Bagratid Armenia and the City of Ani

Restoring a kingdom

Arab rule over Armenia began in the seventh century and weakened in the ninth, as the Abbasid Caliphate lost its grip on its distant provinces. The Bagratuni family had held high office by hereditary right since Arsacid times, and they used this opening skilfully. Their power rested in large part on the nakharar system of hereditary noble houses, which was older than the Battle of Avarayr and had outlasted centuries of foreign rule. They collected taxes for the caliph, kept the peace among rival noble houses, and slowly made themselves indispensable. In 885 the caliph sent Ashot Bagratuni a crown, and the Byzantine emperor Basil I promptly sent another.

The new kingdom was not a centralised state. Armenian society was built around noble houses, each with its own castles and cavalry, and the Bagratid king was the leading prince among many, not an absolute ruler. In 908 the Artsruni family set up a separate kingdom in Vaspurakan, around Lake Van, and smaller kingdoms appeared in Syunik, Kars and Lori. That is why historians speak of a Bagratid era instead of a single unified state.

Even so, the restoration brought real benefits. Noble houses fought each other less, trade routes reopened, and taxes stayed at home instead of going to distant capitals. The population grew and new towns were founded. The monasteries, which had kept learning alive through the hard centuries, could now expand their schools and scriptoria.

Ani, the city of a thousand and one churches

In 961 King Ashot III moved the royal seat to Ani, and his successors turned a hilltop fortress into a capital. Smbat II, who reigned from 977 to 989, built the outer walls. Gagik I completed a building programme that gave the city cathedrals, palaces, markets, bathhouses and bridges. At its height in the early eleventh century, Ani may have held around a hundred thousand people. That would place it among the largest cities of its time anywhere in the world.

The site is a natural fortress: a triangular plateau with deep ravines on two sides and a double line of towered walls across the third. Inside, the streets were laid out around a main thoroughfare, and clay pipes brought in water. Ani lay on a branch of the Silk Road, and merchants from Persia, Byzantium and the Caucasus came there to trade. That trade explains both the city's wealth and the scale of its building.

Later writers called Ani the city of forty gates and a thousand and one churches. The numbers are poetic, not exact. Still, archaeologists have found the remains of dozens of religious buildings inside and around the walls, belonging to Armenian, Georgian and other communities. In 2016 the ruins were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

• Became the Bagratid capital in 961 under Ashot III
• Protected by ravines on two sides and a double wall on the third
• Situated on a Silk Road branch linking Persia and Byzantium
• Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016

Architecture and the arts

The cathedral of Ani, completed around 1001 by the architect Trdat, is the most celebrated building of the period. Inside, clustered piers and pointed arches anticipate features of Gothic architecture in western Europe by more than a century. The proportions of the nave make the building feel far taller than it really is. Trdat was known well beyond Armenia: after an earthquake in 989 he was invited to Constantinople to repair the dome of Hagia Sophia.

Other buildings show the range of Bagratid design. The round church of the Redeemer once held a relic of the True Cross. Ani's building tradition also outlived the dynasty: the church of Saint Gregory, built for the merchant Tigran Honents in 1215 under Zakarid rule, still has extensive frescoes. Beyond Ani, monasteries such as Haghpat and Sanahin, founded in the tenth century, group churches, libraries, bell towers and covered halls into complexes that were as much universities as places of worship.

The same centuries produced fine manuscript illumination, carved khachkars and religious poetry. Grigor Narekatsi, a monk at Narekavank on Lake Van, composed the Book of Lamentations around 1002. This long sequence of prayers remains the most widely read work of classical Armenian literature, and people still recite it today.

Why the Bagratid kingdom declined

Internal division and imperial pressure together brought the Bagratid kingdom down. The Byzantine Empire was expanding east. It annexed Vaspurakan in 1021 and pressed claims on Ani after the death of King Hovhannes-Smbat. In 1045 Byzantine forces took the city and deposed the young king Gagik II. Byzantine officials replaced the Armenian nobility, took apart the local defences and taxed the province heavily.

The consequences came quickly. In 1064 the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan besieged and captured Ani. Seven years later the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert opened Anatolia to Turkic settlement. With the Armenian nobility gone, no organised force was left to defend the region. Ani lived on as a trading town under a series of rulers, but earthquakes, shifting trade routes and the Mongol invasions slowly emptied it. By 1735, when the last monks left, it was completely abandoned.

During these upheavals many Armenians moved south and west. In Cilicia, on the Mediterranean coast, they founded a new principality that became the Kingdom of Cilician Armenia. With its ports and its links to the crusader world, that state carried Armenian political life forward for another three hundred years.

• Succession disputes and the political fragmentation of the Armenian kingdoms
• Sustained Byzantine expansion and claims on Ani
• The weakening of local military power after Byzantine annexation
• Seljuk invasions following the Byzantine capture of Ani in 1045

The legacy of the Bagratid age

Bagratid Armenia is often called a golden age of medieval Armenian culture, and the label is fair. In a century and a half the country produced architects whose work influenced building far beyond its borders, poets whose verse is still recited, and monastic schools that trained scholars in theology, philosophy and mathematics. Much of what museums show as classical Armenian art comes from this period.

The ruins of Ani now lie on the Turkish side of the closed border with Armenia, and they remain a powerful symbol. Conservation projects backed by international bodies have stabilised several buildings, and historians and visitors come to the site from around the world. Its skyline of freestanding churches on an empty plateau is one of the most photographed images in Armenian history.

For students the period is well worth close study. It shows what Armenian society could achieve when it governed itself, and how quickly those achievements became vulnerable once its political structures were taken apart. The story of Ani shows how closely culture depends on institutions.