That is the political sphere. But there is also the matter of religion. In the year 301, during the reign of the emperor of the Armenians Tiridates III Arashakuni, Armenia adopts Christianity. It is the first country in the world in which Christianity attains the rank of a state religion. Conflict hangs in the air: neighboring Persia professes Zoroastrianism, hostile to Christianity, and from the south Islam will soon draw near, hostile to both. The epoch of unleashed fanaticisms begins, of religious massacres, sectarianism, schisms, medieval madness. And Armenia enters this epoch.
Armenians have their church, which is called the Holy Apostolic Armenian Church. In the centuries-long feud between the Vatican and Byzantium, they occupied a middle ground — somewhat closer, however, to the Vatican. That is why, although they belonged to the group of churches practicing the Greek rite, in Constantinople they were counted among those who had severed themselves — among the heretics even. “Their rite,” Runciman reports, “diverged in many particulars from the Greek. They readily offered bloody animal sacrifices, they began the great fast on the Septuagesima, fasted on Saturdays, and above all used unleavened bread in the Eucharist.” Because of this bread, on which they heretically insisted, they were contemptuously called “the unleavened.”
The head of the Armenian Church is the catholicos, who traditionally always resides in Echmiadzin, near Yerevan. The catholicoses have counted among their number several distinguished poets, philosophers, musicians, and grammarians. During those periods when the Armenian state did not exist — an almost permanent condition in feudal and more recent times — it was the catholicoses who represented the Armenian cause in the international arena. They performed the function of the unofficial head of a nonexistent state. From this they derived additional prestige.
A certain monk named Mashtots creates the Armenian alphabet. Mashtots’s life bears the mark of the anonymous monastic existence. He is entirely hidden by his work. Armenians always say of him “the genius Mashtots.” For this alphabet, the church makes Mashtots a saint, an act that in this case can be considered a kind of state honor. It is astonishing that the invention of a then-little-known monk could be so immediately and generally espoused. And yet it is a fact! Already, then, there must have existed among Armenians a strong need for identity and individuation. They were a lonely Christian island in a sea of alien Asiatic elements. The mountains could not save them: at approximately the same time as Mashtots’s alphabet is proclaimed, Armenia loses its independence.
From then on foreign armies — Persian, Mongolian, Arab, Turkish — will blow across this country like ill winds. A curse will grip this land. Whatever is built will be destroyed. The rivers will flow with blood. The chronicles are full of dismal images. “Armenian roses and violets have died,” despairs a medieval Armenian historian, Leo. “Armenia has become the motherland of pain. The fugitive Armenian either wanders in foreign climes or strays, hungry, over a corpse-strewn native ground.”
Vanquished in the field of arms, Armenia seeks salvation in the scriptoria. It is a retreat, but in this withdrawal there is dignity and a will to live. What is a scriptorium? It can be a cell, sometimes a room in a clay cottage, even a cave in the rocks. In such a scriptorium is a writing desk, and behind it stands a copyist, writing. Armenian consciousness was always infused with a sense of impending ruin. And by the fervent concomitant desire for rescue. The desire to save one’s world. Since it cannot be saved with the sword, let its memory be preserved. The ship will sink, but let the captain’s log remain.
So comes into being that phenomenon unique in world culture: the Armenian book. Having their alphabet, Armenians immediately go about writing books. Mashtots himself sets the example. He had barely produced the alphabet, and already we find him translating the Bible. He is assisted by another luminary of Armenian culture, Catholicos Saak Partef, and a whole pleiad of translators recruited throughout the dioceses. Mashtots initiates the great movement of the medieval copyists, which among the Armenians will develop to an extent unknown anywhere else.
Already by the sixth century, they had translated into Armenian all of Aristotle. By the tenth century, they had translated the majority of the Greek and Roman philosophers, hundreds of titles of ancient literature. Armenians have an open, assimilative intellect. They translated everything that was within reach. They remind me in this of the Japanese, who translate wholesale whatever comes their way. Many works of ancient literature survived owing entirely to the fact that they were preserved in Armenian translations. The copyists threw themselves upon every novelty and immediately placed it on the writing table. When the Arabs conquered Armenia, the Armenians translated all the Arabs. When the Persians invaded Armenia, the Armenians translated the Persians! They were in conflict with Byzantium, but whatever appeared on the market there, they would take and translate that as well.
Entire libraries start coming into being. These must have been enormous collections: in 1170 the Seljuks destroy a library in Syunik consisting of ten thousand volumes. They are all Armenian manuscripts. To this day, twenty-five thousand Armenian manuscripts have survived. Of these, more than ten thousand are in Yerevan, in Matenadaran. Whoever would like to see the rest will have to make a journey around the world. The largest collections are in the Library of St. Jacob in Jerusalem, in the Library of St. Lazarus in Venice, and in the Library of the Mekitarians in Vienna. Paris and Los Angeles have beautiful collections. Poland also once had a large collection, in Lvov, where, incidentally, there was a large Armenian printing press.
At first they wrote on skins, then on paper. They once made a book that weighed thirty-two kilograms. Seven hundred calves went into it. But they also have trifles, books small as May flies. Whoever could read and write, copied, but there were also professional copyists whose entire lives were spent behind the writing desk. In the fifteenth century Ovanes Mankasharence transcribed 132 books. “For seventy-two years,” notes his pupil Zachariash, “winter and summer, day and night, Ovanes copied books. When he reached his later years, his sight dimmed, and his hand shook and writing caused him great suffering. He died in Panu at the age of eighty-six, and now I, Zachariash, pupil of Ovanes, am completing his unfinished manuscript.” These were titans of painstaking labor, martyrs of their passion. Another copyist describes how, while going hungry, he would spend his last penny on resinous chips to illuminate the pages he was transcribing. Many of these books are masterpieces of the calligraphic art. Golden armies of small Armenian letters crawl over hundreds of pages. The copyists were also accomplished painters. The art of the miniature attains world-class heights in the Armenian book. The names of two miniaturists in particular — Toros Roslin and Sarkis Picak — shine with an immortal light. The miniatures with which Roslin decorated manuscripts in the thirteenth century have retained the full intensity of their original color, and to this day they dazzle from the pages of the books of Matenadaran.
The fate of these books is the history of the Armenians. Armenians, persecuted and exterminated, reacted to their situation in one of two ways: some went up into the mountains, taking refuge in caverns, and some emigrated, scattering over all the continents. Both groups took Armenian books with them. Because the wanderers left Armenia on foot, certain manuscripts, those that were too heavy, were divided in half. These halves often roamed to different ends of the earth.