The history of Armenia Summarized

This video on the history of Armenia is sponsored by Squarespace. If you need a new, beautiful-looking website, go to squarespace.com forward slash epimetheus. Armenia is a landlocked nation of approximately 3 million people, located in the southern Caucasus mountain region of Eurasia. It is enveloped by Iran, Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Although the modern nation-state of Armenia formed in the 20th century, the region was settled far back in prehistoric times, with some of the earliest permanent human settlements on the planet found there, as well as the earliest remains of a winery and a shoe being found in Armenia. Out of these early cultures developed many small independent city-states, which were protected but disunited because of the mountainous naturally defensible terrain. These same mountains were rich in a variety of metals, especially silver and copper. One of the components needed for the smelting of the alloy bronze. To the south and west, large expansionist empires formed that began to encroach and raid the mountain people's territory, who in response formed formidable coalitions of kings and tribes, which were largely effective in confronting their imperial neighbors. The Assyrians who campaigned in the north, seeking to acquire precious and more utilitarian metals, referred to the small states and coalitions of this region as the Kings of Neri. Over the course of several hundred years, these principalities merged into larger and larger states in response to the threat that the Assyrian Empire posed to them. And by the 9th century BC, these had coalesced into the large kingdom of Urartu, also called the Kingdom of Van, which proved to be the most frequent and arguably the most formidable adversary of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Urartu developed a heavily centralized state, which introduced a standardized calendar, written language, law code, and system of weights and measures, largely unifying the fractured microcultures that had previously existed, with much of the cities and land being administered by the king's royal bureaucracy that oversaw a constant stream of building projects, including a new capital city and an expansive stone-built irrigation system. Urartu's greatest strategic advantage was their ability to rapidly construct and rebuild high-quality fortifications at a higher rate than Assyria could besiege and dismantle them. The basis of the Urartian economy were their skilled metalworkers that exported large amounts of raw and finished metalware throughout the Near East and Mediterranean. After centuries of near-constant war with Assyria and surviving several major nomadic invasions, Urartu steadily declined throughout the 7th century BC. Becoming a nominal vassal of Assyria, both were conquered by the Median Empire, who destroyed the Urartian commercial and political capital city of Van, effectively ending that state. The Medes loosely controlled the region for less than 40 years, in which time they promoted a new royal house, native to the north of Urartu, which spoke an early form of Proto-Armenian. The Medes were overthrown by the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which established a more direct rule over Armenia, which was mentioned for the first time by that name in writing by the Persian king Darius, who recounts putting down a rebellion in Armenia. Over time, the Armenian royal house intermarried with the Persians and loyally served in the army, primarily as a cavalry contingent led by their king. During his first Armenian dynasty, the majority of the country converted to the Iranian Zohar-Astrian faith. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Persian Empire, Armenia fell under the influence of the Seleucid Empire in 312 BC, but remained largely independent and expanded its territory. Less than a century later, the Iranian Arsacid Empire overthrew the Seleucid Empire, and Armenia was able to gain its independence under the leadership of a new Hellenized dynasty. In Greater Armenia, with the western half splitting off and becoming known as Lesser Armenia, these began as very decentralized states, with the Nakharar, or local nobility, acting as autonomous rulers and wielding much of the power within the country. This disunity allowed the Arsacid Parthians to exert considerable influence within the country, even holding an Armenian king hostage and having him rule in absentee. This foreign influence caused the Armenians to unite during the reign of Tigranus II, who had spent 10 years as a hostage in the Parthian royal court before becoming king. He brought all the Nakharars underneath his control. He then defeated the Parthians and Seleucids and carved out a vast empire. He campaigned deep into Parthian territory and began to exert influence over them. When Tigranus was in his 70s, he came into conflict with Rome, who coordinated with the Parthians to attack Armenia on multiple fronts. In the aftermath of the war, he lost nearly all of his conquests and signed a treaty of friendship with Rome. He ruled till he was 85. Armenia avoided annexation by either of its imperial neighbors by strategically switching sides in the delicate balance of power, as it played a major role until 12 AD, when a chaotic period began where both the Parthians and Romans placed kings on the Armenian throne that were favorable to their empire. By 54 AD, the Parthians had firmly established members of their Arsacid royal family on the Armenian throne. Under the emperor Trajan, the Romans briefly annexed Armenia and although belonging to the Parthian-Arsacid royal family, the Armenian kings frequently sided with Rome in the many conflicts between the two empires. During the 3rd century, the Sassanid Persians overthrew the Arsacid Parthians and then conquered Armenia and imposed direct rule for a short while. Roman and Sassanid armies intermittently occupied Armenian territory. In 298, a fractured Armenia was unified and three years later, its king converted to Christianity and adopted it as the official state religion shortly after and was the first nation to do so. During the 4th century, Rome and the Persians continued to battle over Armenia and eventually the two empires concluded a treaty splitting Armenia with the Sassanids taking the eastern two-thirds. Armenia frequently rebelled and in 428, the Persians abolished the Arsacid monarchy and fully incorporated it into the empire as a province. During the centuries of conflict between Rome and the Sassanid Persians, many Armenians decided to migrate into the Roman Empire. Many joined the Roman army and rose to the highest ranks in Roman society including the imperial throne. In the mid-7th century, the Arab Caliphate conquered much of the Near East including Armenia which was administered by an annually appointed governor-general who was tasked with crushing the frequent rebellions in the province and much of the Nakharar nobility was killed during this time. In 884, the Bagratuni family successfully revolted and established a new dynasty. A year later, Ashot I was both recognized by the Caliph in Baghdad and the Emperor in Constantinople as the King of Armenia. A decade later, after a severe earthquake, the Emir of Azerbaijan temporarily annexed Armenia but were driven out with the help of the Eastern Romans and Armenia was re-established. Armenia became more of a confederation of small principalities and kingdoms rather than a single unified state. Over time, despite this, Armenia thrived as a commercial center and its new capital of Ani became known as the City of One Thousand and One Churches. This division, however, made them easier to conquer which the Eastern Romans did in 1045 and the Seljuk Turks a few years later. The brutality of these wars and the desire for independence caused many Armenians to migrate to southern Anatolia to the region of Cilicia where they established a formidable Armenian kingdom which played a pivotal role in the Western European Crusades to retake Jerusalem. During the reign of David IV of Georgia who was of the Bagrationi family, the Seljuk Turks were driven out of Armenia. The Georgian kingdom had a strong and prosperous century which was brought to an end by the Mongol invasions which caused extensive devastation in Armenia. The next 200 years saw a cavalcade of nomadic invasions by Mongol and then Turkic tribes and empires. As this chaotic period drew to a close, Armenia found itself once again split between two formidable empires with the Iranian Safavid dynasty in the east and the Ottoman Turks in the west. From the early 1500s to 1700s, Yerevan in the Armenian heartland changed hands no less than 14 times between the two empires although it was controlled by the Safavids for the majority of the time. As the Safavid Empire collapsed in the early 1700s, the Armenian Liberation Movement was led by David Beck which successfully fought off Ottoman attempts to annex the territory. Iranian authority in the region was re-established there by Nader Shah who reorganized the region into the Irvan Khanate which was a semi-independent vassal of the Afsharid, Zand, and Qajar Iranian dynasties. During this time, the region experienced a period of relative peace and prosperity it had not experienced since before the Mongol invasions. This changed in the early 1800s when it became the battleground for the last two of five Russo-Persian Wars which ended with the territory being reorganized into the Armenian Oblast or province of the Russian Empire after which point Armenians who had lived within the Persian and Russian empires for generations were encouraged to resettle in the largely depopulated country. The province was reorganized several times over a short period of time and then by 1850, it had become the Irvan Governorate. Throughout the 19th century, Armenians continued to immigrate back to the land around Lake Sevan while Muslim Turks, Tatars, Kurds, and Armenians who had converted to Islam left the region. As the Russian and Ottoman Empire became involved in a series of conflicts throughout the 19th century, the Ottoman Sultan Hamid became increasingly worried about the large Armenian population in the eastern portion of the empire as he feared they would support a Russian invasion of Anatolia if it occurred. He then ordered the large-scale mass executions of Armenian communities. He then discontinued the policy after receiving widespread media coverage condemning him in Europe and the Americas. With the outbreak of World War I, the Russians and Ottomans waged large-scale war in the Caucasus Mountains. Again fearing Armenian support of the Russian Empire, the Ottomans rounded up Armenian intellectuals and community leaders, most of whom were either executed or deported. During the war, the mass deportation of Armenians increased, which occurred under extremely harsh conditions and up to 1.5 million people are estimated to have died. In the tragic and complex events surrounding this that continued until 1920, following the Soviet Revolution in Russia, Armenia experienced a short period of independence before being annexed by the Soviet Union in the events following the Armenian-Azerbaijani War and was united with its neighboring regions into the larger Transcaucasian Soviet Republic and was reorganized in 1936 into the smaller Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. And following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, Armenia became the current Republic of Armenia. This has been Epimetheus and I would like to thank my patrons over on Patreon.com and this video's sponsor, Squarespace. If you don't already know about Squarespace, they're the solution to building your own beautiful-looking website, even if you don't know anything about web coding because it's super simple and intuitive. 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