History
During the second half of the eleventh century certain "Turanian" tribes appeared on the horizon of western Asia. The invasion by Tartars and Mongols in the following two centuries laid waste the whole of Asia minor. Armenia was devastated by these onslaughts the loss of Armenia's political independence, and her culture life collapsed.
The Kingdom of Lesser Armenia, which made notable progress regeneration in Cilicia, did not fare much better at the hands of the Mamelukes of Egypt.
After the collapse of the last dynasty in Major Armenia in 1064, a large number of Armenians moved to Poland.
The future of Armenia laid on these colonists. In 1240 the first Armenian Church was erected at Rome, and 1434 the date of the founding of the Holy Cross at Venice, no fewer than eleven Armenian churches were built in Italy alone.
An attempt is made in the following sketch to point out that the Renaissance in Armenia was strikingly similar to that in Europe.
Read more about this topic: Armenian Renaissance
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)