Excavations at the Arai-Bazarjugh Late Medieval Caravanatun, Armenia

ANATOLICA XL, 2014 A HOUSE FOR TRADE, A SPACE FOR POLITICS: Excavations at the Arai-Bazarjugh Late Medieval caravanatun, Armenia Kathryn J. Franklin* Abstract According to predominant approaches to the Late Medieval historical and material record, Europe, the Near East and Eurasia were progressively integrated during the Late Medieval period by communities of style and networks of trade, as well as by political ties. Yet the mechanisms of trade and mobility – that is, the movement of people and materials – during this period remain largely unknown, as well as the ramifi cations of such regional or even ‘global’ economy on local society and politics. The late medieval princedoms of the Armenian Highlands were political entities operating within and between the states of Europe and Asia; the highland princedoms therefore provide an opportunity to examine regional political economy from the perspective of local interests. This paper presents results from excavations at the late medieval (12th-15th c. AD) Arai-Bazarjugh caravanatun (“caravan house” or road inn, also caravanserai), which was constructed by a local Armenian merchant-prince. The architecture of the caravanatun and the material assemblages recovered within it, integrated with historical data, demonstrate the role of the caravanatun as a point of intersection between the global trends of late medieval trade, and local Armenian political traditions. INTRODUCTION The Arai-Bazarjugh caravanatun (“caravan house” or road inn, also known as caravanserai) was excavated in the summer of 2011 as part of ongoing research in the Kasakh Valley, Republic of Armenia. Working in collaboration with the Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS), the author excavated units within the 20 m x 30 m caravanatun structure, recording material and architectural evidence which illuminates the late medieval occupation of the building by traveling merchants, and the provisioning of those merchants by the local people. The architecture of the caravanatun represents encounters between Armenian traditional basilica forms and arcaded styles widespread in Seljuk Anatolia. The excavated artifacts included ceramics similar in style to urban Armenian and regional Near Eastern pottery, suggesting that travelers staying in the caravanserai inhabited large scale ‘material worlds’ even while eating from locally produced vessels. The metsatun or merchant-prince Vache Vachutyan constructed the caravanatun in AD 1213 as part of a wider project of pious endowment throughout the Kasakh Valley and the territory of Aragatsotn. The architectural evidence and artifact assemblage from the 2011 excavations suggest that the caravanatun as a place built for trade acted to tie the Vachutyan political aspirations in Armenia to the wider world of exchange traversed by traveling merchants. * University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology. Email: [email protected] 2 KATHRYN J. FRANKLIN BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH Geographical and Historical Context of the Arai-Bazarjugh Caravanatun The Arai-Bazarjugh caravanatun is located on the eastern slope of Mt. Aragats, the highest peak within the Republic of Armenia. The broad eastern shoulder of Mt. Aragats’ volcanic cone forms the western margin of the Kasakh River valley: the eastern extent of the valley is defi ned by the curve of the granitic Tsaghkunyats range. Just south of the caravanatun’s location, the highland drops off sharply into the broad plain of the Aras River: near the edge of the plateau the Kasakh River becomes deeply incised in a precipitous canyon, north of the smaller volcanic peak of Arailer (Fig. 1). Due to its steady change in elevation from south to north, the Kasakh Valley is a climatic transition zone, with the lower reaches marked by dense fruit orchards and the northern zone currently used for fodder and grain farming, as well as pasture. The valley was robustly occupied during the Bronze Age, and formed part of the territories administered fi rst by the Urartians and then the Achaemenid Empire. An inscription discovered in the contemporary town of Aparan records gifts of land to local elites in the province of Nig (which comprised the Kasakh valley and Tsaghkahovit plain) by Tiridates III in the late third or early fourth century AD (Smith et al. 2009: 98). For most of the medieval period (AD 301 to c. 1450) the administrative region of Nig was a component of the territory known as Mets’ Hayk, Armenia, or al-Irmaniyya, by local, Sasanian Persian, Byzantine and Arab administrators respectively. Medieval Armenia contained the territory of the modern Republic of Armenia, as well as portions of northern Iran, Eastern Turkey and western Azerbaijan. More than consistent borders or centralized rule, the historical narrative of medieval Armenia has been defi ned as the story of the naxarar ‘system’ itself, a Persian-infl uenced tradition of dynastic offi ces and landed aristocratic families (Adontz 1970, Toumanoff 1963). As quasi-feudal, dynastic princes, the Armenian naxarars were as or more likely to play neighboring polities off against each other as they were to make a unifi ed play for Armenian sovereignty in the highlands (Ter-Ghewondyan 1976, Manandyan 1977). The later Developed Medieval period was especially characterized by what C. Toumanoff called ‘pulverized sovereignty’ in the Caucasus, juxtaposing limited periods of centralized rule (such as by the Bagratids at Ani and the Sheddadids at Dvin) with shifting alliances and invasions (1963: 35). In more global context, this period was also defi ned by the multifaceted projects of the Crusades, which enabled the articulation of markets between the Mediterranean and Asia across Near Eastern and Caucasus trade routes (Blackman and Redford 2005: 90-92; Heyd 1967:73-92). This emergent interaction on the global scale occurred synchronously with local transformations in the Armenian highlands, one of the many “places in between” as regarded from the perspective of developing Mediterranean merchant states and their traveling agents (e.g. Marco Polo, in Komroff 1926: 24-28). On the periphery of Seljuk administration in the late 12th century, the remaining members of many of the naxarar princely houses (displaced by the Seljuk invasions) had ANATOLICA XL, 2014 3 turned to brigandage in the mountain passes of the silk routes (Manandyan 1977:128-9). Amongst the actors jockeying for legitimacy in the highlands during this period was the Zakaryan family, who ruled from the citadels of Ani and Dvin as vassals of the Georgian Bagratids (Manandyan 1979). These regional rulers presided over the local naxarar community, which by the late 12th and early 13th century consisted of the same echelon of ‘brigands;’ these princely highland highwaymen now converted the spoils of confl ict into material claims to sovereignty, including land (Manandyan 1977). Also among this class of highland administrators were the so-called metsatun or ‘great-house’ merchant princes. This emergent nobility, appointed to power by the Zakaryans and their peers, consisted of merchants who purchased noble titles and ‘immovable’ feudal property with cash gleaned from developing trade along the mountain highways and from their widely dispersed shares in workshops, mills, and markets (Manandyan 1975: 185; Babayan 1976: 554; Arakelyan 1964:182). Primary among these latter merchant-princes was Vache Vachutyan, assigned by the Zakaryans the territory of Nig as well as lands in Shirak and Ararat (Asatryan 2010: 35). Over the next century, the Vachutyan dynasty would situate their power both in highland feudal traditions of pious Christian authority and in the world of medieval trade. By AD 1213, the date of Vache Vachutyan’s construction of the Arai-Bazarjugh caravanatun (Khalpakhchyan 1971; T’oromanyan 1940: 119; Harutyunyan 1960:73-92), the institution of a hall for “protecting trade” had already long acted as a social and cultural mediator in the medieval Mediterranean and Near East (Hillenbrand 1994: 331). The threads that linked the various physical iterations of the road inn across time and space were their common functions of lodging, trade, and their shared role as nodes of regulation by local administrators of large-scale movements of goods and information (Constable 2003: 7; cf. Campbell 2010). For example, K. Cytryn-Silverman’s study of Mamluk khans in Syria demonstrates that while the form of any single han derives from a combination of historical exigency and functional requirements, the practice of inhabiting and especially of endowing the han was an institution that was central to pious commercial sociality in the Mamluk period (Cytryn-Silverman 2010, Sims 1978, cf. Tavernari 2010). Analyses of the Seljuk caravanserais of Anatolia (Erdmann 1961; Yavuz 1997) demonstrate both formal similarities across the Anatolian and Armenian highland corpuses as well as the potential for signifi cant local variation in the social practices associated with the road inn building. Such practices were frequently implicated in political projects: for example, M. Önge (2007) has demonstrated the role of the charitable caravanserai or han within mid-13th century Seljuk performances of pious power on the part of viziers and sultans (2007: 53). The ‘house’ or hall for traders and travelers, which either provided lodging without cost or donated from its proceeds to charitable works, worked at multiple registers to connect mobile medieval subjects within local political aspirations. The long tradition of Near

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