Contested Space: Land, Law and Society in Early Medieval Armenia
There are two visions of late Antique and medieval Armenia which sit uneasily together: as a site of longstanding political, cultural and confessional contention, often accompanied by violence and as a site of remarkable societal resilience in the face of repeated initiatives by hegemonic authorities – Arsacid, Sasanian, Roman, and Islamic – to assert control. Many of the leading houses prominent in the fourth century were also prominent in the seventh century and some retained their prominence, seemingly unbroken, into the eleventh century and beyond. Although scholars have analysed the complex historical narratives preserved in the rich Armenian literary tradition, the juridical landscape in which these narratives played out remains largely uncharted.
Through a series of case studies, this paper explores that landscape and analyses the ownership and transmission of land across late Antique and early medieval Armenia. It proposes that the Armenian elite utilised legal mechanisms deriving from Iranian jurisprudence to define and preserve inalienable family properties. It focuses on charitable foundations set up for the soul. Since the ownership of such properties became vested in the souls of ancestors, that is, in non-human legal entities, they were insulated from alienation, division or confiscation. The right to manage and benefit from the income or profit of such property rested with the xwastagdār, the possessor of the property, a Middle Persian legal identity expressed in Armenian as tanutēr. These mechanisms were by no means universal in terms of application or form but persisted in central and eastern Armenia throughout late Antiquity and beyond. Those parts of historic Armenia under Roman control came to experience a different juridical regime – Roman law – under which land was treated as personal, not family, property, to be transferred to defined heirs at the direction of the testator or divided into shares in the event of intestacy. The provincial and legal reforms introduced by Justinian across Roman Armenia in the 530s successfully undermined the interests of the entrenched landed elite; these noble houses vanished. The extension of Byzantine power eastwards from the later ninth century saw new opportunities, and pressures, to abandon traditional mechanisms for the ownership and possession of land. Late Antique and early medieval Armenia emerges as a world of resilient local lordship not only because of its fragmented highland topography but also because of the protections afforded by these legal mechanisms against alienation, division or confiscation.
Tim Greenwood is Bishop Wardlaw Professor in the School of History at the University of St Andrews, Correspondant étranger of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France, and Fellow of the British Academy. He specialises in the study of late Antique and medieval Armenia, including interactions with, and reflections of, Sasanian Iran, Byzantium and the wider Persianate and Islamicate worlds. His most recently published co-authored research analyses an eighth-century composition, the Martyrdom of Vahan Gołt‘nec‘i. He is presently preparing a monograph on late Antique and medieval Armenian legal culture..
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East of Byzantium 