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
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“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)