Byzantine Culture

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Byzantium, Armenia and Georgia

Armenia and Georgia were Byzantium's Christian neighbours, allies, rivals and recruiting grounds. Church divisions, architecture, the Armenian emperors of Constantinople, and the 1045 annexation.

The Caucasus was Byzantium’s most complicated frontier. It was Christian, which made it different from every other border the empire held after the seventh century; it was divided between the empire and Persia and then the caliphate; it was a source of soldiers, generals and emperors; and it was split from Constantinople on the central doctrinal question of the age while remaining culturally entangled with it.

The relationship produced some of the best medieval architecture anywhere, a significant share of the Byzantine officer corps, and one strategic blunder of the first order.

The Church Divide

Armenia converted early — traditionally in 301, under King Trdat and Gregory the Illuminator, which makes it the first state to adopt Christianity officially. Georgia followed in the 330s.

The division came at Chalcedon in 451. The Armenian church was not represented: its bishops were occupied with the revolt against Persian attempts to impose Zoroastrianism, which culminated in the battle of Avarayr in the same year. When the Armenians came to consider the council, they rejected it, at the Council of Dvin in 506 and definitively afterwards, on the grounds that “two natures” sounded like Nestorianism — the position set out in the Christological controversies.

The Armenian Apostolic Church has remained non-Chalcedonian, one of the Oriental Orthodox churches, ever since.

Georgia went the other way. The Georgian church, initially aligned with the Armenian position, accepted Chalcedon at the beginning of the seventh century, breaking with Armenia and aligning with Constantinople. That decision set the two countries on divergent courses: Georgia inside the Byzantine Orthodox world, Armenia outside it.

Byzantine attempts to force the Armenians into communion were repeated and uniformly counter-productive, and they are one reason Armenian loyalty to the empire was always conditional.

Armenians in Byzantium

Despite the schism, Armenians were present in the Byzantine empire in enormous numbers and at every level.

The empire settled Armenian populations in Thrace and Anatolia as frontier colonists. Armenians served in the army in such numbers that some Byzantine units were effectively Armenian. And Armenians reached the summit of the state repeatedly:

  • Heraclius was of Armenian descent
  • The Macedonian dynasty, founded by Basil I, was of Armenian origin from the settled community in Macedonia — which is why the dynasty named for a Balkan province is sometimes called Armenian
  • John I Tzimiskes was Armenian
  • Numerous generals, including Narses, Vardan, the Kourkouas family and the Lekapenoi

The conventional estimate that a substantial fraction of the Byzantine military aristocracy of the ninth to eleventh centuries was of Armenian extraction is well supported. Assimilation generally meant accepting Chalcedon; those who did were Byzantines within a generation.

The Georgian Connection

Georgia’s relationship was closer and less fraught. Georgian princes took Byzantine court titles — kouropalates was practically a Georgian hereditary office — and Georgian and Byzantine dynasties intermarried.

The Georgian presence on Mount Athos is the most visible survival: the Iviron monastery, founded by Georgians around 980, remains one of the great houses of the Holy Mountain and preserves a substantial Georgian manuscript tradition. Georgian monks at Athos, at Sinai and in Jerusalem translated Greek theology into Georgian on a large scale.

Georgia’s own golden age under David IV and Queen Tamar in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries produced a state that was, for a period, the strongest Christian power in the region, and its court culture drew on Byzantine and Persian models in roughly equal measure.

Architecture

Armenian and Georgian church architecture is one of the great medieval traditions, and its relationship to Byzantine building has been argued about for a century.

The characteristic features: centralised plans, domes on squinches over a square core, conical stone roofs over the drum, and — crucially — construction in finely dressed stone rather than brick, with sculptural relief on the exterior.

Notable buildings: the seventh-century cathedral at Mren, the ruined Zvartnots (a circular tetraconch of extraordinary ambition), the churches of Ani, the monastery of Geghard cut into rock, and in Georgia Jvari near Mtskheta, Svetitskhoveli, and the eleventh-century cathedrals of Bagrati and Alaverdi.

The old argument — pressed by the Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski in the 1910s — was that these forms originated in Armenia and travelled west, and that Byzantine domed architecture was an Armenian import. The thesis was tied up with a broader and now discredited set of claims about the Aryan east against the classical Mediterranean, and it is not accepted. The current view is of parallel development within a shared late antique inheritance, with real exchange in both directions.

The external stone relief sculpture of Armenian churches has no Byzantine equivalent, since Byzantium had largely abandoned figural sculpture, as Byzantine sculpture explains.

The Annexation and Its Cost

The strategic disaster came in the eleventh century.

Basil II had brought most of Armenia and parts of Georgia under Byzantine authority by treaty, inheritance and pressure, extending the frontier beyond Lake Van. His successors completed the process: the kingdom of Ani was annexed in 1045, its king pensioned off to an estate in Cappadocia.

The Armenian principalities had functioned as a buffer, maintaining their own armed forces on the eastern approaches. The empire disbanded them, replaced local levies with a reduced imperial garrison, and alienated the population by pressing for religious conformity — all in the two decades before the Seljuk Turks arrived.

When they did arrive, there was nothing in the way. Ani was taken by Alp Arslan in 1064. Seven years later came Manzikert, fought within the territory the empire had just absorbed and disarmed.

Afterwards

Armenian refugees from the Seljuk advance moved south-west into Cilicia, where they established the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, which lasted until 1375, allied with the crusaders, and produced its own distinguished manuscript painting tradition — the illuminator Toros Roslin being the outstanding name.

Georgia survived as an independent kingdom, was devastated by the Mongols and Timur, and fragmented; its Byzantine-derived Orthodoxy remained, and the Georgian Orthodox Church is today one of the autocephalous churches described in the Byzantine rite today.

Both retain, in their liturgies, their church architecture, their manuscript traditions and their scripts, the marks of a millennium of engagement with Constantinople conducted across a doctrinal divide that neither side could close.

The Scripts

Both peoples acquired alphabets in the fifth century, and the circumstances illuminate their relationship with Byzantium.

Armenian was created around 405 by Mesrop Mashtots, a monk and royal secretary, with the support of the katholikos Sahak and King Vramshapuh. It has thirty-six original letters (later thirty-eight), designed to fit Armenian phonology precisely.

Georgian script is traditionally attributed to Mashtots as well, though Georgian tradition disputes this and the question is nationally sensitive; the earliest inscriptions date to the fifth century.

The immediate purpose in both cases was to translate the Bible and the liturgy, and the translation programmes followed at once. Armenian literature begins with the Bible translation of the 430s, and the fifth century produced Koriun, Agathangelos, Eznik of Kolb, Pawstos and Movses Khorenatsi — a national literature within a generation of acquiring an alphabet.

What is significant for the present subject is that both alphabets were created in a Christian context, with Greek and Syriac as models, and with the explicit aim of vernacular scripture. That is the same principle Byzantium later applied to the Slavs with Cyril and Methodius, described in the Cyrillic alphabet, and it is the opposite of Latin practice.

It also had a consequence Byzantium may not have intended. A people with its own script and its own scriptures has the means to maintain a separate identity, and Armenia’s rejection of Chalcedon was made durable by the fact that its church could operate entirely in its own language.

Armenian Manuscripts

The Armenian illuminated book is a major medieval tradition and deserves mention because it stands in an interesting relation to Byzantine work.

The Matenadaran in Yerevan holds some seventeen thousand manuscripts, one of the great collections of the medieval world.

The outstanding figure is Toros Roslin, active in Cilician Armenia in the mid-thirteenth century, whose gospel books combine Byzantine compositional models with a distinctive palette, an interest in landscape and a naturalism in the figures that has no close Byzantine parallel. Several of his manuscripts are signed and dated, which is rare in medieval art of any tradition.

Earlier work — the Etchmiadzin Gospels of 989, with sixth- or seventh-century ivory covers, and the Mughni Gospels — shows the same pattern of Byzantine iconography handled in a local idiom.

The Cilician kingdom’s position explains the mixture. It was an Armenian state in the eastern Mediterranean, allied with the crusaders, in contact with Byzantium, the Latin states and the Mongols simultaneously, and its art registers all of it. The same encounter is discussed in crusader art and Byzantium.

The Georgian Contribution to Athos

Iviron deserves a fuller account, because it is the clearest institutional expression of the Georgian relationship with Byzantium.

The monastery was founded around 980 by John the Iberian and his son Euthymius, with the backing of the Georgian general Tornikios, who had commanded Georgian troops for Basil II against the revolt of Bardas Skleros and endowed the house from the spoils.

Its importance is as a translation centre. Euthymius the Athonite (d. 1028) translated a large body of Greek theology, hagiography and liturgy into Georgian; George the Athonite (d. 1065) revised the Georgian biblical text against the Greek and completed the liturgical corpus. Between them they gave the Georgian church its standard texts.

The traffic went both ways: Euthymius translated the Georgian version of the Barlaam and Ioasaph romance — the Christianised Buddha legend — into Greek, from which it passed into Latin and every European vernacular. A story of Indian origin reached medieval Europe through a Georgian monk on Mount Athos writing in Greek.

Iviron also holds the Portaitissa, one of the most venerated icons in the Orthodox world, and a substantial Georgian manuscript collection. It remains one of the twenty ruling monasteries of the Holy Mountain, though its community has been Greek since the Georgian presence declined in the later medieval period.

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