While historians of the Mongol empire have focused on the Mongols' impact on China, Iran, and Russia, many other smaller peoples had dramatic experiences in the Mongol empire. Among the most important of these smaller peoples, and one whose historical experience in the Mongol empire is best documented, are the Armenians. In this new history, Bayarsaikhan Dashdondog, currently of the National University of Mongolia, tells how the nobles of Greater Armenia (the historic Armenian homeland) and the kingdom of Lesser Armenia (in Cilicia in today's southern Turkey) attempted to survive, manage, and even profit from the Mongol conquest. (In line with current official Mongolian practice, but rather confusingly, Bayarsaikhan's seeming surname, Dashdondog, is actually a patronymic, and is never used socially except for official identification purposes.)
Bayarsaikhan's work is a traditional political history. After an introduction on the sources, particularly Armenian, but also Mongolian, Persian, and Arabic, she gives background on Armenia and the Armenians on the eve of the Mongol conquest, and then describes the Mongol conquest, the modus vivendi the Armenians worked out with them, and the vicissitudes of military and political cooperation through the Il-Khanate (1256–1335), the wars with Mamluk Egypt, the Islamic conversion of the Mongols, and the eventual dissolution of the Mongol-Armenian understanding.
One of the striking features of the Mongolian-Armenian historical encounter is the great variety and high quality of Armenian histories it produced. As Bayarsaikhan writes, “The twelfth to thirteenth centuries formed one of the richest periods in Armenian historiography, giving rise to more than ten historians and chronologists” (p. 10); these sources are indeed “excellent examples of world medieval historiography” (p. 20). A few of these histories have been translated into Western languages, but Bayarsaikhan makes full use of a number of histories that have not been translated. She is also fully conversant with the secondary literature on these works, written for the most part by Armenian scholars of the Republic of Armenia in Armenian or Russian. Those already familiar with the translated versions will get a much better grasp of their backgrounds and significance through this book.
The Mongols and the Armenians is a specialist study intended for those already versed in the history of the Mongol empire and in the medieval history of Armenia. Perhaps the most valuable chapters for specialists will be chapters two through five, detailing how the noble families of Greater Armenia jockeyed for power by forming strategic alliances with difference Mongol noyad (commanders). Since Greater Armenia at this time had no unified government, its history is an accumulation of local histories and Bayarsaikhan's study is the best guide yet to these local histories. Her valuable untangling of the rise and fall of local houses is assisted by detailed maps which locate each family within the highly dissected Armenian terrain. By contrast the story of the Cilician Armenian kingdom stuck on the frontier of the Il-Khanate with Mamluk Egypt is a more familiar story, although she adds new information.
In contrast with her thorough mastery of Armenian studies, Bayarsaikhan's treatment of the specifically Mongolian side of the interaction is less thorough and less assured. Wider reading, for example, might have instilled caution about following problematic ideas such as D. Tserensodnom's identification of the Secret History of the Mongols' tammachi (permanent garrison armies) with tamghachi (a kind of tax collector), or omitting Louis Ligeti's 1962 study of the Mongolian words in Kirakos Gandzakets‘i.
In contrast to authors like Robert Bedrosian and H. Manandian who stressed the purely negative impact of the Mongols on Armenia, Bayarsaikhan argues that Armenians found much common ground in cooperating with the Mongols. Needless to say, she rejects their viewpoint that as nomads the Mongols were inherently of too low a level of social development to influence the Armenians (p. 3). While she does document the agency Armenian figures showed in seeking out Mongol assistance, her story also illustrates the painful choices which Mongol patronage often imposed on the Armenians. As she acknowledges on p. 220, n. 2, the author spends relatively little time on cultural and social-historical interactions. Greater attention to how mundane issues like the permissibility or non-permissibility of fermented mare's milk as a drink—most eastern churches regarded it as unclean—shaped social interactions would have put more flesh and bones on this somewhat skeletal story of thwarted cooperation.
In sum, this valuable study of the Mongol-Armenian relationship adds considerably to our understanding of the political ins and outs of their ties and gives a solid narrative background for those interested in exploring further this fascinating topic.
