Landholding in the Medieval Armenian Church

Landholding in late antique Armenia is understood by scholarship as having comprised overwhelmingly inalienable allodial estates under the control of ancient aristocratic families. By the turn of the second millennium, however, a vibrant land market was underway; the challenge facing the historian is thus to account for this transformation. Because of the institutional Church’s inextricable link to these selfsame families through personnel and patronage, ecclesiastical landholding is subsumed into this wider picture and has received insufficient independent scrutiny. This paper asks how the late medieval landscape of landholding among the Armenian Apostolic Church came to be. In investigating this evolution, the paper is made up of three components. The first is a brand-new checklist of episcopal sees and monasteries, intended to outline the chronological and geographical contours of church institutions and foundations and hence tether the paper to concrete examples. The second is an analysis of rulings concerning landholding contained in Armenian canon law. The third and final element is an evaluation of the extent to which Armenian historiography, hagiography, and charters reflect or contradict the requirements of the normative texts. The paper suggests that the alienation of Church land was already underway in Late Antiquity, but that it was overwhelmingly under the disrupting circumstances of Islamic rule in the eighth and ninth centuries that the Church emerged as an autonomous actor and hence also landholder detached from the secular nobility. The subsequent re-emergence of Armenian royal houses between c. 900 and 1375 meant renewed secular challenges to this autonomy, but this was in turn partly counteracted by the continued existence of Armenian communities and institutions outside Armenian rule before and after 1375.