THE WAR OF VARTAN | Page 1 2 3

The cult of the Sasanians was from the beginning a political weapon against Zoroastrian Armenia, as it was to be against Christian Armenia in the 5th century. In 252, Tiridates II was murdered, tradition has it, by Anak Suren Pahlaw, a member of one of the great noble clans of Parthia and Armenia who had apparently been recruited by the Sasanians to destroy the Arsacid line. Anak, whose name means "sinful" in Parthian, consented to undertake the dreadful crime of regicide on condition that the Persians restore to him sovereignty over the ancestral lands of the Parthians.

When Tiridates was killed, the Armenian nobles hastened after the murderer and killed him by flinging him from the bridge called Tap'erakan at Artashat, and exterminated all his family except for two sons. One of these, Suren, was spirited off to Iran; the other was taken to the land of the Greeks. The saviors of the latter were, according to the historians Movses Khorenats'i and Zenob Glak, a Persian nobleman named Burdar (whose name means "carrier") and his Cappadocian Greek wife, Sophia (whose name means "wisdom"). These two raised the child in Caesarea.

Meanwhile, the Persians invaded Armenia and massacred the Arsacid royal family, but again a son was saved by his nurses and spirited off to Greek territory. The two stories are very similar, and reflect a theme common in ancient Armenian and Iranian epic literature: the murder of an entire clan except for one son, who is spirited away to safety and returns later as a man to exact vengeance. This cliche is not limited to the Armenians and Iranians; modern Greek tradition preserves the concept of the magia, the grain of yeast of the nation which miraculously survives wholesale destruction and regenerates the Hellenic people.

The death of Anak by casting from a bridge recalls the Armenian epic narrative of the Artaxiad king Artavazd, who for his sins -- he had rebuked his father, the dying Artashes -- is pulled from a bridge by impure spirits called aysk'. These events, although cast in ancient epic form and therefore not likely to be accurately reported in specific detail, seem to accord in the most general terms with subsequent events. Words like Anak and Burdar seem to be epithets, rather than the names of people who really lived. Yet the son of the former and the charge of the latter was none other than St. Gregory the Illuminator.

From 252 to 293, first Ormizd-Ardeshir, then Narseh (both sons of Shapur I) reigned as Great Kings of Armenia. Both were Sasanians, and each would became King of Kings of Iran. The Arsacids were, for the time being, vanquished. The title of Great King of Armenia is found in an Aramaic inscription at Garni from Parthian times. It refers to a king who was a "son of Vologas (Valakhsh) the king." It cannot be stated with precision who this was, for part of the inscription is illegible, and several kings named Valakhsh ruled Parthia in the 1st and 2nd centuries. What is clear is that the heir to the Parthian throne has served as king of the second kingdom of the Empire, Armenia, and the Sasanians renewed the practice presumably in order to strengthen their grip on the country. The difference was, of course, that the Parthian and Armenian kings had belonged to the same family, the Arsacids, while the new Great Kings would have been regarded as usurpers.

During this period, as the Sasanians developed their methods of administration, they seem to have used a vast variety of titles, both in religious and civil functions, which are not attested from earlier times and cannot be distinguished always with precision. Their policy in Armenia seems to have been to impose their rule, but in the guise of a traditional institution. The Armenians would have none of it.

Neither would the Romans. Throughout the 3rd century, the Romans and Iranians were at war. Iranians killed or captured Roman emperors in battle, and Romans set the Sasanian capital, Ctesiphon, to the torch. Yet neither side managed to exclude the other entirely from a position of influence in Armenia. The return and coronation of an Arsacid king probably is to be seen as a compromise between the Sasanians and Romans; Narseh may have supported the restoration of the Arsacids in order to gain the support of the Roman emperor Diocletian (reigned 284-305) against his brother Varahran. The Arsacid was Tiridates III, who, we remember, had escaped to Roman territory after the death of his father. Another exile returned from the west shortly thereafter: the son of the murderer of the father of Tiridates III had converted to Christianity and received the Greek name Gregory. When did he convince the king to be baptized a Christian, and why did the king do it?

The answers to these questions may never be known. The history of Agathangelos tells us that Tiridates murdered several Greek Christian travelers (St. Rhip'sime and her companions) and cast Gregory into the pit of Khor Virab when the latter refused to participate in Zoroastrian religious ceremonies. The king was turned into a wild boar for his evil deeds, and was finally cured by Gregory with the stipulation that he -- and all the Armenians -- become Christian. This account, like that of the escape of the two principal figures of it in their youth, seems to contain more value as an epic than as history. The wild boar was the symbol of the Zoroastrian divinity of strength and valor, Verethraghna (or in Armenian, Viihagn), and the seal of the Arsacid dynasty. The imprisonment of Gregory may recall the tribulations of other saints in other Christian traditions; there existed by the late 3rd century an abundant hagiographical literature.

Christianity probably found fertile soil for development in Armenia. The Armenian Church preserves a tradition of its foundation by the Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew in the 1st century, only a few decades after the crucifixion of Christ. While the historical veracity of such a tradition may be questioned, there is no doubt that Christians had settled in the country, for in the mid-3rd century there is attested a bishop Meruzanes (or in Armenian Meruzhan) who was probably a member of the princely family of the Artsrunis and resided in Sophene. This province was in the remote southwest of the country, close to the great Christian centers of Syria and Cappadocia, and was, when not under direct Roman control, at any rate independent of the king of Greater Armenia.

Several important trade routes of the ancient world passed through Armenia, and the country's cities were marketplaces of thought as well as of merchandise. The 3rd century religious innovator Mani, whose remarkable philosophy swept the civilized world (the 4th century theologian Augustine of Hippo, in distant North Africa, practiced Manichaeism before his conversion to Christianity), is known to have written an Epistle to the Armenians in the mid-3rd century. Mani's mother was a member of the noble Parthian Kamsarakan family, a branch of which lived in Armenia.

The early centuries of the Christian Era were a time of profound spiritual ferment which saw many new sects and many conversions; most of these teachings are grouped under the general name of Gnosticism, from a Greek words meaning "knowledge," that is, inspired insight into the causes and effects of human and natural phenomena. Through such knowledge, the Gnostics hoped to attain salvation from the tyranny of the passions and the misery of earthly suffering.

We have every reason to believe from the descriptions provided by Agathangelos of temples and rituals that Tiridates III was a pious Zoroastrian, but he would not have been the first to become a Christian. Many Persian noblemen were baptized into the faith and suffered martyrdom at the hands of the Sasanian kings, for although foreigners were more or less tolerated in their alien dispensations, Iran did not suffer apostates from the native religion of the land, Zoroastrianism, to live and spread their contagion. Thus, the martyrologies written in Syriac by the Christians of Mesopotamia are replete with Persian names. One recalls also that Tiridates III had grown to manhood in Rome, where he would have been schooled in Greek philosophy and exposed to the Christian and Gnostic religious currents of the Mediterranean world. He also had no love for the Sasanians, so his conversion would not have been hampered by feelings of loyalty to the usurpers of the dominions of his ancestors.

The traditional date of the conversion of Tiridates by St. Gregory is A.D. 301, at which time the emperor Diocletian was engaged in the vigorous persecution of the Christians of the Roman Empire. It seems unlikely that Gregory would have taken a stance so provocative to such an important ally at that time. Maximin Daia, according to Eusebius, who wrote his Church History in the 4th century, attacked the Armenians, who, Eusebius adds, were Christians. This would have been circa 311, shortly before an edict was issued assuring the Christians of the Roman Empire religious freedom. It is not clear whether the Roman general was assisting Tiridates in his persecution of the Christians or whether he was fighting an already converted king. Historical evidence supports the former assumption, and the date suggested for the conversion of Tiridates and the consecration of Gregory as bishop at Caesarea is A.D. 314.

According to the chronology of Sebeos, who wrote in the 7th century, Tiridates had been crowned in 298; Gregory's consecration as bishop at Caesarea took place in the 17th year of Tiridates, 314. Sebeos places the murder of Khosrov and the deliverance of the infant Tiridates to Rome in 287; and Yeghishe, a historian of the 5th century, mentions that Tiridates' father had been killed by his brothers. The inscription of the Sasanian king Narseh at Paikuli mentions one Tirdat, King of Armenia, who congratulated him upon his accession to the throne of King of Kings in 293. It has been suggested that this Tirdat was one of the slayers of Khosrov, and that he was forgotten because of the horror of his fratricide and because his name is the same as that of his presumed nephew, Tiridates IV (who was converted to Christianity and to whom we have referred as Tiridates III above).

The 17 year of the presumed Tiridates III, the Tirdat of Narseh, would be 303, explaining the traditional date of the conversion of the Armenians. As for the date of 252 assigned to the murder of Khosrov II, it is suggested that this event was telescoped together with the flight of king Tiridates II to Rome. The above chronology, proposed by Cyril Toumanoff, answers many of the discrepancies and problems of dating presented in the Armenian texts, but some scholars still do not accept it. In presenting the history of the conversion we have sought to convey the character of Armenian epic tradition, whose ancient themes are called into service in the chronicle of the new faith. Toumanoff's revisions do not take these sufficiently into account St. Gregory is the son of Anak Suren Pahlaw -- his background is strongly emphasized in later Armenian tradition, and his descendants are buried at T'ordan, near the Arsacid necropolis of Ani, a right which would have been exercised only by the Parthian nobility. Although a universally accepted -- and acceptable -- history of Armenia in the 3rd century may never be written, it may be suggested that subsequent events show that the Armenian Church was from its very beginnings intimately linked to the dynastic structure of ancient Armenian society, its legitimacy based not only on its Apostolic foundations but upon Armenian epic tradition.

Both St. Gregory and king Tiridates were still alive in A.D. 325, when Gregory's son, Aristakes, was dispatched to the ecumenical Council of Nicaea. Although the Armenian Church participated in such gatherings and Armenia was considered a Christian land, it is unlikely that most Armenians had become Christian by that time. The 5th century historian P'austos Biuzand, in writing about the event of the 4th century, complains of attacks on churches and clergymen that were frequently inspired or led by members of the royal family. He singles out for attack King Pap (368-73), whom he blames for the murder of the Patriarch Nerses, the closing of churches, and the confiscation of ecclesiastical estates (which had been appropriated by the Christians from pagan temples; the estates of the cult of Anahit were particularly vast and rich). P'austos complains that the Armenians were Christian in name only, and that many of them went on celebrating the old rituals and singing the ancient epics in secret. An inscription in Greek from Mavafarkin, near modern Diyarbakir, invokes "the province of the gods." Some scholars ascribe this inscription to Pap, while others argue that Pap was nominally Christian and would not have consented to such usage.

Yet at the same time we find Meruzhan Artsruni, who is described as a traitor to the Armenian king but who was more likely the dynastic ruler of Sophene, exercising what he considered his proper sovereignty, destroying churches and constructing fire temples (atrushans) in their place. Vahan Mamigonian, too, is described by P'austos as embracing the laws of the Mazdezns (worshippers of Ahura Mazda, i.e., Zoroastrians). The city of Mayafarkin would have been within the region ruled by the Artsrunis at that time, and the inscription may be attributed to Meruzhan. After the reign of Pap, we find the body of the dead general Mushegh Mamigonian being taken by his grieving relatives to a tower in the hope that he might be revived by the aralezk (dog-like supernatural creatures which supposedly had brought back to life the legendary king Ara). The latter is to be identified with the dying and rising god Attis of ancient Anatolian mythology mentioned by Movses Khorenats'i in his retelling of the legend of Ara and Shamiram, and the survival of this belief gives some indication of the tenacity of pre-Christian religion in Armenia.

Later in the fourth century we find St. Mesrob campaigning against pagan customs in Goght'n (the modern district of Nakhichevan, in the eastern Armenian province of Siunik'), and Movses Khorenats'i, who lived at least half a century -- if not 300 years -- later, claims that he heard with his own ears the pagan song of the birth of Vahagn there. We have no reason to disbelieve him.

Although P'austos waxed indignant at the recitation of pagan epics, he uses them often himself in his narrative. Pap is described as having snakes which sprout from his shoulders, like the evil tyrant Azhi Dahaka of Zoroastrian legend. Pap's father, Arshak II, is shown at an interview with the Sasanian king Shapur II. Unbeknownst to Arshak, Shapur has had half the tent in which they are standing covered with soil brought from Armenia. Whenever Arshak stands on native ground, as it were, he declares to Shapur his true, and hostile, intentions. The basis of this epic theme is that soil imparts strength, and is older than the Greek myth of Antaeus. The reason for Arshak's hostility has its roots in the ancient royal code of honor to which we have alluded before: he considers Shapur a usurper of the rightful power of the Arsacids, and it is his sworn duty to avenge the blood of Ardavan, however impolitic and inconvenient it may be.

If religious tolerance had been the hallmark of Parthian rule in the Near East, a tolerance often misinterpreted as weakness or lack of inner conviction and outward orthodoxy in the practice of Zoroastrianism, then fanaticism was quickly becoming the chief characteristic of Sasanian policy. Although after the conversion of Constantine the Sasanian Empire was to face another state with a bureaucracy more systematic and a state church more aggressive than its own, the persecution of other faiths had begun, as we have seen, long before Rome became Christian. There were many Jews living in Mesopotamia, and many of the scholars whose collected utterances are preserved in the Talmud were living at the end of the Parthian period and in the 1st centuries of Sasanian rule. When Ardavan died in 226, one scholar declared gloomy "the bond (of friendship) is snapped."

There were episodes of persecution under Shapur II (reigned 309-79), but it was under Yazdagird II (reigned 438-57) that observance of the Sabbath, the holiest obligation of the Jewish faith, was forbidden. It was in the reign of the same king that Armenia was to fight the crucial battle for survival that we shall describe presently.

In 387, the Roman and Persian empires concluded formally an arrangement that had existed in fact for centuries; they partitioned Armenia between them. In Persian Armenia, the Arsacid line continued to rule the country. One of the secretaries at the court of king Vrramshapuh (388-414) was a cleric named Mesrob, later surnamed Mashdots (361-440), who invented out of Aramaic, Pahlavi, and Greek elements a clear and elegant script with which every sound of the Armenian language could be transcribed. The importance of this achievement is understood when one considers that Iran itself used a perplexing and outdated script in which words were written in an ambiguous Aramaic shorthand and pronounced in Persian; the few inscriptions we have from Armenia before St. Mesrob seem to be a variant of the same system, or Greek. With their new script, the Armenians entered a cultural golden age in which numerous theological, philosophical, and historical texts were translated from Greek and Syriac, and original compositions were written in a lucid idiom which remained the standard of Armenian style down to the 19th century; the liturgy of the Armenian Church is still chanted in 5th century grabar, or Classical Armenian. Many of the Armenian historians were, or claimed to be, students of St. Mesrob.

A number of followers of the Christian heretical teacher Nestor fled Byzantine persecution to the safety of the Sasanian Empire, which was only too glad to welcome the enemies of its enemies, Christians who were not a potential fifth column of the Roman army. As the Nestorian church grew powerful in the Persian kingdom, it was anathematized by the Council of Ephesus in 431, a judgment to which the Armenian Church adhered. In 428, the last Armenian Arsacid king, Artashes, had been ousted from the throne by Iran, and the Armenian Catholicos, Sahak, was dethroned with him. The Armenians came under pressure to accept the authority of the Sasanian-dominated Nestorian Church. The situation worsened with the coronation of Yazdagird, mentioned above.

The story begins with the conscription of the Armenian cavalry to fight for Yazdagird on the eastern frontiers of Iran against the Kushans (more likely the Hephtahalites). When the king's forces are victorious, his Magi (Zoroastrian priests) inform him that this is a sign for him to make all of his subjects of one religion; one young Armenian nakharar nobleman named Karekin has already been put to death for rebuking attackers of the Christian faith.

While the Armenian forces are still conveniently distant, the Zoroastrian high priest Denshapuh is sent to Armenia to impose heavy taxes on the Christian Churches, and the Sasanian commander-in-chief, Mihrnerseh, sends a long letter to the Armenians demanding that they accept Zoroastrianism. The religion described by Mihrnerseh in his epistle is in fact a heterodox philosophy identical to that described by the 5th century Armenian theologian Eznik Koghbats'i in his book "The Refutation of Sects", according to which both Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu were born of a single source, Zurvan, whose name means "Infinite Time." There is some evidence that this form of Zoroastrian teaching existed in Armenia, for we find a Mt. Zurvan in the country, the mention of Zurvan in a creation myth related by Movses Khoienats'i, and a reference to "four Aramazds" by the same author which may be a reference to the four aspects of Srvan. A modern Armenian legend about time as an old man on a mountain who unrolls black and white spools of thread representing night and day may go back to old beliefs concerning. Zurvan.

Hovsep, bishop of the central region of Ayrarat, replies to Mihrnarseh in a letter signed by the bishops of 17 other nakharardoms defending Christianity. The letter is read in the great Khonastan, the palace of the King of Kings at Ctesiphon, and the king orders that 10 Armenian nakharars come before him, including Vasak Siuni, the marzpan (Sasanian appointed governor of Armenia), and Vartan Mamigonian, the commander-in-chief. They arrive on Holy Saturday and ask why they are being persecuted. He replies, "You kill the fire and befoul water. By burying the dead in the soil you kill the earth, and by not doing good deeds you give strength to Angra Mainyu (Haramani)."

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