Kingdom of Armenia

Politics and institutions

The Kingdom of Armenia occupied the mountain buffer every empire needed, and its politics were the art of surviving both neighbors. Under the Achaemenids the Orontid house governed as satraps; as Alexander's empire broke apart, they slipped into kingship. Around 189 BC Artaxias, a general of the Seleucid king made king himself, founded the Artaxiad line and built the capital Artaxata on the Araxes — a city whose plan, tradition says, Hannibal himself advised. The dynasty's summit came with Tigranes the Great (95–55 BC), who took the title king of kings, married a Parthian princess, annexed Syria and raised Tigranocerta as a new capital, before Rome's generals Lucullus and Pompey broke his empire back down to the mountains.

Economy and finance

Armenia's economy lived off position: the highlands sold their position. The Araxes plain grew grain and vines, the mountains grazed horses and sheep, and the roads between Rome, Parthia, the Black Sea and the Caspian brought tolls and transit goods — Armenian horses and mules were famous exports, and the wine of the valleys older than any market. Kings minted silver in their own names — Tigranes's coins proclaim him king of kings in Greek — and the new capitals, Artaxata and Tigranocerta, were built as market cities with forcibly settled populations from his conquests. Tribute and subsidy from both empires flowed in with the politics: a client kingdom was paid to be a buffer, and Armenia learned to collect from both sides.

Society and culture

Armenian culture kept Greek forms until it invented its own script. The Artaxiad court spoke and wrote Greek; the temples of the old gods stand yet at Garni, a Hellenistic colonnade in the mountains. The conversion changed everything: after Tiridates III accepted baptism from Gregory the Illuminator, around 301 AD, churches replaced temples, and in about 405 Mesrop Mashtots cut the Armenian alphabet — thirty-six letters — so that scripture and liturgy could live in the people's own tongue; the translation of the Bible that followed is called the queen of translations. Court chronicles began in the fifth century, and the monasteries founded in the kingdom's last decades became the conservatories where Armenian identity survived the kingdoms that followed.

Military and frontiers

Armenia's wars were the great powers' wars fought on Armenian ground. Tigranes the Great built his empire by conquest — Syria, Phoenicia, the lands to the Caspian — and lost it in two Roman campaigns: Lucullus's veterans took Tigranocerta in 69 BC, and Pompey left him a mountain kingdom. The Artaxiads fell by dynastic murder; the Arsacids that followed rarely fought as principals — Armenian cavalry rode for both Rome and Parthia — and the crown was settled by treaty: in 63 AD the Rhandeia agreement made Armenia an Arsacid kingdom crowned by Rome. Tiridates I traveled to Rome to receive the diadem from Nero in 66 AD, a spectacle the capital had not seen before. The partition of 387 and the abolition of 428 were, by Armenian standards, peaceful.

Foreign relations

Armenia's diplomacy was the classic small-state strategy between giants: marry both sides, crown with one, bury with the other, and convert when the moment served. The Artaxiads married into Parthia's royal house while trading with Rome; the Arsacids were Parthian princes who accepted Roman coronation, and Rome accepted the arrangement as the price of peace on the Euphrates. The Christian conversion of about 301 pulled Armenia toward Rome's world and away from Zoroastrian Persia — a spiritual choice with a border on it, as the persecutions of the fifth century showed. In 387 the two empires simply divided the kingdom between them; in 428 the Persians abolished the crown at the nobility's own request, and the monarchy ended without a battle.

Legacy and influence

Armenia's fall in 428 was the beginning of its longest institution. The marzpanate that followed kept Armenian law and the nakharar nobility under a Persian viceroy, and the church — catholicosate of Etchmiadzin — became the state the state had ceased to be: the alphabet of 405, the schools, the translated Bible and the chroniclers carried the nation through Persian, Arab, Seljuk, Mongol and Ottoman rule. The memory of Tigranes the Great, the martyr-kings and the first Christian kingdom anchored modern Armenia's self-understanding, and the medieval kingdoms of Cilicia and the Bagratids claimed the Artaxiad line. In world history, Armenia stands as the case study of the buffer state that outlived its buffers: Rome and Persia are gone; the alphabet, the church and the highlands remain.