Historical Armenia Research Articles

Eternalizing a Nation: ArmenianHishatakarans in the Seventeenth Century

In 1514, the first battle between the Ottomans and the newly founded Safavid dynasty took place. The Battle of Chaldiran, as it came to be known, marked the beginning of a century-long struggle between the Sunni Ottomans and Shia Safavids that would draw to a close in 1639 with the Treaty of Zuhab. The human toll of this ongoing warfare over the Caucasus and Mesopotamia would be exacted not just from the soldiers of each empire, but also from the different ethnic groups that inhabited these regions. Some caught in the midst of these conflicts had their towns and homes razed by these troops. Others were forced to relocate and resettle. The Armenians were one such group, trapped between these Muslim forces, whose material and non-material well-being was under threat. Armenians had been coping with foreign incursions for centuries. Historical Armenia had been invaded and often laid to waste by the Arabs in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, the Byzantines in the eleventh, and the Mongols and Seljuks from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. In fact, an Armenian kingdom in ancestral Armenia had not existed since the eleventh century, leaving the people of Greater (or historical) Armenia without any native sovereignty and as a politically fragmented entity. In the sixteenth century, historical Armenia had once again come to lie at the center of unremitting wars, this time fought between the Safavids and the Ottomans.

A new catalogue of earthquakes in the historical Armenian area from antiquity to the 12th century

The present contribution describes the method of work, the types of source materia] used, and the historio- graphical and historico-eismic tradition of Armenia. The catalogue' s territorial frame of reference is that of socalled historical Armenia (which included part of present Eastern Turkey, and part of present Azerbaijan). The sources belong to different languages and cultures: Armenian, Syriac, Greek, Arab, Persian and Georgian. A comparison of the local sources with those belonging to other cultures enab]es the historical and seismological I"adition of the Mediterl'anean to be "linked" with that of the Iranian p]ateau, traditionally considered as two separate areas. We analyzed historical events listed in the most recent catalogues of earthquakes in the Armenian area compiled by Kondorskaya and Shebalin (1982) and Karapetian (1991). Important and valuable though these catalogues are, they are in need of revision. We found evidence for six hitherto unrecorded seismic events. Numerous errors of dating and location have been corrected, and several new localities and seismic effects have been evidenced. Each modification of the previous catalogues has been documented on the hasis of the historiographical and literary sources and the data from the written sources have been linked with those concerning the history of Armenian cities and architecture (monasteries, churches, episcopal complexes). On the whole. the revised earthquakes seem underestimated in the previous catalogues. The aim of this catalogue is to make a contribution to the knowledge of historical seismicity in Armenia, and at the same time to underline the specific nature of the Armenian case, thus avoiding a procedure which has generally tended to place this area in a marginal position, within the wider field of other research on historical earthquakes.