Tigran the Great

Early life

Tigran was born around 140 BC into the Artaxiad dynasty, the royal house that Artashes I had founded about a century earlier. He grew up in hard times. The Parthian Empire to the east had become strong enough to press on Armenia's borders, and after a military defeat the Armenian court had to send a royal hostage to the Parthian king. That hostage was Tigran, and he spent a large part of his early life at the Parthian court.

Ancient historians treat those years as a time that shaped him. At the Parthian court the young prince watched how a large empire of many peoples was run, how vassal kings were tied to a central ruler, and how court ceremony was used to display power. Many of the ideas he later brought to Armenia — the title King of Kings, a network of dependent rulers, a new royal capital — echo what he had seen in exile.

When the Armenian throne fell vacant in 95 BC, Tigran won his release by handing Parthia a group of border valleys, often called the seventy valleys in the sources. He returned to Armenia, was crowned king, and at once set about winning back what he had given away. His parentage is uncertain. The ancient sources say so little that historians describe him variously as the son or the nephew of his predecessor.

Rise to power

Tigran's first task was to unite the Armenian lands. Ever since the Kingdom of Sophene had broken away from the rest of Armenia, the country had been split between two royal branches. Around 94 BC Tigran annexed Sophene. Western and eastern Armenia were now under a single crown for the first time in generations, and he controlled the fertile Upper Euphrates region.

Next he made his western border safe through diplomacy. Tigran married Cleopatra, daughter of Mithridates VI of Pontus, and the marriage allied the two strongest powers of the region. Each king could expand in his own direction while counting on the other to keep Rome busy. The arrangement served Tigran well for almost thirty years, and in the end it helped bring about his defeat.

With his borders secure, Tigran turned east. In the 80s BC a succession crisis weakened Parthia, and he made the most of it. He recovered the seventy valleys, pushed into Media Atropatene and Mesopotamia, and forced several Parthian vassals to accept him as their overlord instead. After these campaigns he took the ancient Near Eastern title King of Kings.

Expansion of the Armenian Empire

At its height, in the late 80s and 70s BC, Tigran's empire reached from the Caspian Sea in the east to the Mediterranean in the west, and from the Kura river in the north to the edge of Judaea in the south. It was not a unified state in the modern sense. Armenia itself formed the core. The outer regions were kingdoms and cities that paid tribute and accepted Tigran as overlord, but kept their own systems of government.

His most important gain was Syria. In 83 BC the nobles of the Seleucid kingdom, worn out by dynastic wars, invited Tigran to take the throne in Antioch. He accepted. For roughly fourteen years an Armenian king governed one of the wealthiest regions of the Hellenistic world, and the coins he minted in Antioch showed Tigran's portrait in the Armenian tiara.

The expansion brought real wealth. Whoever held Syria and northern Mesopotamia controlled the trade routes linking the Mediterranean to Iran and, beyond it, to Central Asia. Tribute and customs duties paid for a large standing army, ambitious building projects and a court that Greek and Roman writers described as one of the richest of its age.

• Sophene, annexed around 94 BC, unifying the Armenian lands
• Media Atropatene and parts of northern Mesopotamia, taken from Parthia
• Syria and Cilicia, governed from Antioch after 83 BC
• Vassal kingdoms across the Caucasus and the Iranian plateau

Tigranocerta

At some point in the 80s or 70s BC, Tigran founded a new capital, Tigranocerta, in the south-west of his empire. The date is most often given as around 83, though the sources do not fix it. The older capital, Artashat, lay in the Ararat plain: safe, but far from the new southern and western provinces. Tigranocerta was sited to govern the empire he had actually built, not just the kingdom he had inherited.

Ancient sources describe a planned Hellenistic city with strong walls, a royal palace, parks and a Greek theatre. To fill it quickly, Tigran moved in people from captured Greek and Syrian cities. This was common practice at the time, though the sources note that the resettled communities resented it. The city became a centre of Hellenistic culture, and the sources record Greek plays being performed there.

Archaeologists still debate where Tigranocerta stood, and there are several candidate sites in south-eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. Its fate is clearer. After the Roman victory of 69 BC the city was sacked, its treasury carried away, and many of the resettled inhabitants went back home. Tigranocerta never regained its brief importance.

Relations with Rome

Tigran's conflict with Rome came through his father-in-law. When Roman armies drove Mithridates VI of Pontus from his kingdom, he fled to the Armenian court, and Tigran refused to hand him over. For Rome, sheltering its most persistent eastern enemy was reason enough for war. In 69 BC the general Lucullus crossed into Armenian territory.

The war went badly for Armenia. At the battle of Tigranocerta in 69 BC the Roman force was far smaller, but it was disciplined and experienced, and it beat Tigran's much larger, hastily gathered army. The new capital fell soon after. Lucullus pushed on toward Artashat, but a hard mountain campaign, a harsh autumn and a mutiny among his own troops forced him to turn back, and Tigran won back much of Armenia proper.

The relief did not last. Pompey took over the eastern command in 66 BC and advanced with Parthian help, while Tigran's own son rebelled against him. With enemies on every side, Tigran chose to negotiate instead of fighting a war he could not win. He rode into the Roman camp, laid his diadem at Pompey's feet and accepted Rome's terms. He gave up Syria, Cilicia and his other conquests and paid a large indemnity, but kept Armenia itself as a kingdom allied to Rome.

Final years

Tigran ruled for another eleven years after the settlement with Pompey, from 66 to 55 BC. The empire was gone, but the kingdom survived intact, and so, unusually for a defeated eastern monarch, did its king. From then on, Roman writers of the time call him a friend and ally of the Roman people, and that status let Armenia keep running its own internal affairs.

He spent these last years rebuilding, and fought no more campaigns. Artashat became the capital again, the government was reorganised for a smaller state, and Tigran worked to keep Armenia balanced between Rome and Parthia without falling under either. That balancing act became the central problem of Armenian foreign policy for the next several centuries.

Tigran died in 55 BC, aged about eighty-five. His successor was his son Artavasdes II, a capable ruler who also wrote plays in Greek. Despite breaks and fights over the succession, the Artaxiad dynasty ruled until AD 12, while Armenia was pulled ever deeper into the long struggle between Rome and Parthia.

Historical legacy

Armenians remember Tigran the Great as the ruler under whom Armenia was, for a short time, a great power instead of a contested borderland. Medieval Armenian historians, above all Movses Khorenatsi, put his reign at the centre of the national story, and that view has carried into modern textbooks, literature and public monuments.

Historians today judge the reign more cautiously. The empire was put together quickly, held together mostly by tribute and the king's personal authority, and fell apart almost as quickly when Roman armies arrived. But some of what Tigran achieved outlasted it: the political unification of the Armenian lands, a period of strong growth in towns and trade, and Armenia's place in the wider Hellenistic world.

For students, the reign is also a clear lesson in the limits of rapid expansion. Tigran built a state that reached the Mediterranean in under twenty years and lost it in three, largely because its government was too thin to survive a serious defeat. The same question — how much a small country can gain and hold between larger neighbours — runs through the whole of Armenian history.