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1080-1375 - Lesser Armenia

The sixth part of Armenian history embraces a period of some 300 years, commencing in 1080 AD with the reign of Reuben the First. 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. Centerd 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 organization.

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.

Ruben, a scion of the Bagratid dynasty, when the kingdom in Greater Armenia came to an end, founded the principality of Lesser Armenia and Cilicia, which eventually became a kingdom. This kingdom gave hospitality to the Crusaders, on their way through Asia Minor for Palestine, and it entered into commercial relations with Venice and other European States. 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 [Rupin] the Bagratid conducted a portion of his people southwestward 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).

The Reubenian princes usually held their court in the country of Cilicia, but were not invested with the absolute power of kings. A political intercourse was maintained with the Crusaders, whom the Armenians assisted with provisions during the time of a sore famine. Notwithstanding the wisdom and valour of the Reubenian princes, Armenia was constantly distressed by internal commotions, by hordes of invaders, by the incursions of Jenkhiz Khan and the other monarchs who wielded the sceptre of Scythia, by the cruelties of the Greeks, by the irruptions of the Persians, the Egyptians, and several other aspiring foes, to whom Armenia was in turn tributary. The Reubenian monarchy was destroyed by the Egyptians, who made Leo, the last king of Armenia, prisoner, and from that time royalty was lost to Armenia.

The last decade of the twelfth century saw the establishment of two small Christian kingdoms in the Levant, which long outlived all other relics of the Crusades except the military orders; and which, with very little help from the West, sustained a hazardous existence in complete contrast with almost everything around them. The kingdoms of Cyprus and Armenia have a history very closely intertwined, but their origin and most of their circumstances were very different. By Armenia as a kingdom is meant little more than the ancient Cilicia, the land between Taurus and the sea, from the frontier of the principality of Antioch, eastward, to Kelenderis or Palaeopolis, a little beyond Seleucia; this territory, which was computed to contain 16 days' journey in length, measured from four miles of Antioch, by two in breadth, was separated from the Greater Armenia, which before this period had fallen under the sway of the Seljuks, by the ridges of Taurus.

The population was composed largely of the sweepings of Asia Minor, Christian tribes which had taken refuge in the mountains. Their religion was partly Greek, partly Armenian. Their rulers were princes descended from the house of the Bagratida?, who had governed the Greater Armenia as kings from the year 885 to the reign of Constantine Monomachus, and had then merged their hazardous independence in the mass of the Greek Empire. After the seizure of Asia Minor by the Seljuks, the few of the Bagratidae who had retained possession of the mountain fastnesses oi Cilicia or the strongholds of Mesopotamia, acted as independent lords, showing little respect lor Byzantium save where there was something to be gained. Rupin of the Mountain was prince [of Cilicia] at the time of the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin; he died in 1180, and his successor, Leo, or Livon, after having successfully courted the favour of pope and emperor, was recognised as king of Armenia by the emperor Henry VI., and was crowned by Conrad of Wit telsbach, Archbishop of Mainz, in Iiqs." The dynasty ended with Leo IV, whose "whole reign was a continued struggle against the Moslems' and who was' assassinated about 1342. "The five remaining kings of Armenia sprang from a branch of the Cypriot house of Lusignan.

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 nation 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 channels. 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 neighboring regions. The division of the Mongol conquests among the family of Gengis 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).

From the year 1226, Georgia and Armenia suffered much from the incursion of the Mogols, which continued till near the end of the thirteenth century. After the murder of Gagik, and the fall of the Bagratide dominion in Armenia Proper, Rupen, a relative of the last king, fled with his family into Phrygia, and established an Armenian principality in the Taurus mountains north of Cilicia, which gradually extended its boundaries to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It soon derived importance from the services which its princes rendered to the monarchs of Europe during the crusades. Leon II., who reigned from 1185 till 1219, was in 1198 crowned king of Cilicia, by Archbishop Conrad of Mainz, who was sent for that purpose by the German emperor, Henry VI., and Pope Cajlestinus III.; and a crown was likewise presented to him by the Greek emperor, Alexius.

The Cilicio-Armenian kingdom continued till the latter part of the fourteenth century. The last king, Leon VI., was in 1375 taken prisoner by the Mamluks of Egypt, and, after a long captivity, wandered as an exile through Europe, from one country to another, until he died at Paris in 1393.