Armenia was wholly partitioned between the ‘Great Powers’ of Rome and Sasanian Persia throughout Late Antiquity. The degree of intrusion on the part of the two imperial powers varied across time but at least in principle, every part of Armenia was under the notional rule of one or the other. Modern scholars have often been misled by the rich Christian Armenian literary tradition and have confused the construct it usually articulates with the realities of imperial rule. Late Antique Armenian literature tends to present an idealised conception of Armenia, a Christian community of believers, united around a single confession of faith, recognizing the spiritual authority of a single leader and, when required to, heroically defying an oppressive Iran. Such projections of unity have proved to be very influential over the centuries for the construction of Armenian identity, establishing and affirming the sense of a shared past, a common cultural background and an imagined ‘Armenian space’.
However we need to recognize that Armenia in Late Antiquity was always plural, contradictory and fluid, a world of rival local lordships, of different Christian confessions and practices, of multiple, contradictory historical and hagiographical traditions and of a range of engagements with and responses to Sasanian Iran. The great powers confronted one another across this fragmented political, social and cultural landscape, seeking to impose their own institutions and structures of control and administration. The surviving Armenian sources often reflect aspects of this contested, messy reality even when they are trying to project a single Christian community bravely standing up to a hostile, non-Christian, persecuting imperial power.
This paper will exploit a range of late Antique Armenian texts, notably Łazar Parpec‘i’s History, to explore how Christian Armenian authors conceptualised what it meant to be Armenian. The memory of persecution in the middle of the fifth century, and ongoing doctrinal tensions with other Christian minorities in the Iranian world, ran deep and influenced how they presented the relationship with Iran. Yet from an administrative, a legal and a cultural perspective, Armenia was integrated into the practices and norms of Sasanian Iran. In other words, Armenia may not have been as distinctive, as ‘other’, as Armenian sources assert.
