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Armenian Dilemma6
Photograph by cou rtesy of the A u t h o r
The Cathedral o f the Holy Cross
,
on the island o f Aghthamar, Lake Van \During the tenth and eleventh centuries, between Turks and
Byzantines, Armenian kingdoms led a perilous life
Anthony Bryer
/ 1
‘We need stone cutters, by the thousand; Gravel carriers, water carriers
By the hundred, by the thousand. We need masons, plasterers By the hundred, by the thousand; We peed wood carvers, masters and men By the hundred, by the thousand.
Oh I am calling, let them come; He who loves God, let him come.’
S
o demandedone o f the heroes of the Armen ian epic, The Daredevils of Sassoun, when they built the monastery church o f Marouta’s High Mother o f God. The church was erected in seven days. Forty priests, forty archdeacons, forty deacons and forty candle-bearers came to consecrate the forty altars. It has been suggestedthat the foundation in Sassoun may have an echo in fact, for the building of King Gagik’s monas tery church of the Holy Cross on the island of Aghthamar in Lake Van was carried out on the same heroic scale—although it took nearly seven years of feudal corvées, rather than seven days of miracle, to complete. The church survives almost intact, the most beautiful and intricate achieve ment of medieval Armenian architecture. The marvellously blue lake, and the tall mountains that encircle it, still invest Aghthamar with the legendary quality o f Armenian epic. The hermits, who once looked down from the mountains to the changing seasons reflected on the lake, called it an earthly paradise.
!
The heart of ancient Armenia, and o f the medieval kingdom o f Vaspurkan, lay in the triangle formed by three lakes, Van (now in Turkey), Sevan (now in Soviet Armenia) and Urmia (now in Iran). Hayk, legendary and eponymous father o f the Armenian people, came to Van when the ancient Urartu held its great rock fortress. His descendants peopled the steep valleys o f Armenia and looked with awe upon the peaks of Ararat. In 301 St. Gregory the Illumin ator baptized King Tiridates of Armenia and the country became the world’s first Christian state. But it was rarely united; and Armenians, who emigrated to more prosperous lands from earliest times, look upon their independent Church as tangible evidence o f their national identity. Since it has formed the borderland o f the Roman and Persian Empires, of Byzantium and the Califate, and o f the Ottoman and Russian Empires, Armenia has always been the threshold o f conflict, the scene o f shifting spheres of influence. But for Muslim and Christian border barons, the capitals o f Constantinople and Baghdad were equally remote and a local independence and accommo dation of faith was often possible. Many Armen ians made distinguished careers in the Byzantine Empire, but as monophysite Christians, those who stayed in Armenia often found the Muslims marginally less hateful than the Orthodox Byzantines. Armenian rulers usually looked to the Califate for political recognition and protection, but kept a wary eye on developments in Byzan tium. Armenian princes competed for a precarious title to supremacy; the internal history of their lordships is o f appalling complexity.
Unlike Byzantium, with its centralized bureau cracy, Armenia and Georgia shared a feudal, aristocratic, society. Armenian chronicles are animated genealogies, interspersed with tales of conquests from outside, followed by struggles to raise, or evade, tribute. Their ruling families learned early how to survive. The greatest, the Bagratids, first appear as lords of the fortress town of Ispir on the Akampsis (Çoroh) in north eastern Turkey, in the first century A .D . For several centuries they quietly assembled castles and estates along the Byzantine frontier, becoming coronants o f Armenia. The family ramified, and eventually gave ruling dynasties to both Armenia
and Georgia; the last Bagratid king in Georgia was not deposed until 1810. The Bagratids of Afmenia achieved supremacy in 885 when Calif Motamid recognized Ashot the Great as ‘King o f Kings of Armenia’—but Ashot took good care to have his title ratified by the Emperor Basil I, for both the Byzantines and the Arabs regarded him as a sort o f vassal viceroy in Armenia.
Ashot’s kingdom lay in north-eastern Armenia. Its centres were at Dvin (where the Supreme Catholicos of the Church resided), and at Ani (where he built a splendid walled capital over looking a branch o f the Araxes). But his independence and authority depended upon his maintaining a delicate balance between his Arab and Byzantine neighbours. Ashot’s son Smbat I (890-914) was not so astute; he adopted a pro- Byzantine policy at a time when the Byzantines could do little to help him against Arab ven geance. The Calif sent his Emir Yusuf to reduce the errant vassal. In 908 Yusuf deposed Smbat and offered the crown of the King of Kings of Armenia to Hachik-Gagik Artzruni.
The Artzruni estates lay to the south and east of Lake Van. Like the Bagratids, the Artzrunis had been building up their lordship from small
b eginnings. But they were never more than the second family in Armenia. Both dynasties regarded Hayk as too humble an ancestor, but where the Bagratids eventually claimed descent from David and Solomon and cousinship with the Virgin Mary, the Artzrunis were content to trace their genealogy back to Adremelech, parricide of Sennacherib, King of Assyria. In an age when Caucasian lords ruled as clan chiefs, such formal ancestry was important. In fact, the most famous Artzruni relative may have been the Byzantine Emperor Leo V. Their family name is derived from the high office that had supposedly been bestowed upon an ancestor, that of bearing a golden eagle before the Arsacid king. The eagle became the emblem o f the Artzruni kingdom of Vaspurkan.
Hachik-Gagik Artzruni seized the bait of a crown and, as Yusuf had planned, civil war ensued, allowing the Emir to conquer Bagratid Armenia with ease. Smbat was martyred in 914. Gagik was regarded by many Armenians as an anti-king and traitor, but any pangs of conscience
The Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century, during the period o f invasions by the Seljuk Turks
he may have had were doubtless quelled when Y usuf placed on his head:
‘a crown of pure gold and artistic workmanship, adorned with precious jewels . . . He clad him in a tunic woven with gold and girt him with a belt and a sword resplendent with gold ornaments beyond imagination and description. Mounted on a horse with gilt trappings, he shone like the sun amid the stars; large companies of soldiers, armed from head to foot, stood to the right and to the left; the weapons clashed, the swords glittered, the trumpets resounded the horns blared, the flutes shrilled, the lyres gave forth melodious sounds; psalteries and banners preceded and followed him, and the soldiers of the royal army let out a mighty shout which shook the earth. With such pomp he was installed.’
The description is that of Gagik’s relative and court chronicler, Thomas Artzruni.
In 915 the Byzantines moved at last, defeating the Emir Yusuf and restoring much o f the Bagratid kingdom to Ashot II. In 9 17 Empire and Califate signed a five-year truce. But in
Vaspurkan, Gagik kept Yusuf’s golden crown and used those five years’ respite to build a magnificent palace, church and administrative centre to enhance his new royal dignity. But Gagik was still unsure o f himself and chose as his capital the tiny island of Aghthamar on Lake Van, safe from Arab, Byzantine or Bagratid attack.
The island lies two and a half miles from the southern shore of the lake and is little more than a third of a mile long. The western half is a rock rising 350 feet from the lake, leaving a platform o f about 400 by 100 yards at the eastern end. The minute size o f this, the only flat part o f the island, must be remembered when we turn to Thomas Artzruni’s grandiose account of what Gagik built upon it. The platform seems to have been levelled by the King, for, according to our chron icler, he first ‘summoned thousands o f workers and a huge crowd flocked to break up the massive and heavy rocks, rolling them into the depths of the waves’ . Gagik then built a port, part of whose
moles can still be seen in the clear, dead waters o f the lake, and encircled the island with walls and high towers that seem to have entirely
disappeared. In 9 15 :
‘The king, endowed with sublime intelligence, began to draw with his own hands (and with the help of a number of experts) the designs and plans o f his pleasure domes at the foot o f the rock which forms one end of the island, which would be worthy as a palace for his majesty. Beneath the wall he laid out streets, made cultivated terraces along the cliff-sides, built houses for his officials, planted orchards and gardens of sweet-smelling flowers in hidden valleys .. He planted groves of trees which were watered by the never-failing stream which sprang in the centre of the city by divine providence.’
‘A host of artists (Thomas Artzruni continues), honourable people drawn from all countries, gathered at the royal gate to carry out the king’s plans faultlessly . . . (Gagik) commanded one of them, who was notably skilful, to build a square palace, forty cubits broad and the same in height and length. Its walls, made of blocks of stone and lime, are three long paces thick, looking like a mass o f lead and copper molten together. From foundation to summit the palace rose, without supporting columns, like the flight of a bird; it is truly a marvel which surpasses all imagination. It has sunken vaults, delicious pavilions and wonderful galleries which are past counting, and cupolas like the arch of heaven, decorated and gleaming with gold. I f you want to admire the dome you must take off your hat, as if you were honouring a king, and then crane your neck to make out the beautiful colouring.’
‘ The architecture of the palace is utterly amazing and so exalted that it surpasses the imagination. An intelligent man may spend several hours examining a 348
single chamber; but when he left it, he would be incapable of describing everything he had seen. He finds depicted gilded divans on which the king is enthroned in splendid majesty, surrounded by young pages whose eyes shine with joy, numerous musicians and bevies of delightful girls. He sees paintings of soldiers with naked swords, wrestlers in combat interspersed with lions and other wild beasts, flocks o f birds in brilliant and varied plumage. I f one wanted to enumerate and describe everything there, the narrator and listener would soon be exhausted.’
One o f the officials on Aghthamar also told Thomas Artzruni, our chronicler, that 200,000 pounds o f iron had gone into the building o f the palace, which rose out of the tiny city like the rock that forms the other half o f the island. Gagik also excavated deep store-chambers for his treasury and formidable armoury. Thomas Artzruni’s description reminds one of the golden decorated palace which Digenis Akrites, hero of the medieval Byzantine epic, built amid luxurious gardens on the Euphrates:
‘O f worthy size, four-square of ashlared stone . . . Within he made three-vaulted upper chambers, Of goodly height, the vaults all variegated, And chambers cruciform, and strange pavilions, With shining marbles throwing gleams of light.’
Both palaces had the same kind o f wall- paintings. The descriptions are o f the ideal o f a Byzantine, or at any rate, of an oriental palace. Probably it was something like the palace called ‘The Novelty’ which Basil I built at this time in Constantinople. But, once stripped o f its hyper bole, Artzruni’s account is perfectly factual in
tone: Gagik’s palace may have been splendid beyond compare, but it was also modest in size. It was forty cubits—say twenty to twenty-five yards—square, and therefore not much larger than the palace church that survives There is a wreckage o f buildings of this size on the south side of the church, and further remains on the eastern tip o f the island.
Close to the palace, King Gagik built the church o f the Holy Cross. It is centrally planned with a tall drum and conical dome, in a style that had been evolving in Armenia since the seventh century. The shape of the exterior belies the form of the interior. Four semicircular exedrae and four three-quarter cylindrical niches are hidden in the angular mass of the walls. But the peculiar glory and fascination o f the church lies in the frieze and figure carvings that cover its exterior. This sort o f sculpture is characteristic o f medieval Armenian architecture, but no other church has a decorative programme so striking and so elaborate.
We cannot check Thomas Artzruni’s descrip tion o f the palace, but his account o f the church remains the best guide we have today. Gagik obtained the stone from the village o f Kotom, which he devastated. His architect was called Manuel and the decoration was entrusted to an unknown monk. The carvings show:
‘perfectly life-like portraits from Abraham to David and up to our Lord Jesus Christ, the series of prophets and apostles in their appointed order and wonderful to see. All round the church he designed and put together groups of wild animals and birds,
boars and lions, bulls arid bear's, Opposing each other and symbolizing their contrary natures, which greatly delights those who ponder these tfekgs. Also he carved round the sides of the church a vine laden with grapes which incorporates, in separate scenes, vineyard workers and groups of animals and reptiles, each according to its appropriate characteristic-.’
‘On the four sides (at the top of the exedrae) he depicted those especial saints, the four evangelists, forming the crown of the holy church. He showed also (on the west wall) the image of our Saviour, incarnate for our salvation and appearing as a man. Facing him is the nimbed and perfectly life-like figure of King Gagik, bearing with deep piety a model of the church in his hands, as if it were a golden vase full of manna, or a gilded casket redolent with perfume. The monarch is shown in the attitude of a man who begs forgiveness of his sins.’
‘Above the door on the south side of the church is a vaulted gallery (the south exedra) hidden from the people but accessible by stairway. It is the king’s chapel where if he wishes he can go to commune, privately with God. In the holy of holies is a chest painted in vivid colours and with doors decorated with silver and chased gold. Within are icons mounted in gold and embellished with precious stones and pearls, and many chalices which gleam brilliantly and remind one in a marvellous way of the second Jerusalem, even of the gates of Zion above.’
The reliquary has long disappeared and the royal gallery has gone within living memory, but otherwise Thomas Artzruni’s description can serve as a guide today.
The iconography of the Holy Cross carvings and o f the wall-paintings within has intrigued a number o f scholars. Professor Sirarpie Der Nersessian has demonstrated that they reflect very early Christian cycles—especially from Egypt—but are full o f local surprises. There are some curious parallels, once more, with the scenes that were supposed to have decorated the palace of the legendary Digenis.
Gagik built other palaces and churches around Lake Van, but they have not survived. His greatest political triumph came in 929 when the supreme Catholicos o f the Armenian Church, John V o f Draskhanakert (898-929), sought refuge and died in the new island capital. His first three successors as supreme Catholicos made the Holy Cross their patriarchal church. But Thomas Artzruni’s chronicle closes with Gagik’s death in 943) although it was continued by another hand,
the five Artzruni kings of Vaspurkan who followed him are shadowy figures. Vaspurkan was fragmen ted into appanages until 1003. The Bagratids swiftly recovered their supremacy and lured the supreme Catholicos Ananias of Moks from Aghthamar to Ani in 946.
During the late tenth century, Byzantium became the dominant power in Armenia. Basil II the Bulgar-slayer (976-1025) aimed to annex the Armenian kingdoms outright, rather than main tain them as useful buifer states against enemies from the East. The Seljuks were on the horizon before he died. They were a new and terrifying threat: ‘They live in the wilderness, they worship the wind . . . they have no noses,’ one traveller reported. The Armenians were equally disturbed: ‘Up to then no one had set eyes upon Turkish cavalry. Facing the enemy the Armenians saw these strange men, armed with bows and having flowing hair, like women. They were not used to shielding themselves against such infidel arrows,’ bewails Mathew o f Edessa. In 10 18 Sennacherib John, last Artzruni king of Vaspurkan, heard at Vostan of the utter defeat o f his son David at the hands o f the Seljuks. He is said to have recalled a prophecy o f St. Nerses that a thousand years after Christ’s mission a barbarian people would bring calamity. Despairingly he offered his kingdom to Basil II.
It is difficult to make out how voluntary this gift was, for Sennacherib John in fact left Aghthamar in 10 21 in the midst o f the old Emperor’s last great campaign in Armenia. The Bagratid king o f Ani was also induced to will his state to Byzantium. These annexations may have looked fine on the map, but in a very few years they brought disaster to Byzantine and Armenian alike.
Basil I I gave the Artzrunis the city and sur roundings o f Sebasteia, four hundred miles west o f Lake Van, as an alternative and safer lordship, and they moved there with a number of their subjects. The continuator o f Thomas Artzruni states that Sennacherib John and his four sons were accompanied by 14,000 men, but modern Armenian historians have interpreted this figure as 40,000 or even 400,000 refugees. The short lived Byzantine province o f Vaspurkan inherited eight towns, seventy-two fortresses and 4,000
villages. Clearly the majority of Sennacherib John’s people stayed in Vaspurkan, but the migra tion to Sebasteia marks the beginning o f the Armenian diaspora in the face of Seljuk invasion, , whose most famous Armenian kingdom in exile j was to be Cilicia, in southern Anatolia. Senna- j cherib John died in Sebasteia in 1027, but was > taken back to Vaspurkan to be buried beside his { queen Khoshkhosh in the Artzruni mausoleum, the Holy Cross monastery at the foot o f Mount Varag, near Van. Local Armenians remembered the King who had abandoned them with disgust and his tomb was stripped of its ornaments by a nationally-minded nineteenth-century Catholicos.
Sennacherib John’s sons, David and then Adam and Abusal, succeeded him in Sebasteia. Over the next half century, more refugees fled to the Artzruni fief. In 1050 came the supreme Catho licos St. Peter I Guetedarts. He had caused a sensation in 1022, when Basil I I was in Trebizond, by holding up the waters o f the local river Pyxites. Contact with the Armenian homelands was now more perilous and in 1058 St. Peter was buried not in Vaspurkan, but in the new mon astery of the Holy Cross in Sebasteia, built in imitation of Varag. In 1064 Bagratid Ani fell and the Seljuks began to close in. Next year, Adam and Abusal temporarily abandoned Sebasteia after Seljuk raiders had sacked it for eight days.
The Byzantines had long pursued a policy of settling awkward minorities far from their homes, and the pathetic Artzruni court at Sebasteia was no more out of place than the Slav villages that Basil I and II had planted elsewhere in Anatolia. Sennacherib John built the conventual cathedral of St. Nishan in Sebasteia and placed in it the Artzruni throne which he had brought from Aghthamar. Until 19 16, when it was lost in the atrocities, the throne was one of the most precious relics o f the Armenian people. But the Crooked Bridge, which Sennacherib John’s daughter built over the Halys, seems to have survived. Mary, another daughter, left for Georgia where she married George I Bagrat (1014-27).
Neither Seljuks nor Byzantines were parti cularly welcome to the Armenians. Nicephoros Comnenos, Byzantine governor o f Vaspurkan, alienated his Armenian subjects who became the hapless victims of a greater conflict. Some
Photograph by cou rtesy o f the A u t h o r
The south façade o f the church at Aghthamar, portraying the story o f Jonah and the Whale; at the left
,
he is swallowed; on the right, he sleeps under a gourd treeArmenian leaders accepted the Seljuks almost with relief, regaining their authority under the Turkish conquerors. Some took advantage of the chaos to erect transitory principalities. But for most Armenians these years were filled with misery:
‘Who can describe in detail the tribulations of the Armenian people, her sorrows and tears (asked Mathew of Edessa), for all that they have suffered under the Turks, these wild animals, blood drinkers, when our kingdom lost its true rulers who had been deposed by their false protectors, that impotent, effeminate, ignoble nation of Greeks. They destroyed our national throne and scattered our defences. Their claim to glory lies in the speed with which they ran away from the Turks, like cowardly shepherds who think only of themselves when the wolf comes.’
At the opening of the campaign season of 10 7 1, Romanos IV Diogenes passed through Sebasteia on his way east. The Artzruni princes welcomed him, but local Greeks whispered that ‘These Armenians hate us; they are more pitiless than the Turks themselves.’ Romanos deposed the princes. A few months later, he met his own devastating defeat by the Seljuks at Mantzikiert in Vaspurkan. To the Artzrunis it must have
appeared as appropriate and divine judgement upon their clumsy Byzantine overlords, prompted (it must be added) by mass Armenian desertion on the battlefield of Mantzikiert. In the next few years, the Seljuks casually overran the whole of central and eastern Anatolia. Adam and Abusai Artzruni fled to Constantinople where they were put to death in 1080. In those years all the last dispossessed Armenian rulers died: Gagik II Bagrat of Ani in 1079, his namesake o f Kars in 1080, and George II of Lori in about 1082. But in Cilicia the Roupenians were setting up a final Armenian state in exile.
Sebasteia became Sivas, first in Seljuk and then in Danishmend hands. It flourished as a trading city and its Armenians seem to have prospered under both régimes. Something o f the tolerance of early Muslim rule in Sivas can be seen in the fact that a Franciscan convent was built there in 1279, in the same decade as its great mosque. The Armenians were particularly susceptible to Catholic evangelization. But the final disaster came in 1400 when Timur took Sivas after a twenty-day siege. He dealt with the city with characteristic ruthlessness. Until recently, travel lers were shown ‘the Black Earth’ in Sivas, the
Photograph by courtesy o f the author
The tenth-century ruler of Armenia, k i n g G A G I K holding a model o f the church at Aghthamar
common grave of the 4,000 Armenians who had helped in its defence. Sivas never recovered, although it remained an Armenian centre until this century. After the year 1400, many Armenians fled to Trebizond, where there is evidence o f a refugee problem for a couple of decades. As for Cilicia, the last independent Armenian state had died with its final wandering King in 1393. From Trebizond some Armenians pushed on, to their colonies in the Crimea, or up the Danube.
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In Vaspurkan a descendant o f the Aftzrunis led local resistance against the Seljuks from Aghth amar and from Amiuk fortress above Van, for some years after 10 71. With the fall of Ani, the little island became prominent once more and some o f the most precious relics o f the Church were brought there for safety. In 1 1 1 3 David Thornikian, Archbishop of Aghthamar, mindful o f the days when the supreme Catholicos o f his Church had lived on Aghthamar, proclaimed himself Catholicos in the church o f the Holy Cross. In vain two thousand five hundred clerics gathered in Cilicia under the supreme Catholicos to condemn him. Aghthamar became the first and smallest local Catholicosate within the Armenian Church and the island a notable pilgrim centre.
In 1894 H. F. B. Lynch visited the last Catho licos, Khachatur, and found him making elaborate preparations for his own funeral. He had already set up his tombstone, which still stands near the church:
‘ I approach thee, O fair grave, with a greeting; my secrets to tell I have no tongue . . . Whatever I may leave behind me—the holy oil, the library, the cowl, the stole, the staff—I leave to serve as a memory of me for my successors. Lastly I entreat my people to be loyal to Sultan Hamid . . . Pray for me weekly for a while and forget me not.’
Khachatur died in 1895 when thousands o f his flock, accused of disloyalty to Sultan Hamid, were massacred. His stole and staff went to no successor and the Catholicosate was abolished in 1916. In that year the remaining Armenians of Vaspurkan were deported or massacred. The liturgy had been celebrated in Gagik’s church o f the Holy Cross for exactly one thousand years when Aghthamar fell silent.
Few travellers have been able to visit Aghtha mar in this century, but three years ago restrictions were lifted and, with a little determination, the island can now be reached. Almost miraculously the church has survived, but it has been uncared for for over half a century and is deteriorating rapidly. It is to be hoped that the interest shown by visitors will lead to its repair and protection from vandals, for Gagik’s church on Aghthamar can be counted among the finest of all medieval monuments.
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