The history of Armenia

Armenia is a small, landlocked republic in the South Caucasus, but the historic Armenian homeland was far larger, a high plateau stretching from Lake Sevan across eastern Anatolia to Lake Van and Mount Ararat. On this plateau the kingdom of Urartu flourished in the first millennium BCE, and Armenian kingdoms rose and fell for two thousand years between Rome and Persia, Byzantium and the caliphs, the Ottomans and the Safavids. Armenia became the first state to adopt Christianity, in the early fourth century, and its church and alphabet held a scattered people together through long centuries of foreign rule. The Ottoman genocide of 1915 destroyed Armenian life in its western heartland; the eastern part, ruled by Russia from 1828 and then by the Soviet Union, became independent in 1991, and its history since has been dominated by the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

The highlands have been inhabited since the Stone Age. In the cave of Areni-1, archaeologists found the world's oldest known leather shoe, about 5,500 years old, and one of the oldest known wineries. In the fourth and third millennia BCE the Kura–Araxes culture spread from here across the Caucasus and into the Near East. Hittite records of the second millennium mention a land called Hayasa-Azzi in the region, which some historians link to the Armenians' own name for themselves, Hay.

In the ninth century BCE the kingdom of Urartu, centred on Lake Van, united the highlands. Its kings built fortresses, canals and terraced vineyards and fought the Assyrians for control of the region. In 782 BCE King Argishti I founded the fortress of Erebuni, whose cuneiform foundation inscription is the birth certificate of Yerevan. Urartu declined in the seventh century BCE under pressure from Scythians and Medes, and an Armenian-speaking population, whose origins historians still debate, became dominant on the plateau.

The name Armenia first appears in the Behistun inscription of Darius the Great, around 520 BCE, as a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire. Its governors, the Orontid family, became kings in their own right after the conquests of Alexander the Great, first under loose Seleucid overlordship. In 189 BCE, after Rome's defeat of the Seleucids, the general Artaxias proclaimed himself king and founded the Artaxiad dynasty, with a capital at Artashat on the Araxes.

His descendant Tigranes II, the Great, who ruled from 95 to 55 BCE, built a short-lived empire that reached from the Caspian to Syria and the Mediterranean coast. He founded a new capital, Tigranocerta, and took the title king of kings. Allied with his father-in-law Mithridates of Pontus against the Roman Republic, he was defeated by Lucullus and submitted to Pompey in 66 BCE, keeping his throne as a Roman ally.

For the next six centuries Armenia was the prize in the rivalry between Rome and Iran. In 63 CE the Treaty of Rhandeia settled that a prince of the Parthian Arsacid dynasty would rule Armenia but receive his crown from the Roman emperor; Trajan briefly annexed the kingdom as a province in 114. When the Sasanian Empire replaced the Parthians in Iran, the Armenian Arsacids looked to Rome for support.

According to Armenian tradition, in 301 King Tiridates III was converted by Gregory the Illuminator and made Christianity the state religion; many historians prefer a date around 314, but either way Armenia was the first kingdom to take this step. Around 405 the monk Mesrop Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet, and a golden age of translation and writing followed, beginning with the Bible. In 387 Rome and Persia partitioned Armenia, and in 428 the Sasanians abolished the Arsacid monarchy in their larger eastern share. When the Persian king tried to impose Zoroastrianism, the nobility rebelled; at the Battle of Avarayr in 451 the commander Vardan Mamikonian was killed and the rebels defeated, but the Persians eventually accepted Armenian Christianity. The Armenian Church rejected the Council of Chalcedon, and its separate doctrine set it apart from both Byzantine and Latin Christianity.

Arab armies entered Armenia in the 640s, and under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates it was governed as the province of Arminiya, with great Armenian noble houses ruling locally and periodically revolting against heavy taxation. As caliphal power waned, the Abbasids and the Byzantine Empire both recognised Ashot I of the Bagratuni family as king in 884–885. Bagratid Armenia flourished in the tenth century. Its capital, Ani, grew into a great walled city of churches, and rival Armenian kingdoms arose in Vaspurakan, Kars, Syunik and Lori, along with the principality of Khachen in Artsakh.

The Byzantines, expanding eastwards under Basil II, absorbed the Armenian kingdoms one by one and annexed Ani in 1045. Byzantine rule was brief: the Seljuk Turks sacked Ani in 1064 and destroyed the Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071, opening the highlands to Turkic settlement.

Many Armenians moved south-west to Cilicia, on the Mediterranean coast of modern Turkey, where the Rubenid princes built a new state. Allied with the Crusaders, it became a kingdom when Leo I was crowned in 1198. Cilicia's ports traded across the Mediterranean, but the kingdom was caught between Turkish emirates and the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, which took its capital, Sis, in 1375.

In the north, Armenian princes of the Zakarid family, serving the Georgian crown, drove out the Seljuks and ruled a revived Armenian principality around Ani from about 1200. It fell to the Mongols in the 1230s and was then ruled under the Ilkhanate. The invasions of Tamerlane at the end of the fourteenth century and the wars of the Turkmen Kara Koyunlu and Aq Qoyunlu confederations devastated the plateau, and Armenians became a minority in parts of their homeland.

In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Empire fought over the highlands and divided them, a line confirmed by the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639. Western Armenia became Ottoman, while eastern Armenia, around Yerevan, stayed Persian. In 1604–1605 Shah Abbas I deported a huge Armenian population from the borderlands as part of a scorched-earth policy against the Ottomans; many died on the way, and the survivors included the merchants of New Julfa in Isfahan, whose trading network stretched from Amsterdam to Manila. Under the Ottoman millet system Armenians formed a recognised Christian community led by its patriarch in Constantinople, with a prosperous urban class but second-class legal status.

Peter the Great's Persian campaign of 1722 raised Armenian hopes of Russian protection, and in the Russo-Persian War of 1826–1828 Russia conquered the Erivan khanate. The Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828 made eastern Armenia part of the Russian Empire, and tens of thousands of Armenians from Persia and the Ottoman lands resettled there. Russia gained Kars in 1878. In the Ottoman Empire, the "Armenian Question" of reform and protection was raised by the European powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, but little changed. Armenian revolutionary parties, the Hunchaks and the Dashnaks, formed in the 1880s and 1890s. Sultan Abdul Hamid II answered unrest with the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, in which perhaps 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians were killed, and in 1909 some 20,000 more were killed in the Adana massacre.

After the Ottoman Empire entered World War I, the ruling Committee of Union and Progress turned on the Armenian population, portraying it as a Russian fifth column. On 24 April 1915 the authorities arrested several hundred Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople, most of whom were later killed; Armenians commemorate that date each year. Armenian men were massacred or worked to death in labour battalions, and women, children and the elderly were deported on death marches south into the Syrian desert, where many more died from starvation, disease and massacre in camps such as Deir ez-Zor. Assyrian and Greek Christians suffered similar violence.

Between 1915 and the early 1920s, an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Armenians were killed, and Armenian life in eastern Anatolia, continuous for over two thousand years, was destroyed. The great majority of historians and genocide scholars describe these events as genocide, and the word's inventor, the jurist Raphael Lemkin, cited the Armenian case in developing it. As of 2026 more than thirty countries, including France, Germany, Russia and the United States, have formally recognised the genocide, along with the European Parliament. Turkey rejects the term. Its official position is that Armenians died as a result of wartime conditions, disease, intercommunal violence and a relocation it describes as a security measure, that Muslims also suffered greatly in the same years, and that the question should be left to a joint commission of historians. Azerbaijan supports the Turkish position.

The Russian Revolution collapsed the Caucasus front. After the brief Transcaucasian federation broke apart, Armenian forces halted an Ottoman advance at Sardarabad, and the First Republic of Armenia declared independence on 28 May 1918. It was a desperate state, crowded with refugees and ravaged by famine, and it fought border wars with Georgia and Azerbaijan over Zangezur, Nakhichevan and Karabakh. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 promised it a large territory in eastern Anatolia, with borders drawn by Woodrow Wilson, but Turkish nationalist forces invaded in autumn 1920 and took Kars, and in December the Red Army entered Yerevan.

Under Soviet rule the treaties of Moscow and Kars in 1921 left Kars, Ani and Mount Ararat in Turkey, while Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhichevan, both claimed by Armenians, were placed in Soviet Azerbaijan, Karabakh as an autonomous region with an Armenian majority. Armenia joined the Transcaucasian republic in 1922 and became the separate Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936. Industrialisation, literacy and the planned city of Yerevan transformed the republic, but Joseph Stalin's purges killed many of its leaders, writers and clergy. About 500,000 Armenians served in World War II, and roughly 175,000 died. In 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide, mass demonstrations in Yerevan led to the building of the Tsitsernakaberd memorial.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, the Armenian-majority legislature of Nagorno-Karabakh voted in February 1988 to transfer the region to Soviet Armenia, and huge rallies in Yerevan backed the demand. Soviet Azerbaijan and Moscow refused. Within days Armenians were killed in a pogrom in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait, and in the years that followed nearly all Armenians left Azerbaijan, including after a pogrom in Baku in January 1990, while Azerbaijanis were expelled or fled from Armenia. On 7 December 1988 an earthquake around Spitak killed about 25,000 people. Armenia voted for independence on 21 September 1991, and Levon Ter-Petrosyan, a leader of the Karabakh movement, became president as the Soviet Union dissolved.

The First Nagorno-Karabakh War, fought between Karabakh Armenian forces backed by Armenia and the forces of Azerbaijan, escalated in 1992. Both sides committed atrocities, including the killing of hundreds of Azerbaijani civilians at Khojaly in February 1992. By the Russian-brokered ceasefire of May 1994, Armenian forces held almost all of Nagorno-Karabakh and all or part of seven surrounding Azerbaijani districts. About 30,000 people had been killed and more than a million displaced, most of them Azerbaijanis. The self-declared Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, later called Artsakh, was recognised by no state, including Armenia, and international law regarded the territory as part of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan and Turkey closed their borders with Armenia.

The 1990s brought blockade, energy shortages and mass emigration; the population fell from about 3.6 million in 1991. Robert Kocharyan, a former Karabakh leader, became president in 1998, and on 27 October 1999 gunmen stormed parliament and killed the prime minister, Vazgen Sargsyan, and the speaker, Karen Demirchyan. Under Kocharyan and his successor Serzh Sargsyan, Armenia allied closely with Russia, which kept a military base at Gyumri. After a disputed election in 2008, ten people died when security forces broke up protests. Protocols signed with Turkey in Zurich in 2009 to open the border were never ratified.

When Serzh Sargsyan, having reached the presidential term limit, made himself prime minister under a new parliamentary constitution in April 2018, weeks of peaceful protests led by the opposition deputy Nikol Pashinyan forced him to resign. This Velvet Revolution made Pashinyan prime minister, and his alliance swept elections that December.

On 27 September 2020 Azerbaijan launched an offensive to retake the territories, and the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War lasted 44 days. Azerbaijan, with Turkish drones and support, recaptured the surrounding districts and about a third of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, including the town of Shusha. A ceasefire brokered by Russia on 10 November left the Armenian-held remainder linked to Armenia by the Lachin corridor under Russian peacekeepers. Some 3,000 Azerbaijani and 4,000 Armenian soldiers were killed. In Armenia, the defeat brought months of protests against Pashinyan, but his party won early elections in 2021. Azerbaijani forces also advanced into Armenian territory in 2021 and 2022, in fighting that killed hundreds.

From December 2022 Azerbaijan blocked the Lachin corridor, first by protesters it described as environmental activists and from April 2023 with a military checkpoint, causing severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine for the roughly 120,000 Armenians of Karabakh. On 19 September 2023 Azerbaijan launched a military offensive, and the next day the Karabakh authorities agreed to disarm. Within about a week more than 100,000 people, almost the entire Armenian population, fled to Armenia. Armenia, the European Parliament and many human rights groups and genocide scholars described the blockade and exodus as ethnic cleansing; Azerbaijan said the residents had left of their own choice and had been offered integration as Azerbaijani citizens. The Republic of Artsakh announced its dissolution from 1 January 2024, and the remaining Russian peacekeepers withdrew in 2024.

Disappointed that Russia and the Russian-led CSTO alliance had not defended it, Armenia froze its participation in the alliance, joined the International Criminal Court and in 2025 passed a law endorsing a bid to join the European Union. Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed the text of a peace treaty in March 2025. On 8 August 2025, at the White House, Pashinyan and Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev initialled the treaty and signed a joint declaration brokered by US President Donald Trump, which provided for a transit route across Armenia's southern Syunik province linking Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave, to be developed with US involvement and named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity. Supporters hailed it as the end of a conflict of nearly four decades; critics in Armenia said it gave up the right of return for Karabakh's Armenians. Azerbaijan has made its signature conditional on Armenia removing a reference to Karabakh's unification with Armenia from its constitution, which requires a referendum.

Pashinyan's government said it had foiled several coup plots, and in 2025 it arrested senior clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan. In parliamentary elections on 7 June 2026, Pashinyan's Civil Contract won about half the vote and a parliamentary majority, though not the two-thirds needed to call a constitutional referendum on its own. Opposition parties led by Karapetyan's Strong Armenia rejected the results as rigged. At the time of the election the peace treaty had been initialled but not yet signed.