Caucasus

Bounded by mountains and seas, the great rocky knot of the Caucasus is one of the most isolated, locked off portions of Asia. It is also at its very heart. For thousands of years invaders and refugees have established themselves in its crags and hollows, maintaining their languages, cultures, and identities even as their relatives elsewhere integrated, assimilated, and disappeared. The Caucasus thus offers a bewildering range of peoples not necessarily closely related to anyone else in the world. None of these peoples have ever got on very well with one another. To this day, perhaps especially in this day, the Caucasus is a fiercely contested place and little can be said of its history which is not controversial.

The first people of the Caucasus of whom we are aware are among the very first people of whom we are aware outside Africa. They left no records aside from their bones, but they left those behind over one and a half million years ago - long before Homo sapiens. A great deal later, modern humans arrived and eventually technologies arrived from the Near East such as farming, iron-working, and cuneiform writing. The recipients of these technologies actively adapted them to suit their own culture - which they called Biainili, but which we know as Urartu. They enter history in the 800s BC, as enemies of the Assyrian Empire, the superpower of the Near Eastern Iron Age. They held their own against the Assyrians in their mountain fastnesses until some time around 600 BC, when their culture collapsed. The region came under control of the Medians of Northwestern Iran (not well known themselves) and when the dust cleared, the southern part of the Caucasus was dominated by a group of people called the Armenians, who may or may not have been in the region under Urartian rule. The northern portion of the region formed into the kingdoms of Kolchis on the Black Sea shore and Iberia inland. The inhabitants of these kingdoms had close interactions with the seafaring Greeks from the sixth century BC onwards and were the ancesters of the modern Georgians.

The whole region passed under Persian rule in the fifth century, the south passed into the rule of Alexander's successors in the early 300s BC, and then gradually drifted out of it. Around 175 BC, the Orontid vassal-kings of Armenia, a shadowy dynasty of (reputedly) Persian extraction, were replaced by the Artaxiad dynasty of (reputedly) Armenian extraction. The second Artaxiad king Tigran the Great was a massively successful king, who conquered Syria sometime around 70 BC and led armies all the way to Judaea. He ultimately butted heads with the Romans and was driven back into Armenia. His successors found themselves pinched between Rome (which gobbled up the northwestern, Georgian, portion of the Caucasus) and Arsacid Persia. Both empires aimed to conquer Armenia and, after several wars, a compromise was reached by which the King of Armenia would be a relative of the Parthian king but selected by and vassal of the Romans. More wars followed, but this compromise was always returned to, until the 200s AD when the Parthians ceased to exist and the Romans became embroiled in internal troubles. The Caucasus was largely left to itself.

Soon, a new group of refugees arrived, with new ideas and technologies. These were the early Christians, who converted the Armenian kingdom and the Georgian kingdom of Iberia in the very early 300s AD - the first countries to convert to Christianity anywhere. In both countries, the religion was accompanied by the reintroduction of writing in the local vernacular, in both countries the culture was heavily reshaped by Christian influence, yet the two conversions are almost always studied in isolation from one another. 

The Persians (now Sassanians) and the Romans (now Byzantines) returned in the fifth and sixth century, renewing their conflict over the region. The Armenians, in particular, became a vital component of the Byzantine empire providing the empire with a dynasty of emperors. The coming of Islam, however, destroyed the Persians and shook the control of the Romans. Armenia drifted into independence under the Bagratids; Georgia dissolved into principalities, eventually united into a single kingdom by the Bagrations - almost certainly two branches of the same family, their ethnic identity is now the subject of intense, anachronistic, and petty dispute. The very eastern portion of the Caucasus, came under the control of the Shirvanshahs and was thoroughly converted to Islam. 

The Armenian kingdom split into ever smaller feudal units and was conquered by the Seljuq Turks, Muslims from the Central Asian Steppe, in 1071. Much of their elite relocated to Cilicia on the Mediterranean coast, where they established a small kingdom alongside those of the Crusaders. The rest of the Armenians continued to reside in their old Caucasian homelands, under the rule of a succession of Muslim dynasties. 

Much of Georgia was also occupied by the Seljuq Turks after 1071, but not all of it. A few holds in the Caucasus mountains remained free, and from these the Bagrations mounted a counter-attack, reconquered much of the country and enjoyed a period of great prosperity. For a brief period under Queen Tamar in the early 1200s, the Georgians controlled almost the entire Caucasus. From 1220 until 1403, however, the kingdom was repeatedly attacked by the Mongols, the Mongol successor Khanates, and Tamerlane. The kingdom shattered once more.

The whole Caucasus now became the centre of a rivalry between the Ottoman Turks and the Safavid Persians, which looked a lot like the conflict between Rome and Parthia a millennium earlier. For the most part, the Ottomans had the best of it - northern Georgia had particular significance to them as the source of many of the beauties of the Sultan's harem. Not a few of these women rose to supreme power over the Ottoman realm, and, by its end, the dynasty was genetically far more Caucasian than Turkish.

Most of the region was conquered by the Russians over the course of the 1800s and became part of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The Turkish portion, which was inhabited by Armenians, was thoroughly ethnically cleansed shortly after WWI. The Soviet Union fostered ethnic identities (to a certain extent), dividing the whole region into three "Republics": Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. With the fall of Communism, the three "Republics" became the three independent Republics of the modern Caucasus... and instantly fell to fighting. Armenia now occupies part of Azerbaijan, while several portions of Georgia have seceded with Russian assistance.    

ARMENIA

GEORGIA