Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia

Politics and institutions

Cilician Armenia began as a refugee principality. After the Seljuk conquest of the Armenian highlands and the fall of the Bagratid kingdom, Ruben and other nobles established themselves in the Taurus foothills around 1080, with Tarsus and later Sis as their capital. In 1198 Prince Leo I was crowned king with the approval of the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, turning a lordship into a kingdom recognized by the West. The crown passed to the Hethumids in 1226 through the marriage of Isabella and Hethum I, and later to the Lusignans of Cyprus. The kingdom was never a great power; it survived by choosing protectors, first the Crusaders, then the Mongols, and by keeping its church and nobility united enough to bargain.

Economy and finance

The kingdom's wealth came from the sea. The ports of Ayas and Korikos and the river emporium of Mopsuestia connected the caravan roads of Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia with the Mediterranean, and Cilician Armenia became a clearing house for spices, silk, cotton, timber, wine and hides. Genoa, Venice and Pisa obtained quarters and tax privileges, and Italian became the language of commerce while French shaped the nobility. The kings struck silver drams and gold tagvorins at Sis and Tarsus, and foreign ducats, florins and dirhams circulated alongside them. Prosperity was real but fragile: it depended on the goodwill of the Italian republics and on the survival of the caravan trade through a region increasingly contested by Mamluks and Mongols.

Society and culture

Cilician society was heterogeneous and increasingly Western. Armenians formed the ruling class, but Greeks, Syrians, Jews, Muslims and Europeans lived in the cities, and the nobility adopted chivalry, French names, Western dress and feudal titles. The Armenian Church moved its Catholicosate into Cilicia, first to Hromkla and then to Sis, and the kingdom became the cultural center of a people whose homeland was occupied. The period produced the illuminated manuscripts of Toros Roslin and a school of castle and church architecture that influenced the Crusaders. Yet the Latinizing policies of the Lusignan kings, and the repeated attempts at union with Rome, alienated the clergy and peasantry and weakened the kingdom from within.

Military and frontiers

Cilician Armenia was a land of castles. The Rubenids and Hethumids held the Taurus passes with fortresses at Sis, Anavarza, Vahka and Lampron, and their knights fought alongside the Crusaders and later the Mongols. The army was small but well placed; its problem was that it could not fight the Mamluks alone. The disaster at Mari in 1266 cost the life of one prince and the captivity of another, and the sack of Sis followed. Tribute and truces bought time, but Mamluk raids continued, and the last strongholds fell in 1375. The kingdom's military history is thus a long rearguard action, in which geography and diplomacy replaced the mass armies it could not field.

Foreign relations

The kingdom's survival depended on alliance management. It was a client of the Crusader states, married into the houses of Antioch, Cyprus and Jerusalem, and supplied horses, guides and troops to the First Crusade. When the Mongols destroyed the Seljuk army at Köse Dağ in 1243, Hethum I chose submission rather than resistance, sent his brother to Karakorum and became the Mongols' most reliable Christian ally in the Near East. That alliance brought brief victories, including the occupation of Damascus in 1260, but it also made Cilicia a target for the Mamluks. After the Mongol defeats at Homs and Shaqhab, the kingdom had no protector left, and its appeals to Europe produced words rather than armies.

Legacy and influence

The fall of Sis in 1375 did not end Armenian Cilicia as a cultural fact. The Catholicosate of Cilicia survived, eventually settling in Antelias in Lebanon, and the lion of Cilician Armenia remains part of the coat of arms of the Republic of Armenia. The manuscripts, castles and churches of the kingdom are among the finest achievements of Armenian art, and the period is remembered as the last time an Armenian state stood on the Mediterranean. The later history of the region — Mamluk and Ottoman rule, the Adana massacres of 1909, and the dispersion of Cilician Armenians — gave the kingdom a double meaning: a lost homeland and a proof that Armenian statehood could survive exile.