The imbecile policy of the Byzantine Court continued after the
suppression of the line of Pakrad, and with even worse results. Having
destroyed the interest and even the right of Armenia to keep up
an army of her own, and confiscated her revenues applied to that
purpose, the loss of defenders should have been made good as far
as possible, by keeping a large regular army there in their place;
but the same corrupt and profligate court avarice which had caused
the one, prevented the other. Not only did Constantine X (1059-67)
actually reduce the number of his army, leave it unprovided with arms
and ammunition and other supplies, let the frontier fortifications
fall out of repair, and leave the garrison unpaid, to save money
for his overgrown court of costly favorites (the Byzantine court a
little later cost $20,000,000 a year by itself), and let the officers
put civilians on the rolls, and made artisans and shop-keepers of
their real soldiers to pocket fraudulent pay for themselves, as the
Persians do now, but he used to disband most of his army after every
campaign to save paying them, letting them have free quarters on the
citizens. The Seljuks were prompt to take advantage of this. In 1060
Togrul sacked Sebaste. In 1063 his greater nephew Alp Arslan began
a series of raids that soon reduced Iberia and Northern Armenia
almost to a waste. The systematic policy of the Turks was to make
any country they invaded impossible of civilized habitation again,
by obliterating all the results and "plant" of civilization which
many ages of labor and money had enriched it with. They deliberately
cut down all the vineyards, orchards, and olive groves, wrecked the
aqueducts, filled up the wells and cisterns, broke up the bridges,
and in short made the land (except for a few fortresses) a mere
desert pasture ground to feed their cattle on. They were only nomad
shepherds and cattle-men, despised cities as at best necessary evils,
and did not care for tilling the soil. Whatever spot the Turk has
set his foot on, he has blasted like a breath from hell, turning to
naught the labors of thousands of years at a blow; and he has never
put anything of his own in place of what he has destroyed. Where are
the Turkish great cities developed by them, the Turkish flourishing
agricultural regions, the Turkish manufactures, the Turkish literature
or art? At most they have not quite been able to exterminate others'
progress, because they must perish themselves in doing it.
The Armenian king of Iberia had to submit; the Armenian prince of
Lorhi close by had to give his daughter's hand to Alp Arslan; and
at last the royal city of Ani, though strongly situated on a rocky
peninsula and protected on two sides by a rapid river and a deep
ravine, was left without help by the Byzantines, and in spite of a
heroic defense, was taken by storm, June 6, 1064. This convinced the
Armenian prince of Kars (another Kakig), that he could not hold out;
he surrendered his province to the Byzantine Empire for the appanage of
the district of Amassia. This removed the last Armenian prince from the
old seats of the race, which were now all occupied by the Turks; and
the Armenians emigrated in vast numbers to the districts west and south
(old Cappadocia and Cilicia), where their native princes were living
as great Byzantine dukes and governors. A number of semi-independent
vassal principalities were soon formed, making as before an Armenian
wall between the Turks and the empire; but only part way, and far
weaker, having left its impregnable mountains, and being much poorer,
and having lost heart. The upper part, through Old Armenia, was left
wholly open; and the Seljuks poured into Asia Minor like a flood,
ruining the country beyond reparation as they went. Within a dozen
years from the capture of Ani, the Seljuk dominion reached to Nicaea,
fifty miles from Constantinople, and the seat of the first Christian
church council. Its lands could be seen from St. Sophia; the Byzantine
Empire retained only a strip of Asia Minor along the sea-coast.
But the Armenian courage and national spirit, and the political
and military ability which had governed the Eastern Empire so many
centuries, were not extinct. The heart of the nation, forced out of
its immemorial lands, still beat strongly, and animated their mass
of dukedoms, now forming a compact body in the center of Asia Minor,
with a common life and national instinct, which was soon to weld
them into a new Armenian kingdom, as true and real a one as the
old, Armenians under an Armenian prince, but in a wholly different
territory, south and southwest of the former. Among the great barons
of this district was one Rupen (Reuben), a relative of the slain Kakig;
it is said that he saw him hanged. At any rate, no sooner was the deed
accomplished than he retired to the mountains of Northeastern Cilicia,
and raised the standard of Armenian independence, with himself as
king. There was absolutely no reason why it should not be gained;
the Seljuk conquests had cut the Armenian districts wholly off from
the Greek Empire, so that a Greek army could not come upon them to
punish them for revolt without traversing at least a hundred miles
of Turkish or other Mohammedan territory. The Armenian settlements
were an island in a sea of Mohammedanism. The new kingdom of Cilicia
or Lesser Armenia grew with a rapidity that would seem miraculous,
only it was a mere coalescing of the fragments of Armenia into their
old unity; in no long time it had spread east to the Euphrates,
taking in Melitene (Malatia), and Samosata, north fully half way to
the Black Sea, and south to the Mediterranean, occupying the coast
from Tarsus almost to Antioch. This kingdom played a part of the first
importance in the history of Asia Minor for close on three centuries;
its territories were gradually whittled away by Turks and Mongols, but
it kept the Eastern Mediterranean open for Christian action against the
Mohammedans to the last. To their shame, the Byzantine emperors were
much more hostile to it than to the Turks, with whom they often allied
themselves against it; for some years it was vassal to the Byzantine
Empire; later it was overwhelmed by the Mameluke deluge from Egypt,
and allied itself with Jenghiz Khan's Mongol hordes against them;
but the Mongols passed and the Mamelukes remained, and exacted a
terrible vengeance, putting an end to the kingdom with the usual
horrors of Oriental conquest in 1375.
Rupen's son Constantine succeeded him. It was by his help that
the leaders of the first crusade captured Antioch. Constantine was
succeeded by his two sons, Leo and Theodore jointly, but finally
Leo reigned alone; he was an able prince, fought the Saracens with
success, and much enlarged his kingdom, and at last made a naval
attack on Isaurian Seleucia, the frontier fortress of the Byzantine
Empire in this part, and an important seaport. This brought "Handsome
John," the ablest of the Comnenian line of Byzantine Emperors, into
the field; he stormed the Cilician seaports, and then reduced the
chief interior fortresses; Leo fled to the Taurus Mountains, but was
captured, and died in captivity at Constantinople. His son Rupen had
his eyes put out on a charge of treason, and died of it; but his other
son, Toros, escaped, and after John's death restored the Cilician
kingdom, which had temporarily been made vassal by John. Toros is
the glory of the whole Rupenian line; he was of the first rank, both
as a general and a statesman. He scarcely ever suffered a military
reverse. He beat the Byzantine armies in campaign after campaign, and
the Seljuks as well; under him the new Armenia was almost a match for
all its enemies combined, and no one of them dreamed of attacking it
single-handed. Levon was another able ruler, who maintained the power
and prosperity of the kingdom; he was an ally of the great Emperor
Frederick Barbarossa in the Third Crusade, assisted him in capturing
Iconium (1190), and both Frederick and the Greek Emperor Alexius III
sent him crowns,--the second no great honor, as Alexius was one of
the most contemptible of human beings. In Levon's time the capital
of the kingdom was Cis, where there is now a great Armenian monastery
with rare manuscripts, the residence of a Catholicos. The changes in
the extent of the kingdom are very curious; perhaps most curious of
all (since the Armenians were always a race of inland and highland
farmers, not seamen), the new kingdom was gradually crowded down on
the north and lost two-thirds of its territory in that direction,
but steadily extended along the coast until it came to include not
only all Cilicia but all of old Isauria clear to its western mountain
barrier; hundreds of miles of seaboard, from close to Antioch on the
one side, to far west of Cyprus on the other, being indeed a strong
maritime power. At the end it had lost these western coast extensions,
but still had an area larger than that of the Crimea now, a very
considerable power to hold the northeast corner of the Mediterranean.
It was during these times that the hard-pressed Armenians received
promises from the Popes to help them against their enemies if they
would use the Roman ritual and ceremonial, and submit themselves
to the papacy. The country never did accept Romanism, though some
churches introduced the ritual and images, and conformed to the Roman
fashion; and of course it never did get any help from the popes, who
had nothing to give but recommendations, which the temporal powers
paid no attention to.
Levon VI was the last of the line. He was a weak, easy-going man,
handsome and popular, but not of much ability; perhaps he could not
have saved his country if he had been. I have told of the Mamelukes and
their invasion; they overran the country, and treated the people as the
Turks have done lately, striking terror to them by terrific massacres,
satiating their lust on the women, and carrying off many thousands of
captives for wives or slaves. Levon was taken captive also; after some
years in Egypt, he was permitted to go free, wandered through Europe
for a dozen years, and finally settled in Paris, where he died in
1393. He was buried by the high altar of the Church of the Celestine;
the following epitaph is on his monument, which still exists to-day:
Here lies Levon VI, the noble Lousinian Prince,
the King of Armenia,
who died 1393, A.D., Nov. 23d, in Paris.
I have been dealing here with the special kingdom of Armenia, under a
regular king; but it must not be forgotten that the older sections,
ruled by Greek or Turk, were Armenia still, inhabited largely by
Armenians, in spite of emigration and Turkish settlement, and their
fortunes really part of this history. Under both Jenghiz Khan and his
successors, and Timour, every horror was let loose on the unhappy
lands. For nearly a century the first Tatar invasion cursed and
devastated it; hundreds of villages were destroyed, the inhabitants
slain or at the mercy of the savages, and vast numbers emigrated in
despair. Among others, the cities of Ani and Erzeroum were captured,
and every inhabitant put to the sword, each soldier being given
his portion to kill, so that none should escape. Timour compelled
all whom he spared to become Mohammedans. When he took the city of
Van, he threw the inhabitants from the castle walls until the dead
bodies reached to the height of the walls. A great famine followed,
and many thousands died of it; the starving wretches sometimes ate
their children or parents to sustain life a little longer. The reader
will see later whether the modern Turks have any superiority over
the hordes of the thirteenth or fifteenth century.