Cilicia: Pacific to Atlantic 🌍🌏
Since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabagh War, I and many in the Armenian community have taken a renewed interest in Armenian matters so I’ve decided to publish this series of essays from college. These works explore Armenian history and the wider human experience in all its beauty and disorder, glory, and despair.
This one is about European and Chinese cultural influence in the medieval kingdom of Cilician Armenia.
The Bodhisattva statues of Gandhara don’t look like those of other Buddhist societies. Their noses are impossibly straight and their bodies are muscular and draped in togas. These statues are the result of Greek influence on north Indian society after the conquests of Alexander. This kind of East-West cultural fusion would be similarly observed in the short-lived kingdom of Cilician Armenia a thousand years later, where both the far East and the far West would converge. Cilicia arose alongside Crusader states, European principalities perched next to it who served as a major influence for hundreds of years, leaving strong cultural traces that have survived in some forms to this day. Subsequently, the cultural influence from the East, specifically China, flowed from the formation of the Pax Mongolica, which promoted heavy land commerce through the well-regulated Mongol trade routes. The Crusader states and trade activity in and around Cilicia introduced to it several elements of Western culture while the Mongolian trade system influenced its artistic tradition.
The First Crusade was launched in 1095 by Pope Urban in order to alleviate the burden of war on Byzantium, appease ambitious European nobles, and relieve tensions between troubled groups in Europe. The Franks who had just arrived in the Levant created counties and principalities that bordered with Cilicia and started to form alliances with the Armenians against the Byzantines to the north and the Arabs to the south. With the help of Crusader alliances, Cilicia was slowly dominated by the Rubenids who consolidated their rule during the Third Crusade, which was prompted by Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187. As Saladin conquered most of the Crusader states and weakened Christian presence in the region, Cilicia now had new importance for the Western onlookers: kings and merchants alike. Henry VI of Germany sent Levon I a crown to be coronated in Tarsus, legitimizing Levon’s rule as king of Cilicia and symbolizing an alliance with the West. More importantly for merchants, “Cilicia was a link for several trade routes from Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. Armenian merchants made contact with other traders and opened trading houses in China and Europe.” It was in this context that Cilicia experienced its many cultural exchanges.
Cilicia was influenced by the West both through the bustling trade of its ports and its proximity to the crusader states. It is during Levon’s rule, the apex of Cilician power, that western influence became most apparent. Levon looked to the principality of Antioch, just south of Cilicia, and slowly adopted the feudal legal system. The Assizes were now used in Cilicia to “judge cases involving the court and nobility.” Furthermore, the nakharar system of Armenian aristocracy, characterized by nobles having close relationships with the king, was replaced by the Western feudal relationship of the sovereign to its vassals. Armenian knights now underwent a European knighting ceremony and took part in jousts and tournaments. Also during this time, Armenian women started dressing in European clothing, and intermarriage between Cilician aristocrats, most often women, into European noble families was very common.
Coupled with the shifting political culture were linguistic transformations that are living remains of the cultural borrowings from the West: “Latin and French terms of nobility and office were used in place of Armenian equivalents: “paron” (“baron”) rather than nakharar, and “gonstapl” (“constable”) rather than sparapet.” The codification of the Latin letters “O” and “F” into the Armenian alphabet were during this time. Other changes in language include the introduction of words like “kin” from queen, “berem” from to bear, and “oot” from eight in German. Finally, “European, particularly French names, such as Raymond, Henri, Etien, Alice, Isabelle, and Melisende, became popular among members of the royal court.” The most important linguistic development of Cilician history was the gradual formation of the Armenian vernacular in texts during this time. One conjectural cause for this is the influence of Italian and Jewish merchants, established in their ‘Fondacos’ and trading communities, bringing their own vernacular languages into the ports of Cilicia, hence encouraging Armenians to do the same. Outside of these linguistic changes, European culture had very little influence on Cilicians outside the nobility. The peasantry was detached from Western influence and the church “did its best, in the face of pressure from the throne, to keep its Eastern, Armenian character intact.”
The Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century and the ensuing period of peace, the Pax Mongolica, were instrumental in boosting Armenian trade, and with it, the introduction of Chinese motifs in Cilician art. The Mongol tribes, unified by Genghis Khan in 1206, conquered Eurasia in less than a century, establishing an empire that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea. The threat of impending destruction by the largest contiguous land empire in the world was mitigated for Cilicia by Hetum’s alliance with the Mongols in 1247 and 1253. Hetum had entered the Pax Mongolica, the stability of Mongol hegemony that facilitated human exchange and communication smoothly throughout Eurasia. During this time, the roads of the re-opened silk road “created for some 75 years a huge zone of relative stability, which allowed for an intensified exchange of ideas, goods, and people.” 20 years after the battle of Ayn Jalut, Armenian court artists were already using Chinese motifs in their illuminated manuscripts.
The Chinese motifs in question are animal representations on illuminated manuscripts commissioned by the Armenian aristocracy “the most important of which is a luxurious Lectionary, now in Erevan, commissioned in 1286 by Prince Het’um.” The motifs on the lectionary include “two pairs of lions, upright and crouching, […] and the Buddhist Wheel of the Law” and the juxtaposition of a dragon and a phoenix in the midst of a dance. The dragon and phoenix, when used in Chinese art, represent a sort of yin yang theme with the phoenix as the empress and the dragon as the emperor. According to Kouymjian, the Cilician artists who incorporated this theme were well aware of this and used it to depict the “harmony in the Cilician household,” demonstrating a thorough theoretical understanding of the motif and hence the extent to which these artists were influenced by the cultural memes of the East. The Pax Mongolica was a period of peace, prosperity, and cultural enrichment for the kingdom of Cilician Armenia as illustrated in the flood of cross-cultural illuminated manuscripts commissioned by the nobility.
There is no such thing as a pure culture. Even the lyric poetry of Greek antiquity was written in an alphabet that originated in the Levant while the columns of its temples were inspired by Egyptian predecessors. So too in Cilician Armenia, nobles of ancient families were given French titles and Christian manuscripts incorporated Chinese imagery. Cilicia’s close contact with and heavy dependence on the newly formed crusader states influenced its adoption of Western feudal laws and aristocratic customs. Its geographic location and status after the Third Crusade as a Christian enclave amidst weakening crusader states initiated a heavy flow of commerce, ideas, and culture. Additionally, its position as the westernmost end and access to the Mediterranean under the Pax Mongolica stimulated a similar influx of commerce and ideas, most notably the Chinese motifs that traveled from the courts of Qaraqorum across the highly efficient Mongol road network. Cilicia’s historical context and location allowed such a fascinating historical exchange to take place.
Bibliography:
Bournoutian, Ani Atamian and Hovannisian, Richard G., “Cilician Armenia.” The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), vol. 1.
Bajarsajhan, Dasdondogijn. “Strategic Submissions by the Armenians.” The Mongols and the Armenians: (1220–1335). Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Bournoutian, George A. “East Meets West, the Cilician Kingdom of Armenia.” A Concise History of the Armenian People: (from Ancient times to the Present). Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2002.
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Ghazarian, Jacob G. The Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia during the Crusades: The Integration of Cilician Armenians with the Latins, 1080–1393. Richmond: Curzon, 2000.
Kouymjian, Dickran. “The Intrusion of East Asian Imagery in Thirteenth-Century Armenia: Political and Cultural Exchange along the Silk Road.”The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road. By Philippe Forêt and Andreas Kaplony. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
Panossian, Razmik. The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.
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Images:
The original uploader was Artaxiad at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Creator:Henri Delaborde, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
