The alliance between the Emperor Basil II and the Georgian Bagratid prince David of Tayk’ resulted in a considerable extension of David’s lands, for the emperor granted him a great tract of western Armenia stretching from Tao down to Lake Van. Successful offensives against the Arabs of Azerbaijan established David as the dominant prince in Armenia and Georgia, but upon his death without an heir in 1000 the Emperor Basil annexed the whole territory. Bagrat III, the King of Abasgia, whom David had adopted as his heir, was recompensed by the emperor, but when his father, the King of Georgia died in 1008, he inherited and united both western and eastern Georgia under a single ruler. Shortly afterwards he incorporated Kakhetia into his domain and, with the King of Armenia, defeated the Shaddadid emir of Gandza (in Caucasian Albania). By the time of his death in 1014 he had expanded his realm to incorporate further principalities, and make Georgia the paramount kingdom in Caucasia.
Internecine strife and external attacks brought about the collapse of the Armenian kingdom. Between 1018 and 1021, the country was attacked by both Daylamite raiders from
Map H.5 Venice, Genoa and the merchant empires.
Map 11.6 Armenia and Georgia c. 1000-1460.
The south and Seljuk Turks, and in 1021 King Sennacherib of Vaspurakan ceded his kingdom to the Emperor Basil II. By 1040, again by virtue of the will of the ruler Smbat III of Armenia, Ani and Armenia were likewise to become part of the empire. But local resistance prevented annexation for a few years until 1045. Having incorporated the region, the imperial government decided to stand down the local levies, leaving the country poorly defended and easy prey to Seljuk raiders who, from 1045 onward, repeatedly attacked the country. In 1064 Ani fell to the Seljuk leader Alp Arslan, and the local kings of Siunia and Kars accepted Seljuk overlordship. The Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071 sealed the fate of Armenia. A number of independent principalities - Moxoene, Arsamosata, Sasun - survived into the later twelfth century, when they were absorbed by the local Seljuk power.
As Greater Armenia suffered under Byzantine and then Seljuk pressure, the migration of Armenian nobles and their retinues, often under imperial auspices to remove the threat they posed to Byzantine influence in their homelands, called into being a Lesser Armenia, initially in Cappadocia until this region, too, fell to the Seljuks, and then in north-western Syria and Cilicia. The political origins of the kingdom lie in the refusal of its first ruler, Philaretos Brachamios, Byzantine commander of Germanikeia (Mar’as) and Melitene (Malatya), to accept the rule of the Emperor Michael VII Doukas after the defeat and capture of Romanos IV in 1071. By 1078 he also held Antioch, and shortly afterwards incorporated much of Cilicia, already occupied by transplanted Armenian nobles since the early part of the eleventh century. But under pressure from Seljuks on the one hand and the Franks of the First Crusade, on the other, Lesser Armenia broke up into its constituent parts. Only in Cilicia was there some element of continuity under the dynast of the Rubenids, who seem to have served the empire as generals during the earlier eleventh century. By the 1130s the Rubenids held all eastern Cilicia, and although temporarily defeated by the emperors John II Komnenos and Manuel, the Cilician principality consolidated. Under the kings Leo II (11861219) and Het’um I (1226-1269) Lesser Armenia became a significant local power, although they had to contend with the Ayyubids of Syria and their more formidable successors, the Mamluks of Egypt. Het’um accepted Mongol suzerainty and was instrumental in provoking the Mongol attack on Syria which culminated in the sack of Baghdad and the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, and the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 when the Mamluks defeated the Mongols.
This turned the tide, and although the Armenian kingdom retained its independence for a while longer, internal factionalism rendered it weak. The conversion of the Mongol Il-Khans of Persia to Islam in 1304 turned a former ally and protector into an enemy; under the Lusignan kings, who ruled the kingdom by bequest from 1329, more and more territory was lost to neighbouring Islamic powers, until by the 1370s only Sis and Anazarbos remained. The kingdom was finally extinguished by the Mamluks in 1375, when the king and his family were captured and imprisoned in Cairo. The region remained part of the Mamluk empire until taken by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century.
The Georgian kingdom fared better. Conflict with the empire marked the period 1014-1059, and from the early 1080s the Seljuks exercised a limited dominance. But by the 1120s the Shaddadids of Azerbaijan had been expelled from Tbilisi and Ani, the district of Kakhetia had been taken, and in the following decades Georgia grew to become the leading state in the region. By the time of Queen Thamar the Great (1184-1212) the kingdom spanned the whole Transcaucasus region from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea, chiefly because royal authority was effectively asserted over the factious noble houses of the provinces. Thriving commercial centres at fortress-cities such as Dvin, Ani, Kars, Tiflis and others brought great wealth to the crown as well, the rulers built churches and decorated them, literature flourished. This was a Georgian ‘golden age’. But the appearance of the Mongols heralded a change. A raid in 1220-1221 defeated a large royal army, an attack by the shah of Khwarizm devastated the land in 1225, and Mongol attacks in the 1240s reduced most of Georgia to vassal status. The kingdom remained autonomous, although it split into two, Imeretia and Georgia, as a result of further factional strife in 1258. By the 1320s, Georgian control over Armenia had been reduced, although close diplomatic ties were developed with the Komnenoi of Trebizond, and a number of marriage alliances were negotiated. The attacks of the armies of Timur between 1386 and 1403, however, permanently damaged the economy of the region, and with the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 Georgia was isolated from the western church with which efforts at a union had been attempted. Thereafter the kingdom sank into relative obscurity, the target of both Ottoman and Persian attacks, although it survived into the nineteenth century, when it was annexed by Russia.
World History
