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859-1080 - Armenia Major

Prince Ashod of the Bagratid family built the city of Ani, near Kars, and his dynasty ruled in Armenia Major for upwards of two centuries. Under them the Armenians enjoyed freedom and made very remarkable progress in the arts of civilization. He became the founder of the Bagratide dynasty, which occupied the throne of Armenia till the year 1080. During the greater part of the tenth century, in the reign of Apas (928-951), Ashod III. (951-977) and Sempad II. (977-989), Armenia enjoyed tranquillity.

The fifth part of Armenian history comprises 160 or 220 years, commencing in 856 AD at the reign of Ashot, the first king of the race of the Bagratians. During the reigns of the Bagratian kings, Armenia was for a time allowed to taste the sweets of peace and consequent prosperity, yet she was soon disturbed by internal factions and dissensions, by the incursions of foreign enemies, and by the cruelties of those powers to which she was tributary. The calamities of Armenia were finally crowned by the barbarous oppression of the Greeks, who being actuated by a spirit of inveterate enmity excited by religious differences, committed such dreadful enormities in this unhappy land, as caused the destruction of the Bagratian monarchy, which was followed by the most horrid invasions.

The Mamluks were soon obliged to yield up their rule over Cilicia, and part of Armenia Proper, to the Ottomans. The Saracens were succeeded by Turkmans, which ever since held most tenaciously by a country which they have found peculiarly adapted to their habits and mode of life. Three times the Christians of the West, as they were rising into power upon the past civilisation of Greece and Rome, advanced to battle for the empire of the Cross through Cilicia; and fatal experience ultimately taught them to take other routes. For a time, as under the wily Alexius or the less fortunate John Comnenus, Cilicia was once more a Greek province: but the dread power of the Osmanlis was already on the ascendant; and with the exception of the temporary sway of the Mamluks, and of the devasting inroads of a Janghiz Khan or a Timur-lang, which were as evanescent as they were sweeping, and of a brief Egyptian domination in the time of Ibrahim Pasha, Cilicia since remained under the control of the Osmanlis, or of their more or less dependent vassals, the Turkman chieftains of the country.

By 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 ie 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 country became an object of contest between the Byzantine empire and the Seljukide Turks. Gagik, the last of the Bagratide kings, was treacherously killed (1079), and Armenia, though still partially governed by native princes (the Orpelians and others), became mainly dependent on the Greek empire, while in the northern provinces, the Turks, and in the southern parts, the Kurds, encroached upon its limits. The brunt of this movement fell upon the unprepared and disunited Armenian principalities.