Note 14 — Chapter XVIII · ANI, AND THE ARMENIAN KINGDOM OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Ashot II. (Erkath) A.D. 915A desperate effort was made by his son Ashot to retrieve the fortunes of the Armenian arms. He expelled the Mohammedans from many of the fortified places which they had occupied, and allied himself closely with the king of Georgia, who placed the crown of Armenia upon his head. Yusuf was not slow to revenge the reverses of his adherents, and the whole country was given over to war. The wretched inhabitants fled to the mountains and the deserts; the remnant wandered about in a state of nakedness, and experienced all the tortures of famine. When winter came thousands perished in the snow. If they fell into the hands of the enemy they were either massacred or subjected to every description of torture. In many cases they were offered liberty and even affluence if they would abjure the Christian religion; but these advances were almost always without effect. Our historian relates with pride the tragic incidents of this period of martyrdom; and the profession of faith which he puts in the mouth of one of the victims is worthy of the highest conceptions of religious minds. “We are Christians,” exclaimed a young noble in the presence of Yusuf; “we believe in God, Who is Truth and Who dwells in the midst of Light without limits.” These afflictions might have excited the compassion of their Christian neighbours. But perhaps these neighbours were conscious of their own helplessness; they preferred to ride on the wave of the Mussulman invasion, and to share in the spoils of the Armenian provinces. Whole towns were destroyed and whole countrysides depopulated; while the nobles, instead of combining, were involved in civil war. This state of affairs continued for no less than seven years, exhausting the country and denuding it of cultivation. “We sow, but we do not reap; we plant, but gather not the fruit; the fig-tree bears not, and the vine and olive-tree are barren. We collect a little and abandon the rest.” Page after page our author unfolds the tale of all the miseries which were endured by himself and his countrymen. He himself was a refugee at the court of the king of Georgia, where he was in correspondence with the patriarch of Constantinople. It was the aim of Byzantine policy to unite the Christian nations of Transcaucasia with the Armenians; and the historian, as the spiritual head of the latter people, used his best endeavours towards this end. Issuing from his retreat, he made his way to the province of Taron (Mush), whence he addressed a long missive to the Byzantine Cæsar (A.D. 920 [C.]). In touching terms he entreated him to become the avenger of the Armenian Christians, whom he represented as the spiritual sons and servants of Constantine. At his instance the Byzantine court despatched an imperial legate to the son of Sembat, with the view of renewing the relations which had subsisted between his father and the deceased ruler of the Eastern Empire. Our writer met this envoy in the territory of Taron, and accompanied him to the presence of Ashot. The prince returned with the legate to Constantinople (A.D. 921 [C.]), where he was received in a manner becoming his royal rank. He was addressed as the son of a martyr and the spiritual son of the Cæsar, was arrayed in purple and invested with the insignia of royalty. Meanwhile the historian was sojourning in the province of Terjan, a district which has retained its name to the present day. He naïvely exhibits the difficulties of his position, endeavouring, as he was, to avoid complying with the pressing invitations to the imperial city which were lavished upon him by his spiritual brothers of the Greek Church. He was deterred by the fear that he would be pressed to conform to the doctrine which had been laid down at the Council of Chalcedon. His peregrinations brought him to the scenes where St. Gregory the Illuminator passed his later years in the seclusion of an anchorite. He describes the cavern where the saint lived, and where his remains were deposited, to be removed by an angel to a grave in the vicinity. His account of this lonely place, so difficult of access, agrees in a striking manner with that of a modern traveller, which it invests with an impressive reality.14 The patriarch found the district inhabited by anchorites, who maintained an altar in the holy cave.