Making & Breaking an Urban Elite in Medieval South Caucasia: The City of Ani Between Commerce and Conquest, 1050–1350
The city of Ani has pride of place in the urban history of medieval South Caucasia. Long a fortified site, Ani rapidly urbanised between the late ninth and mid tenth centuries, to become one of the pre-eminent regional commercial centres c.1000–1300, before an equally rapid ruralisation by c.1400. Despite this pride of place, however, the city has rarely been holistically studied across its lifespan, instead divided between field-specific focuses, whether the early “golden age” under the Bagratuni kings of Great Armenia, or its later “silver age” under the Zakarian-Mkhargrdzeli princes within the Georgian kingdom. In this lecture, then, we explore the city’s trajectory as a whole by centring a different main character in the story, the non-aristocratic, largely mercantile urban elite. We’ll follow their emergence, coalescence, and dissolution, as they developed the city within wider political and economic regimes constituted by successive conquerors in a context of widespread commercialisation in the region and beyond. We’ll centre identifiable historical actors whose traces are preserved in documents inscribed into the city’s very stones, and see how their actions were as definitive for Ani’s ultimate fate as the imperial antagonists usually centred in scholarship and the popular imagination.
Nicholas S. M. Matheou is Lecturer in Global Medieval History & Marxism at the University of Edinburgh. His research explores the economic and social history of medieval Afro-Eurasia, centring the regions of Anatolia, Upper Mesopotamia and South Caucasia, and Armenian, Georgian, Greek and Persian sources, in stories such as the political economy of sedentary and nomadic state systems and long histories of commercial capitalism. His research has been published in a range of field-specific, general historical, and theoretical journals, and he is currently completing two book projects, a global socio-economic history of the city of Ani 900–1400, and a manifesto for a field encompassing the entire Afro-Eurasian Middle Ages.
This lecture will take place live on ZOOM, followed by a question and answer period.
REGISTRATION OPENS MARCH 2, 2027
