Kingdom of Armenia

A mountain kingdom that was briefly an empire and spent the rest of its existence as the buffer two larger powers fought over. It emerged as a satrapy that stopped obeying, was ruled by the Orontids and then from 189 BC by the Artaxiads, and its geography - high, cold and defensible - let it survive between Rome and Parthia for five centuries. Tigranes the Great, ruling from about 95 to 55 BC, made it the strongest state between the two. He took Media, Syria and Phoenicia from the collapsing Seleucids, styled himself king of kings, and built a new capital at Tigranocerta populated by people deported from the cities he had captured. It lasted as long as Rome was busy elsewhere. Lucullus destroyed the army in 69 BC, and Tigranes ended as a Roman client, kneeling to Pompey and keeping his throne. For the next three hundred years the succession itself was the dispute: Rome and Parthia each claimed the right to install the king, and a compromise of AD 66 had a Parthian prince crowned by Nero in Rome. Armenia stayed Arsacid and, for most purposes, independent. Its decisive act was religious. Around 301 Tiridates III was converted by Gregory the Illuminator, and Armenia became the first state to adopt Christianity officially - before Rome and against a Zoroastrian Persia next door, which is why the alphabet Mesrop Mashtots created in 405 mattered so much. Rome and Persia partitioned the kingdom in 387 and abolished the monarchy in 428; the church kept the identity going without a state.

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