THE RUPENIAN DYNASTY.
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.