Cilician Armenia

Cilician Armenia was the Armenian state on the southeast coast of Anatolia, in the region of Cilicia, between the Taurus Mountains and the Mediterranean. Armenian emigrants founded a principality in the Taurus in 1080, and it grew into a kingdom.¹ The Mamluks of Egypt conquered the kingdom in 1375.²¹

The land

Cilicia is a district of southern Anatolia with a rugged, mountainous west and a fertile eastern lowland. In antiquity it held the only land route from Anatolia to Syria.¹ Arabs ruled eastern Cilicia from the seventh century until 964, when the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II Phokas took it back.¹ The Seljuks took Ani in 1064 and scattered the Armenians, and the emigrants who settled in the Taurus founded the principality.³⁴

The dynasties

The Rubenid family, which first ruled as barons, founded the state in the twelfth century. Constantine I ruled from 1092 to 1100 and Thoros I from 1100 to 1129.⁵ Levon the Great became the first king in 1199, and the Rubenids held the crown until 1226.⁵² They were followed by the Hethumids, the family of the noble Oshin, who ruled until 1342.⁶

The kingdom lay on the route of Venetian and Genoese trade with the East. Frankish families who came east on the Crusades shaped its culture, and its rulers built close ties with the West.²⁶

Church and music

The scholar Mkhitar Gosh studied at the Armenian monastic community on the Black Mountain in Cilicia.⁷

The seat of the Catholicosate of the Armenian Church moved to Sis in Cilicia in 1293, where it stayed for nearly seven hundred years; its later history is told in the entry on the Catholicosate of Cilicia.⁸ The oldest dated talaran, a hymn book, was drawn up at Drazark in Cilicia in 1241 (see Khaz notation).⁹

After the kingdom

Cilicia passed to the Ottomans in 1515.¹ During the Armenian Genocide the Armenians of Cilicia were massacred, and further massacres followed in 1921, after the French withdrew from the region. The Treaty of Sèvres had given part of Cilicia to French Syria; France gave up its claim in 1921.¹⁸ The survivors, led by their Catholicos, went into exile in Syria and Lebanon.⁸