ARMENIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

ARMENIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH. An ancient nation and people in the region of the Caucasus Mountains and northeast Asia Minor (q.v.) and very much alive today, the Armenians boast of having been the first nation to convert to the Christian faith. King Trdat III (d. 330) thus anticipated the Emperor Constantine by perhaps a decade. His instructor in the new religion and later the patron saint of Armenia was Gregory the Illuminator (q.v.). He carried Christianity to his adopted people from Caesarea in Cappadocia (qq.v.), the ecclesiastical region to which the local church was subject until the beginning of the 6th c. The Armenian alphabet and early translation of the Scriptures (q.v.) into Armenian is credited to Mesrop Mastoc (q.v.). Armenian eccesiastical independence dates to their church’s refusal of the Council of Chalcedon (q.v.) at the local councils of Vagharshapat (491) and Dvin (527). Even so, contacts with Byzantium (q.v.) were never entirely broken. Throughout the Empire’s life Armenians made significant contributions as soldiers, even providing occasional emperors. They also shared Byzantium’s ultimate fall to the Ottoman Turks, though, as with the Greeks, their church continued to sustain the nation’s life and identity. In an effort to suppress the latter toward the end of the 19th c. the Ottoman Empire, already smarting from the loss of the Balkans (qq.v.), reacted with extraordinary ferocity. A series of state-inspired outrages and massacres occurred in the 1890s and again during World War I with a savagery not equaled until Hitler’s holocaust of the Jews.