) · Photograph: Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0

The kingdom was reorganised on Frankish lines at the same time and more comfortably. Barons held fiefs, the offices took French names — the constable, the marshal, the seneschal — and Smbat the Constable, the king's brother who had gone to Mongolia, compiled a law code drawing on the Assizes of Antioch alongside Armenian and Byzantine law. Cilician nobles married into the crusader houses and the crusader houses married into them.

So the state that resulted was Armenian in language, church and self-description, and Frankish in its institutions, Byzantine in its titles and Mongol in its foreign policy within fifty years. The hybridity was not cosmopolitanism and should not be admired as though it were. It was the running cost of continuing to exist in a place where four larger powers met, paid in instalments, and the largest instalment was a church its own people believed had been sold.

Layas

peakDrafted from Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo (1903)

Here the Book begins; and first it speaks of the Lesser Hermenia.

The most famous travel book of the Middle Ages opens on this kingdom. Marco Polo's first chapter, before Persia and before China and before anything he is remembered for, is a page about Cilician Armenia — because that is where he started, and because in the 1270s everybody going east started there.

Yumurtalık, Adana, Turkey · Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo (1903) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

His account is a merchant's, and mostly complimentary about the trade and rude about everything else.

What he says

There are two Armenias, the Greater and the Less. The Lesser is governed by a king who maintains a just rule but is himself subject to the Tartar. The country has numerous towns and villages and everything in plenty; it is excellent for hunting; and it is, he adds, by no means a healthy region but grievously the reverse.

Then the sentence the Armenian nobility would not have enjoyed:

In days of old the nobles there were valiant men, and did doughty deeds of arms; but nowadays they are poor creatures, and good at nought, unless it be at boozing; they are great at that.

And then the reason he mentions the place at all:

Howbeit, they have a city upon the sea, which is called Layas, at which there is a great trade. For you must know that all the spicery, and the cloths of silk and gold, and the other valuable wares that come from the interior, are brought to that city. And the merchants of Venice and Genoa, and other countries, come thither to sell their goods, and to buy what they lack. And whatsoever persons would travel to the interior of the East, merchants or others, they take their way by this city of Layas.

What that was worth

Layas — Ayas, on the gulf beyond Alexandretta — was the western end of the overland route from Tabriz, which after the Mongol conquests was the road along which the goods of Iran, Central Asia and further east reached the Mediterranean. Every Italian merchant handbook of the period gives the stages: Ayas to Sivas, Sivas to Erzincan, Erzincan to Erzurum, Erzurum to Tabriz.

Yumurtalık, Adana, Turkey · Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo (1903) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

A small kingdom held the port at the end of that road. It taxed what came through, it granted quarters and privileges to the Genoese and the Venetians, and the trade is why a mountain lordship of refugees was solvent enough to hire troops, endow monasteries and pay a million dirhams a year in tribute later on.

It is also why the kingdom could not be neutral. In 1294 a Venetian fleet attacked Genoese vessels in the harbour and there was a sea battle at Ayas between two Italian republics, fought in an Armenian king's port, over the right to buy pepper from Persia.

The other page

Polo's very next chapter is on Turcomania - the Sultanate of Rum, three sorts of people, and the finest carpets in the world, a passage the Seljuk sultanate's own history quotes in full - and it dates the pair as precisely as this one does, in the same page-long, trade-first register, without mentioning a war on either side of the border. This is what the eastern Mediterranean looked like to somebody who had come to buy: an Ilkhanid customs system with kings inside it.

The coin

Yule illustrates the chapter with a coin of King Hetum and Queen Isabel, the two of them standing together holding a cross between them.

It is a good object to stop on. Isabel was the daughter of the Levon crowned at Tarsus in 1198; Hetum was the constable's son who married her and then went to Karakorum and knelt to the Great Khan. The coin shows a king and queen of a Christian kingdom, in Armenian letters, minted in a country where the money that mattered was Italian and the overlord was a Mongol.

What was made at Sis and Hromkla

aside?What aside meansDrafted from (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013)

The Armenian church's see moved into this kingdom's territory, to Hromkla and then to Sis, and stayed there for two hundred years. What that produced is the reason the kingdom matters to more people than it has readers.

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore · (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013) · T'oros Roslin · CC0

Cilician manuscript painting is the high point of Armenian art. The workshops at Hromkla in the thirteenth century, and above all T'oros Roslin working there in the 1250s and 1260s, produced illuminated gospels of a quality that put them among the finest medieval books made anywhere — and they are distinctively themselves, drawing on Byzantine models and on crusader and western manuscripts arriving through the ports, in a manner that is neither. Roslin signed his work, which medieval illuminators mostly did not.

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore · (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (2013) · T'oros Roslin · CC0

The kingdom also produced law and history in quantity: Smbat the Constable's code and his chronicle, Vardan Arewelts'i's world history, Het'um of Korykos writing in French for a papal audience about how a Mongol alliance could recover the Holy Land. The last of those is a book by an Armenian prince, in French, arguing to Rome for a partnership with a pagan empire — which is the kingdom's whole foreign policy compressed into an artefact.

Two things are worth drawing out.

The first is the timing. Cilicia's manuscript production peaks in the decades after 1266 — which is to say after the Mamluk invasions had begun, while the kingdom was paying tribute and losing towns. Roslin was working at Hromkla in the years the plain was being raided. That pattern is common enough on this frontier to be worth stating rather than treating as a curiosity: Rumi was writing at Konya under Mongol suzerainty, al-Jazari built his machines for a vassal principality at Amid, and the Ma'munids of Khwarazm kept al-Biruni for fifteen years and lasted twenty-two. Whatever produces books, it is not political security.

The second is what survived. The kingdom fell in 1375 and the church did not, and the books left in people's luggage. A state that lasted at most three centuries produced an institution and a library that have now lasted seven.

Disguised as a servant

contractionDrafted from Sparapet, Chronicle (2005)

In 1253 the king of Armenia dressed as a servant with a pack animal, left Cilicia with a few men, and rode to Mongolia. His elder brother, who was constable of the kingdom and had made the same journey five years earlier, wrote it down in the annals he kept year by year.

Smbat's account is domestic in tone and that is what makes it useful. The entry for 1252 is the queen's death — daughter of King Lewon, mother of three sons and five daughters, adorned with every virtue — with a note that one of the daughters had married a Frank, the lord of Sidon, who then lost Sidon at dice, so that the Templars bought it. The entry for 1253 is the journey.

Het'um went in disguise and in fear, crossing Cappadocia where, Smbat says, the Ishmaelite tribes lived, guided by a monk named Barsegh who had done the route many times. They stopped near Erzurum at the house of a prince and waited there — because the presents for the khan had not caught up with them. The king's father Kostandin had assembled the goods in Cilicia and sent them on after him with trustworthy men. When they arrived Het'um went to Möngke, gave them, and was received joyfully and granted everything he asked. The khan attached two of his own men to the Cilician party for the journey home, and Smbat names them: Markatea, who was one-eyed, and Pach'u.

Sparapet, Chronicle (2005) · E. J. Davis, 1879 · Public domain

He got back in September 1256, and his brother's sentence about it is the best thing in the chronicle. If, in going to him, he had moved clandestinely, in his return he went through them like a lion.

Within a month of reaching home he called an assembly of his brothers, relations and gentry — a hundred thousand men, Smbat says, which is the kind of figure a chronicle gives when it means everybody — and invaded the Seljuk territory through the Taurus passes, and came back with cattle, sheep, horses, mules, servants and gold. The same year he put his eldest son Lewon on a horse for the first time, and summoned to the ceremony his son-in-law Bohemond of Antioch, the lord of Sidon, and the Countess of Jaffa.

Set those three entries in a row — the disguise, the lion, the raid — and the policy is entirely legible. Cilicia had spent a century as one small Christian kingdom among Muslim neighbours who were individually stronger than it was. What the journey bought was not protection in the abstract. It was permission: from 1256 the king of Armenia could raid the Sultanate of Rum with a hundred thousand men and nothing would happen to him, because the people who would otherwise have stopped him now answered to the khan he had just given presents to.

It worked for about fifty years and then the thing he had attached himself to became Muslim, and made peace with Egypt, and stopped answering letters. Smbat himself was killed in 1276 fighting the Mamluks. What had been the shrewdest decision any Armenian ruler made in three centuries turned into the reason there was nobody to appeal to when the Mamluk armies came up through the passes.

The bet on the Mongols

contractionDrafted from Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (2017)

In 1247 Hetum I sent his brother to Mongolia. In 1253 he went himself, across Central Asia to Karakorum, and submitted in person to Möngke.

Every state on that frontier faced the same choice and nearly all of them made it late and under duress. The Khwarazmshah fought and was destroyed. The Sultanate of Rum fought at Kösedağ and became a tributary afterwards. The Abbasid caliph refused and Baghdad was sacked. Cilicia submitted before it was attacked, and got the terms available to those who did: protection, privileges for the Armenian church, and — this was the point — an alliance against the Muslim powers to the south.

For fifty years it was the right bet. Armenian contingents rode with Hulegu's army; the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258 and Aleppo and Damascus in 1260; and it appeared for a season that the Ayyubid and Mamluk world was finished and Cilicia would be the western anchor of a Mongol Levant.

Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (2017) · Photograph: Commons contributor · Public domain

Then the Mamluks beat a Mongol force at Ayn Jalut in 1260, and the arrangement inverted. Cilicia was now a Christian kingdom that had ridden with the Mongols, sitting on the Mamluk sultanate's northern frontier, with its ally beyond a desert and increasingly disinclined to cross it. Baybars came in 1266, beat the Armenian army at Mari, sacked Sis and took the population of the plain. Further invasions followed in 1275 and at intervals afterwards; by 1285 the kingdom was paying a million dirhams a year in tribute.

The last attempt at the original strategy was in 1299, when Hetum II joined the Ilkhan Ghazan for a victory at Wadi al-Khazandar that could not be held. Mamluk victories in 1303 ended it — and Ghazan had by then converted to Islam, which removed the last thing that had made the alliance intelligible to either side.

What the fifty years had bought, in the end, was a reputation. The kingdom was now identified across the Muslim Levant as the Christian power that had ridden with the Mongols into Baghdad and Aleppo, and there was no way to put that down.

1375

endDrafted from Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (2017)

After 1303 the kingdom did what small states in that position do.

It appealed to Europe for a crusade, repeatedly and in writing, and no crusade came. Het'um of Korykos wrote a book in French for a papal audience explaining how an alliance with the Mongols could recover the Holy Land, which is the kingdom's foreign policy compressed into an artefact and was read with interest and acted on by nobody.

It accepted a Frankish dynasty. The Rubenid male line ran out in 1342 and the crown passed to the Lusignans of Cyprus, who were Catholic, and who set about the church union that two centuries of Armenian clergy had refused — which split the kingdom internally at the moment it could least afford it. There were revolts against the Latin kings by the population they were supposed to be saving.

And it was raided, at intervals, by an enemy that did not need to hurry. Mamluk armies came when it suited them. Towns were taken and not returned. The tribute went up.

Sis fell in April 1375. The last king, Levon V, was taken to Cairo and eventually released.

Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (2017) · Photograph: Yerevantsi · CC BY 4.0

What kind of ending that is

The kingdom made one large strategic decision in its history and made it early, deliberately and — on the information available in 1247 — correctly.

Submitting to the Mongols before being attacked was the choice that saved every polity that made it and destroyed every polity that did not. Hetum I sent his brother across Asia to Karakorum, then went himself, then rode with Hulegu, and for half a century it worked exactly as designed: privileges for his church, protection from the south, and a share in the destruction of his enemies.

Then his ally lost a battle in Galilee, converted to his enemies' religion, and stopped coming. The kingdom was left holding a commitment it could not withdraw, on the frontier of the power that had beaten its protector, and it was worked to pieces over the following century by an enemy that was never in any particular danger from it.

There are a great many states that were destroyed for choosing wrongly. There are very few that chose correctly, early, and were destroyed anyway because the winner they had picked lost somewhere else.

The pension

afterlifeDrafted from Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo (1903)

The last king of Armenia spent his final years touring the courts of western Europe asking for an army, and was given an annuity by the king of England instead.

Yule sets it down in a footnote, in the flat register in which footnotes deal with the ends of kingdoms. Levon VI, the ex-king — into whose mouth the chronicler Froissart puts some extraordinary geography — had a pension of a thousand pounds a year granted him by Richard II, and died at Paris in 1398.

Basilica of Saint-Denis, France · Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo (1903) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

He had been crowned at Sis and was a prisoner in Cairo within about a year of it. Released, he went to Europe and worked at it — Froissart has him in the middle of the English and French courts, and the geography Froissart attributes to him is wild enough that Yule declines to take it seriously — and what he came away with was a thousand pounds a year and no army. Twenty-three years of a man with a title and no country, arguing.

The title itself went on without him. Yule records that on the extinction of the male Rubenid line in 1342 the kingdom had passed to John de Lusignan of the royal house of Cyprus, and it is through the Lusignans that King of Armenia entered the collection of styles that European dynasties carried for centuries after the places had gone.

The four beasts

Polo's contemporary Marino Sanuto, writing about how a crusade might be supplied, described the kingdom of the Pope's faithful Armenians as caught between the teeth of four fierce beasts: the Lion Tartar, the Panther Soldan, the Turkish Wolf, and the Corsair Serpent.

It is a better summary than most modern ones, and the useful part is the count. Four. Cilicia was not squeezed between two powers, which is a survivable position and the one most small states occupy. It was on the meeting point of the Mongols, the Mamluks, the Turkmen of the interior, and the Mediterranean sea powers who came into its harbour to fight each other — and it needed something from all four.

What did not fall

Yule notes, in 1903, what was left: the chief remaining vestige of this little monarchy is the continued existence of a Catholicos of part of the Armenian Church at Sis, which was the royal residence.

That is the durable thing. The kingdom lasted at most three centuries; the catholicosate its kings had brought to Hromkla and then to Sis outlived it under the Mamluks, then under the Ottomans, and then — after the destruction of 1915 emptied Cilicia of Armenians entirely — moved again, to Antelias in Lebanon, where it still is. It has now existed for something over seven hundred years, most of them without a state.

The books went too. The gospels illuminated at Hromkla in the 1250s and 1260s, the finest medieval manuscripts made in that part of the world, were carried out in stages by people leaving, and are now in Yerevan, Jerusalem, Venice and Los Angeles.

A refugee state made a church and a library. Both of them survived it by centuries, and both of them survived by being carried.