loosened these links and knit certain new links with the West. The
period that followed was marked by a perpetual struggle between the
Roman and Parthian Governments for political influence over the
kingdom, which was really a battle over Armenia’s soul. Was Armenia
to be wrested away altogether from Oriental influences and rallied
to the European world, or was it to sink back into being a spiritual
and political appanage of Iran? It seemed a clear issue, but it was
not destined to be decided in either sense. Armenia was to be caught
for two millenniums in the uncertain eddy of the Nearer East.
In this opposition of forces, the political balance inclined from
the first in favour of the Oriental Power. The Parthians succeeded
in replacing the descendants of Tigranes by a junior branch of their
own Arsacid Dynasty; and when, in 387 A.D., the rivals agreed to
settle the Armenian question by the drastic expedient of partition,
the Sassanid kings of Persia (who had superseded the Parthians in
the Empire of Iran) secured the lion’s share of the spoils, while
the Romans only received a strip of country on the western border
which gave them Erzeroum and Diyarbekir for their frontier
fortresses. In the cultural sphere, on the other hand, the West was
constantly increasing its ascendancy. King Tiridates was an Arsacid,
but he accepted Christianity as the religion of the State he ruled;
and when, less than a century after his death, his kingdom fell and
the greater part of the country and the people came directly under
Persian rule, the Persian propaganda failed to make any impression.
No amount of preaching or persecution could persuade the Armenians
to accept Zoroastrianism, which was the established religion of the
Sassanian State. They clung to their national church in despite of
their political annihilation, and showed thereby that their
spiritual allegiance was given irrevocably to the West.
The partition of 387 A.D. produced as long a political interregnum
in Armenian history as the fall of Urartu in the seventh century
B.C. In the second quarter of the seventh century A.D., the mastery
of Western Asia passed from the Persians to the Arabs, and the
Armenian provinces changed masters with the rest. Persian governors
appointed by the Sassanid King of Kings were superseded by Arab
governors appointed by the Omayyad and Abbasid Caliphs, and the
intolerance of Zoroastrianism was replaced by the far stronger and
hardly less intolerant force of Islam. Then, in the ninth century,
the political power of the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad began to
decline, the outlying provinces were able to detach themselves, and
three independent dynasties emerged on Armenian soil:—
(_a_) The _Bagratids_ founded a Christian principality in the
north. Their capital was at Ani, in the upper basin of the
Aras, and their rule in this district lasted nearly two
centuries, from 885 to 1079 A.D.
(_b_) The _Ardzrounids_ founded a similar Christian principality
in the basin of Van. They reigned here from 908 to 1021 A.D.
(_c_) The _Merwanids_, a Kurdish dynasty, founded a Moslem
principality in the upper basin of the Tigris. Their capital
was at Diyarbekir, but their power extended northward over the
mountains into the valley of the Mourad Su (Eastern
Euphrates), which they controlled as far upwards as Melazkerd.
They maintained themselves for a century, from 984 to 1085
A.D.
The imposing remains of churches and palaces at Ani and elsewhere
have cast an undue glamour over the Bagratid House, which has been
extended, again, to all the independent principalities of early
mediæval Armenia. In reality, this phase of Armenian history was
hardly more happy than that which preceded it, and only appeared a
Golden Age by comparison with the cataclysms that followed. From the
national point of view it was almost as barren as the century of
satrapial independence which preceded the reign of Tigranes, and in
the politics of this period parochialism was never transcended.
Bagratids and Ardzrounids were bitter rivals for the leadership of
the nation, and did not scruple to call in Moslem allies against one
another in their constant wars. The south-western part of the
country remained under the rule of an alien Moslem dynasty, without
any attempt being made to cast them out. Armenia had no second
Tigranes in the Middle Ages, and the local renewals of political
independence came and went without profit to the nation as a whole,
which still depended for its unity upon the ecclesiastical tradition
of the national Gregorian Church.
In the eleventh century A.D., a new power appeared in the East. The
Arab Empire of the Caliphs had long been receiving an influx of
Turks from Central Asia as slaves and professional soldiers, and the
Turkish bodyguard had assumed control of politics at Baghdad. But
this individual infiltration was now succeeded by the migration of
whole tribes, and the tribes were organised into a political power
by the clan of Seljuk. The new Turkish dynasty constituted itself
the temporal representative of the Abbasid Caliphate, and the
dominion of Mohammedan Asia was suddenly transferred from the
devitalised Arabs to a vigorous barbaric horde of nomadic Turks.
These Turkish reinforcements brutalised and at the same time
stimulated the Islamic world, and the result was a new impetus of
conquest towards the borderlands. The brunt of this movement fell
upon the unprepared and disunited Armenian principalities. In the
first quarter of the eleventh century the Seljuks began their
incursions on to the Armenian plateau. The Armenian princes turned
for protection to the East Roman Empire, accepted its suzerainty, or
even surrendered their territory directly into its hands. But the
Imperial Government brought little comfort to the Armenian people.
Centred at Constantinople and cut off from the Latin West, it had
lost its Roman universality and become transformed into a Greek
national state, while the established Orthodox Church had developed
the specifically Near Eastern character of a nationalist
ecclesiastical organisation. The Armenians found that incorporation
in the Empire exposed them to temporal and spiritual Hellenisation,
without protecting them against the common enemy on the east. The
Seljuk invasions increased in intensity, and culminated, in 1071
A.D., in the decisive battle of Melazkerd, in which the Imperial
Army was destroyed and the Emperor Romanos II. taken prisoner on the
field. Melazkerd placed the whole of Armenia at the Seljuk’s
mercy—and not only Armenia, but the Anatolian provinces of the
Empire that lay between Armenia and Europe. The Seljuks carried
Islam into the heart of the Near East.
The next four-and-a-half centuries were the most disastrous period
in the whole political history of Armenia. It is true that a vestige
of independence was preserved, for Roupen the Bagratid conducted a
portion of his people south-westward into the mountains of Cilicia,
where they were out of the main current of Turkish invasion, and
founded a new principality which survived nearly three hundred years
(1080-1375). There is a certain romance about this Kingdom of Lesser
Armenia. It threw in its lot with the Crusaders, and gave the
Armenian nation its first direct contact with modern Western Europe.
But the mass of the race remained in Armenia proper, and during
these centuries the Armenian tableland suffered almost ceaseless
devastation.
The Seljuk migration was only the first wave in a prolonged outbreak
of Central Asiatic disturbance, and the Seljuks were civilised in
comparison with the tribes that followed on their heels. Early in
the thirteenth century came Karluks and Kharizmians, fleeing across
Western Asia before the advance of the Mongols; and in 1235 came the
first great raid of the Mongols themselves—savages who destroyed
civilisation wherever they found it, and were impartial enemies of
Christendom and Islam. All these waves of invasion took the same
channel. They swept across the broad plateau of Persia, poured up
the valleys of the Aras and the Tigris, burst in their full force
upon the Armenian highlands and broke over them into Anatolia
beyond. Armenia bore the brunt of them all, and the country was
ravaged and the population reduced quite out of proportion to the
sufferings of the neighbouring regions. The division of the Mongol
conquests among the family of Djengis Khan established a Mongol
dynasty in Western Asia which seated itself in Azerbaijan, accepted
Islam and took over the tradition of the Seljuks, the Abbasids and
the Sassanids. It was the old Asiatic Empire under a new name, but
it had now incorporated Armenia and extended north-westwards to the
Kizil Irmak (Halys). For the first time since Tigranes, the whole of
Armenia was reabsorbed again in the East, and the situation grew
still worse when the Empire of these “Ilkhans” fell to pieces and
was succeeded in the fifteenth century by the petty lordship of Ak
Koyunli, Kara Koyunli and other nomadic Turkish clans.
The progressive anarchy of four centuries was finally stilled by the
rise of the Osmanli power. The seed of the Osmanlis was one of those
Turkish clans which fled across Western Asia before the Mongols.
They settled in the dominions of the Seljuk Sultans, who had
established themselves at Konia, in Central Anatolia, and who
allowed the refugees to carve out an obscure appanage on the marches
of the Greek Empire, in the Asiatic hinterland of Constantinople.
The son and successor of the founder was here converted from
Paganism to Islam[210], towards the end of the thirteenth century
A.D., and the name of Osman, which he adopted at his conversion, has
been borne ever since by the subjects of his House.
The Osmanli State is the greatest and most characteristic Near
Eastern Empire there has ever been. In its present decline it has
become nothing but a blight to all the countries and peoples that
remain under its sway; but at the outset it manifested a faculty for
strong government which satisfied the supreme need of the distracted
Near Eastern world. This was the secret of its amazing power of
assimilation, and this quality in turn increased its power of
organisation, for it enabled the Osmanlis to monopolise all the
vestiges of political genius that survived in the Near East. The
original Turkish germ was quickly absorbed in the mass of
Osmanlicised native Greeks[211]. The first expansion of the State
was westward, across the Dardanelles, and before the close of the
fourteenth century the whole of South-Eastern Europe had become
Osmanli territory, as far as the Danube and the Hungarian frontier.
The seal was set on these European conquests when Sultan Mohammed
II. entered Constantinople in 1453, and then the current of
expansion veered towards the east. Mohammed himself absorbed the
rival Turkish principalities in Anatolia, and annexed the Greek
“Empire” of Trebizond. In the second decade of the sixteenth
century, Sultan Selim I. followed this up with a sweeping series of
campaigns, which carried him with hardly a pause from the Taurus
barrier to the citadel of Cairo. Armenia was overrun in 1514; the
petty Turkish chieftains were overthrown, the new Persian Empire was
hurled back to the Caspian, and a frontier established between the
Osmanli Sultans and the Shahs of Iran, which has endured, with a few
fluctuations, until the present day.
In the sixteenth century the whole Near Eastern world, from the
gates of Vienna[212] to the gates of Aleppo and Tabriz, found itself
united under a single masterful Government, and once more Armenia
was linked securely with the West. From 1514 onwards the great
majority of the Armenian nation was subject to the Osmanli State. It
is true that the province of Erivan (on the middle course of the
Aras) was recovered by the Persians in the seventeenth century, and
held by them till its cession to Russia in 1834. But, with this
exception, the whole of Armenia remained under Osmanli rule until
the Russians took Kars, in the war of 1878. These intervening
centuries of union and pacification were, on the whole, beneficial
to Armenia; but with the year 1878 there began a new and sinister
epoch in the relations between the Osmanli State and the Armenian
nation.
-----
Footnote 191:
There seems to be no available name to convey the Janus-character
of this region. “Balkan” has all the connotation, but the word is
allocated already to a much too limited geographical area.
“Levantine” covers a wider geographical field, but suggests merely
the superficial characteristics which the Near Eastern peoples
share with many others in a certain transient stage of
development.
Footnote 192:
The limits of the Near East are not easy to define. On the
north-west, Vienna is the most conspicuous boundary-mark, but one
might almost equally well single out Trieste or Lvov or even Prag.
Towards the south-east, the boundaries are even more shadowy. It
is perhaps best to equate them with the frontiers of the Arabic
language, yet the genius of the Near East overrides linguistic
barriers, and encroaches on the Arabic-speaking world on the one
side as well as on the German-speaking world on the other. Syria
is essentially a Near Eastern country, and a physical geographer
would undoubtedly carry the Near Eastern frontiers up to the
desert belt of the Sahara, Nefud and Kevir.
Footnote 193:
There is one physical type, classified by ethnologists as
“Armenoid” or “Anatolian,” which seems to be both indigenous and
persistent in the Anatolian Peninsula and in the triangle included
between the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and the Caspian. Its
characteristics are very individual—a “sugarloaf” skull, broad
from side to side and sliced off at the back; prominent
cheek-bones; a fleshy, hooked nose; and a rather clumsy, thick-set
body. These features are distinguishable in the ancient Hittites
of Eastern Anatolia, as they are portrayed in the native and
Egyptian monuments of the 14th and 13th centuries B.C.; in the
modern Tchatchadzé nomads of Lycia (the extreme South-West of the
Peninsula); and in a considerable percentage of the living
Armenian people, scattered all over the Near East.
Footnote 194:
Called “Ararat” in the Bible and “Alarodioi” by Herodotus.
Footnote 195:
“The City of Dhuspas (Tosp) in the land of Biaina (Van).” In the
course of history the names have been transposed; Van is now the
town, and Tosp the district.
Footnote 196:
Round the present town of Isbir, in the Tchorok Valley.
Footnote 197:
The chief evidence for the racial unity of all these primitive
populations is the survival of the name of Khaldis, the national
god of Urartu, throughout the Armenian plateau. On the banks of
the Aras we have the district of Khaldiran, and the northern
affluents of the river are fed by Lake Khaldir. Further west, the
modern Vilayet of Trebizond was called the Province of Khaldia
under the late Roman Empire, and there is still a Diocese of
Khaldia maintained by the Orthodox Greek Church in the immediate
hinterland of Trebizond.
Footnote 198:
The original focus from which the Indo-European languages spread
having been situated apparently in what is now Austria-Hungary and
the Ukraine.
Footnote 199:
It is equally possible that the modern Armenian language was
introduced into the country at an earlier date, and existed there
side by side with the official language of the Urartu
inscriptions. Egyptian records show that an Iranian people, the
Mitanni (Matienoi), were established in Northern Mesopotamia as
early as the 16th century B.C., and their name clung to the Urmia
basin as late as Strabo’s day. They were the western outposts of
Indo-European settlement on the Iranian plateau. On the whole,
however the Mitanni are more likely to have been the originators
of the Kurdish language than of the Armenian.
Footnote 200:
In the classical form, of which the spoken language of to-day is a
development.
Footnote 201:
Probably a synthesis of Hittite and Cimmerian, corresponding to
the Urartu-Scythian blend which we have suggested as the origin of
Armenian.
Footnote 202:
The traditional date varies from 261 to 301 A.D.
Footnote 203:
A suggestive parallel to the way in which another foreign
missionary, St. Patrick, has become the national hero of Ireland.
Footnote 204:
In 553 A.D. the national individuality of the Gregorian (Armenian)
Church was given formal expression by the foundation of a new
ecclesiastical era.
Footnote 205:
Herodotus’ “Province of the Matienoi, Alarodioi and Saspeires.”
Footnote 206:
This is the probable extent of Herodotus’ puzzling “Province of
the Armenians and Paktyes,” and the certain extent of the later
Sophene.
Footnote 207:
The provenance of this name is as obscure as every other problem
of Armenian origins. It may mean “the land of Erimenas,” a king of
Urartu, known from an inscription on a votive offering at Van,
just as the neighbouring province of Azerbaijan derives its name
from the satrap Atropates; or (as Lord Bryce suggests) it may be a
“portmanteau word,” perhaps compounded of Urartu and Minni, the
Assyrian name for the upper basin of the Greater Zab. The name of
Kat-Patuka (Cappadocia) is a possible analogy to this latter
suggestion.
Footnote 208:
Turkish “Ermen-ler.”
Footnote 209:
The Seleucid Dynasty had inherited most of the Asiatic dominions
acquired by Alexander the Great when he conquered the Achæmenid
(Persian) Empire.
Footnote 210:
This is the view of Mr. Herbert Adams Gibbons, the most recent
historian of the early Ottoman Empire.
Footnote 211:
The people of the East Roman Empire in its latter days were Greeks
in the sense that they spoke the “Romaic” modification of the
Ancient Greek language; but most of them had only become Greeks by
the loss of their native language at the date when the Armenians,
unlike them, had successfully preserved theirs.
Footnote 212:
The Osmanlis besieged Vienna twice, and held a frontier within
ninety miles of it for a century and a half.
III. DISPERSION AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE
ARMENIAN NATION.
We have now traced the political vicissitudes of Armenia down to its
incorporation in the Ottoman Empire, and are in a position to survey
the effects of this troubled political history on the social life
and the geographical extension of the Armenian people.
At the present day the Armenians are, next to the Jews, the most
scattered nation in the world, but this phenomenon does not begin to
appear until a comparatively late stage in their history. At the
time of the Partition of 387 A.D. they were still confined to a
compact territory between the Euphrates, Lake Urmia and the River
Kur. It was the annexation of the western marches to the Roman
Empire that gave the first impetus to Armenian migration towards the
west. After 387 A.D. the Roman frontier garrisons were moved forward
into the new Armenian provinces, and these troops were probably
recruited in the main, according to the general Roman custom, from
the local population. But in the middle of the seventh century the
Roman frontiers were shorn away by the advance of the new Arab
power; the garrisons beyond the Euphrates were withdrawn towards the
north-west, and, after a century of darkness and turmoil, during
which all the old landmarks were effaced, we find that the “Armeniac
Army Corps District” has shifted from the banks of the Euphrates to
the banks of the Halys (Kizil Irmak) and become approximately
coincident with the modern Vilayet of Sivas. This transference of
the troops must have meant in itself a considerable transference of
Armenians, and it can be taken for granted that the retiring armies
were accompanied by a certain portion of the civilian population. We
can thus date back to the seventh century the beginning of those
flourishing Armenian colonies in the towns of north-eastern Anatolia
which suffered so terribly in the ordeal of 1915.
The mountain zone between the Roman fortress of Sivas (Sebasteia) on
the Halys and the Arab posts along the Euphrates, from Malatia to
Erzeroum, was now debatable territory between the Moslem and the
Christian Empires, and in the eighth century it was held by an
independent community of Armenian heretics called Paulikians. These
Paulikians led an untamed, Ishmaelitish existence. They were
excommunicated for their tenets by the Gregorian Armenian Church, as
well as by the Orthodox Patriarch at Constantinople, and they raided
impartially in the territories of the Roman Empire and the Arab
Caliphate. The Emperors waged against them a war of extermination,
and anticipated the present Ottoman policy by deporting them from
their mountain fastnesses to the opposite ends of the Imperial
territory. In 752 A.D. a number of them were settled in Thrace, to
exercise their military prowess in holding the frontier against the
Bulgars; and, in 969 A.D., the Emperor John Tzimiskes (himself an
Armenian) transplanted a further body of them to Philippopolis. It
may be doubted whether there is any direct connexion between them
and the present (Gregorian) Armenian colony in the latter city, but
their numbers and influence must have been considerable, if one may
judge by the vigorous spread of their tenets among the Bulgars and
the Southern Slavs, and they are noteworthy as the forerunners of
the Armenian Dispersion in Europe, as well as of the Protestant
Reformation.[213]
Migrations on a larger scale were produced by the Turkish invasions
of the eleventh century. In 1021 A.D., for instance, the Ardzrounian
Dynasty of Van surrendered its home territory to the Roman Empire in
exchange for a more sheltered principality at Sivas. It only reigned
sixty years in exile before it was overwhelmed there also by the
advance of the Turkish tide; but the present Armenian villages in
the Sivas Vilayet are doubtless derived from these Ardzrounian
refugees. In the very year, again, in which the sovereignty of the
Ardzrounids was extinguished at Sivas, the Bagratids of Ani founded
themselves a second kingdom in Cilicia. We have spoken of this
kingdom already; it is represented to-day by a chain of Armenian
mountain towns and villages which stretches all the way from the
headwaters of the Sihoun (Saros) and Djihoun (Pyramos) to the shores
of the Gulf of Alexandretta.
The still more terrible invasions of the thirteenth century
scattered the Armenians even further afield. The relations of Lesser
Armenia with the Crusader Principalities opened for the Armenians a
door into Western Europe. When the Roupenian Dynasty became extinct,
it was succeeded by a branch of the French House of Lusignan
summoned from Cyprus, and in 1335 there was the first secession from
the national Gregorian Church to the Communion of Rome. These new
adherents to the Papal allegiance spread far and wide over Latin
Christendom. A strong colony of Armenian Catholics established
itself at Lemberg, recently won by Polish conquest for the Catholic
Church; and others settled at Venice, the European focus of the
Levantine trade. In this Venetian settlement the tradition of
Armenian culture was kept alive by the famous brotherhood of
Mekhitarist Monks. They founded the first Armenian printing press
here, in 1565, and maintained a constant issue of Armenian
publications. Their greatest work was a magnificent thesaurus of the
Armenian language, which appeared in 1836.