Kingdom of Greater Armenia

A governor who kept the province

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

Antiochus III lost to Rome at Magnesia in 190 BC, and the Seleucid empire's authority in its northern provinces went with the battle. Artaxias, the strategos Antiochus had appointed over Armenia, declared himself king.

History Museum of Armenia, Yerevan · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Yerevantsi · CC BY 4.0

A deputy left in charge by a distracted overlord is the commonest way a state begins anywhere — the Tulunids in Egypt, the Rasulids in Yemen, Toghtekin at Damascus, a governor at Sohar, a hundred others across the following two thousand years. Artaxias is among the earliest examples anyone can name.

Artaxias founded Artaxata on the Araxes — Plutarch says Hannibal, in exile at his court, advised on the site — and his dynasty held the Armenian highland for about a hundred and eighty years. What they governed was not a state in the Seleucid or Roman sense. Armenia was a country of hereditary noble houses, the nakharars, each holding its own districts with its own fortresses and its own cavalry, and a king was the senior among them rather than a sovereign above them.

Artaxata, Ararat province, Armenia · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Jona Lendering (Livius.org) · CC0

That structure is the key to the whole region and Toumanoff's argument is worth stating plainly: the three Caucasian countries had one social system and three crowns. The crowns were removed by the Sasanians within a hundred and fifty years of each other. The system was not, and could not be, because it was not attached to the crowns. That is why all three countries reappear afterwards as principalities rather than dissolving into provinces.

It is also why the Bagratuni, who take the Armenian crown in 884, are not a new dynasty arriving from outside. They are one of these houses, attested here in the second century BC, waiting four and a half centuries.

Fifteen years of an empire

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

Tigranes II came to the Armenian throne in 95 BC, having spent his youth as a hostage of the Parthians and having bought his release with seventy valleys. He then spent about twenty-five years assembling the largest state ever governed from the Armenian highland.

The circumstances made it possible: the Seleucid empire was in terminal collapse and Parthia was in a succession crisis, so the two powers that ordinarily bounded Armenia both stopped functioning at once. Tigranes took Sophene, then Media Atropatene, then Mesopotamia, then Syria — where the Antiochenes invited him in, and where he ruled for fourteen years as the successor to the Seleucids — and reached the Mediterranean. He took the title king of kings, which is the Iranian imperial style, and which Odaenathus of Palmyra would claim three centuries later for the same reason.

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · CC0

He built a capital, Tigranocerta, and populated it the way Hellenistic sovereigns did: by deporting the inhabitants of Greek cities into it.

Then Rome arrived. Tigranes had sheltered his father-in-law Mithridates of Pontus, which gave Lucullus a reason; in 69 BC the Roman army destroyed the Armenian field force outside Tigranocerta, and the deported Greeks opened the gates. Pompey finished it in 66. Tigranes kept Armenia and gave up everything else, and was left as a Roman client for the rest of his life.

The empire lasted about fifteen years. What is worth taking from it is not its size but what the size was made of. It existed because two neighbouring empires were incapacitated at the same moment, and it ended when one of them was replaced by a third that was not. The position on the map is the constant; everything else in Armenian history is the management of it.

A throne disposed of by treaty

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

For the century after Pompey, Armenia was the standing quarrel between Rome and Parthia: each installed kings, each removed the other's, and the fighting was periodic and inconclusive. In AD 63 they settled it at Rhandeia.

The king of Armenia would be a prince of the Arsacid house — that is, a Parthian royal — nominated at Ctesiphon. He would receive his crown from Rome. Tiridates travelled to Italy to be crowned by Nero in person, in a ceremony Roman writers describe at length and evidently enjoyed.

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

It worked. There was no serious Roman-Parthian war over Armenia for fifty years, and the arrangement in modified forms governed the kingdom's constitutional position for three centuries.

Garni, Kotayk province, Armenia · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

It is worth being clear about how strange the arrangement is, because it is easy to read past.

Thrones are normally filled by a rule internal to the country: eldest son, senior kinsman, division among heirs, nomination by the incumbent, election, acclamation, or whoever can raise the most men. Armenia's was filled by a treaty between two foreign empires, which specified both the family the king had to come from and which capital would choose him and which would crown him.

Client kingship is common enough; a great many small states have had a king their neighbour approved. What is unusual here is the formality — two great powers, in writing, agreeing in advance the procedure for filling a third country's throne, and then keeping to it for three hundred years. Neither of them thought this odd. Armenia was not a party.

The Armenian nobility went on being Armenian throughout, which is the other half of the story and the reason the arrangement was survivable. A king nominated in Ctesiphon and crowned in Rome still had to govern through nakharar houses that had been there before either empire and would be there after.

A diadem laid at his feet

contractionDrafted from Cary, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. VIII (1925)

The Rhandeia arrangement held for exactly as long as both empires found it convenient, and it stopped being convenient for Rome the moment Trajan decided he wanted Armenia outright rather than as a jointly managed client. In 113 the Parthian king Osroes deposed the reigning Armenian king and replaced him, on his own authority alone, with Parthamasiris - a direct breach of the treaty's requirement that Rome crown whoever Parthia nominated. Trajan did not answer the letters Parthamasiris sent asking for recognition. He marched instead.

A king who came expecting his crown back

Trajan advanced through Armenia in 114, taking towns without a fight and accepting the submission of local rulers, until he reached Elegeia, where Parthamasiris came to meet him in person - confident, by his own later account, that he would receive the kingdom the same way Tiridates had received it from Nero at Rhandeia fifty years before. Seated on a tribunal in the Roman camp, Trajan received him. Parthamasiris saluted him, took the diadem from his own head, and laid it at Trajan's feet - then stood in silence, waiting to have it handed back.

A shout that terrified a king

The watching Roman soldiers, seeing a descendant of Arsaces and nephew of the Parthian king standing bare-headed before their emperor like a captive, broke into a spontaneous acclamation hailing Trajan imperator, as though for a victory - what Roman writers afterward called a "crownless and bloodless victory." Parthamasiris, certain the shout signaled his own execution, panicked and tried to flee before finding himself hemmed in on every side. Trajan had him brought into his tent privately, then - deliberately, so that no rumor of a secret deal could circulate - had him brought back out and made him state his case publicly before the whole army. Parthamasiris spoke bluntly: he had not been defeated or captured, he said, but had come voluntarily, expecting to be treated exactly as Tiridates had been. Trajan's answer was final. He would surrender Armenia to no one; it now belonged to Rome and would have a Roman governor. Parthamasiris was free to leave for wherever he pleased - under a Roman cavalry escort that ensured he could contact no one and raise no rebellion on the way. The Armenian nobles who had come with him were simply kept, as Trajan's own new subjects.

A kingdom that briefly stopped existing at all

Cary, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. VIII (1925) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

For the first and only time since Rhandeia, Armenia ceased to be a kingdom altogether. Trajan organized it as a Roman province, took the surrender or submission of the surrounding petty kings, captured Nisibis and Batnae further south, and was voted the title Parthicus by the Senate for it - though contemporaries noted he took more pride in being called Optimus, "the best," a title about his character rather than his conquests. The arrangement did not outlive him. Trajan's successor Hadrian, judging the eastern provinces overextended, abandoned direct rule of Armenia almost immediately after taking power and restored it to client-kingdom status - a reversion to something close to the Rhandeia model, though never again quite as stable as the fifty years that had preceded Parthamasiris's ill-fated journey to Elegeia.

First

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

Armenia adopted Christianity as the religion of the state under Tiridates III, converted according to the tradition by Gregory the Illuminator, who had been imprisoned in a pit for thirteen years first. The conventional date is 301, and a good deal of modern scholarship prefers something around 314; the difference matters to the claim of being first only if one is arguing with Rome about it, which people have been.

Khor Virap, Ararat province, Armenia · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

What is not disputed is the priority in substance. Armenia is the earliest state adoption of Christianity anywhere, and Iberia followed about a generation later and Caucasian Albania about the same time — three kingdoms along the Sasanian empire's northern flank, all Christian within four decades of each other.

Vagharshapat, Armavir province, Armenia · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Antisyntagmatarchos · CC0

The strategic reading is the obvious one and it is not the whole of it. Christian Armenia was permanently unreliable to a Sasanian empire that was in the same decades consolidating Zoroastrianism as a state religion with a state priesthood, and permanently intelligible to Rome. It aligned the country and it did so at a cost the Armenians paid for the following three centuries.

The cost is on the chapters that follow, and it is worth naming the shape now. Every subsequent Sasanian attempt to secure Armenia included pressure on the church: the abolition of the monarchy in 428, the attempt to impose Zoroastrianism that produced the revolt of 451, the periodic persecutions. And every subsequent Byzantine attempt included pressure of a different kind, because the Armenian church rejected the Council of Chalcedon in the sixth century and was thereafter heretical in Constantinople's eyes.

A church that made the country legible to one empire made it a target for both. Four centuries later the Bagratuni kings would draw the obvious conclusion and take their crown from the caliph in Baghdad instead, on the reasoning that a Muslim overlord had no opinion about Chalcedon.

Twenty-three years before the end

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

Around 405, Mesrop Mashtots devised an alphabet for Armenian, under the patronage of the king Vramshapuh and the catholicos Sahak. Within about a generation the Bible had been translated into it, along with a large body of Greek and Syriac theology, and Armenians had begun writing history in their own language — Koriwn's life of Mashtots, Agathangelos, Faustus, Movses Khorenatsi, Eghishe on the revolt of 451.

The Armenian fifth century is called the golden age for that reason, and the chronology is worth being exact about. The alphabet is made in about 405. The monarchy is abolished in 428. The literature that has carried Armenian identity for sixteen hundred years was created in the last twenty-three years of the kingdom that paid for it, and most of it was written after the kingdom had gone.

Matenadaran, Yerevan (MS 7736, fol. 22v) · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Artist unknown · Public domain

Political weight and cultural output come apart all the time, and this is the extreme version of it, running in the direction that matters. The state ended and the alphabet did not. Every Armenian polity afterwards — at Ani, in Cilicia — wrote in it, and so does everybody in Yerevan this morning.

There is a dispute about how much else Mashtots made, and it is unusually tangled. The Armenian tradition credits him with the Georgian and the Caucasian Albanian alphabets as well. The Georgian tradition credits its own script to a king centuries earlier. Modern scholarship is divided, and of the two claims the Albanian one has the better support.

Three national traditions, three alphabets, and no agreement about who invented which. It is not a question that can be settled from the outside, and the temptation to settle it is exactly what makes it worth leaving open.

The crown removed and the houses left

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

Rome and Persia partitioned Armenia by agreement in 387, taking roughly a fifth and four-fifths respectively, and left an Arsacid king on the Persian side. In 428 the Sasanians abolished that kingship at the request — the sources are consistent on this — of some of the Armenian nobles themselves, who preferred a Persian governor to a king of their own who might tax them.

Calling that a conquest is accurate about the agent and misleading about the mechanism. Nobody stormed Armenia in 428. A foreign empire removed a native monarchy because a proportion of the native aristocracy asked it to.

What happened next is the whole argument of the Caucasus. The crown was removed and the nakharar houses were not. They went on holding their districts, their fortresses and their cavalry, and when the Sasanians attempted in 449 to impose Zoroastrianism, the houses raised an army under Vardan Mamikonian and fought at Avarayr in 451. They lost the battle comprehensively and Vardan was killed. Thirty-three years later, at Nvarsak, the Sasanians conceded religious freedom and the restoration of the nakharars' privileges, because the country had proved ungovernable on the other terms.

Armenian tradition treats Avarayr as a victory and the reasoning is sound: the objective was the church and the church survived.

The country then spent four and a half centuries without a crown — Sasanian, then Byzantine, then from the 640s under the caliphate, governed throughout by the same houses under a resident governor and an Armenian prince. In 884 one of those houses, the Bagratuni, took a crown from Baghdad.

Four hundred and fifty-six years separate the two Armenian kingdoms, and it is worth being exact about what crossed the gap and what did not.

What crossed: the church, the alphabet, the literature written in it, and the noble houses in their own valleys with their own fortresses and their own cavalry. What did not: the state. There was no Armenian kingdom for four and a half centuries, and there was an Armenia throughout, which is only a paradox if you assume the two words mean the same thing.

Ararat plain, Armenia · (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (1997) · Photograph: Serouj Ourishian · CC BY-SA 4.0

Twenty-three years after the kingdom

afterlifeDrafted from Elishe, The History of Vartan and of the Battle of the Armenians, Containing an Account of the Religious Wars between the Persians and Armenians (1830)

The Arsacid kingdom of Armenia was abolished in 428. In 450 the Sasanian court ordered the country to give up Christianity for Zoroastrianism, and discovered that abolishing the monarchy had not removed the thing that could refuse.

What refused was the naxarars, the noble houses, with the church behind them. Elishe, who wrote the account within living memory and presents himself as having been there, states their reasoning as a formula that has been quoted in Armenian ever since: apostasy they look on as death, and death for God as an immortal life; slavery on earth they esteem the liberty of their lives, and to be cast into banishment they call being in secret with God.

Vardan Mamikonian, who commanded, knew perfectly well that the country was divided — Elishe says the disbelief of the timorous had not escaped him, and that he knew the undecided spirit of even the men attached to him, and encouraged the army anyway. The prince of Siwnik had gone over to the Persians with a body of troops. Vardan replaced the defectors with his own brothers, sons and nephews and sent each of them out with a force, and summoned everyone else to Artashat. Elishe then lists the houses that came, name by name — Artsruni, Khorkhoruni, Palunik, Amatuni, Gnuni, Dimaksian, Arsharuni — which is the point of listing them: there was no king to command any of them and they came.

His speech before the battle survives in the account. Do not fear the numbers of the heathen; do not withdraw your necks from the sword of a mortal man; if the object of our lives is completed by a holy death in battle, let us meet it with a joyful heart. And earlier in it, the harder sentence, which is about what they had all been doing for the previous year: you remember how we outwitted the tyrant, how we treated him as a simple child, how we accommodated ourselves to his impious will by seeming apostasy, though in secret we were true to God.

They met on the plain of Avarayr on 2 June 451. Vardan saw a chosen body of Persians fall on the Armenian left, attacked the Persian right, scattered it along with the elephants and drove them back to where they had started, and for a moment the Persian main body broke and ran from its own camp. The Persian commander rallied them, ordered the officer riding one of the elephants — which Elishe says served as a watchtower or a fortified city — to sound the trumpet, and went into the front rank himself. Vardan was killed on the spot. The fighting went on all day; the bodies were heaped like fallen cedars and like walls of stone, and the spears and bows were so broken and the dead of both sides so mixed that the bodies of the blessed could not be told apart. It was spring, and the flowering meadows were destroyed by the crowd. Elishe writes that there was no distinction between victors and vanquished — wherever the brave of either side met, there were victims.

Matenadaran, Yerevan (MS 1920, fol. 250v) · Elishe, The History of Vartan and of the Battle of the Armenians, Containing an Account of the Religious Wars between the Persians and Armenians (1830) · Illuminator named as Baghesh · Public domain

Then he counts. Of the Mamikonian house, Vardan and a hundred and thirty-three; of the Khorkhoruni, Khoren and nineteen; of the Palunik, Artak and fifty-seven; and so through nine houses, two hundred and eighty-seven men with their princes, and seven hundred and forty others, and one thousand and thirty-six in all. On the other side, three thousand five hundred and forty-four, including nine men of distinction — and the Persian commander, counting his own dead and finding the proportion, was troubled, because the affair had not fallen out as he expected.

Armenia lost the battle. The survivors dispersed into the hills and the castles they held, and Elishe notes that the number who got away was greater than the number who fell, and that they went on ruling every district that could not be taken. The Sasanian court did not raise the religious question again on those terms, and thirty-odd years later conceded it in writing.

That is the reason a chapter about a battle belongs after the end of a kingdom rather than inside it. The Armenian state had been gone for twenty-three years when this happened, and it turned out that the thing which had made Armenia Armenian was not the state — it was an aristocracy that could still assemble itself, and a church, and the alphabet that had been cut for it a generation earlier. Those three survived every subsequent conquest, and 2 June is still kept.

Yerevan, Armenia · Elishe, The History of Vartan and of the Battle of the Armenians, Containing an Account of the Religious Wars between the Persians and Armenians (1830) · Photograph: Aschroet · CC0