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And this fact alone explains why the Seljuk Turks' conquest of Asia Minor went as fast as it did. This is why the Byzantine historians, in one step, jump from the defeat at Manazkert to verifying the conquest of Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks, where they in one place describe how the Seljuk Turks fought in Armenia and on the next, their arrival at the gates of Constantinople.

These Turkish inhabitants of Asia Minor remained, for more than two centuries, as tent-living nomads and it was only during the 14th century that they began to settle down in cities and set up agriculturally. 5 The present-day population of Asia Minor is a result of the blend of the occupying Turanian peoples and the native population in the region, where the mother tongue of the majority of those people was Greek and their religion Christianity, but who in time have lost both their language and their religion.

At the beginning of the 12th century, Armenia was divided up between different Seljuk warlords who ruled in the cities of Ani, Akhlat, Kars and Erzurum. Some small Armenian principalities were however left in the mountainous regions such as Dzoraget, Zangezour, Sasoun and Moks and it seems that the Armenians during this period had a relatively wide influence on the Seljuk Turks, for instance in the technical and artistic fields.

The Invasion of the Mongols

Until the beginning of the 13th century, Armenia was under the rule of the Seljuk Turks. A reprieve, came when the kings of the Bagratouni dynasty in Georgia, at the end of the 11th century, drove out the Seljuk Turks and retook a part of Armenia which included Ani and Kars. During this time the country experienced a period of tranquillity.

Armenian commanders, who served the Bagratouni kings in Georgia, played a major role in this recapture which resulted in the creation of Armenian principalities in north-western Armenia, under Georgian protection. This Georgian rule in Armenia was, during the reign of Queen Tamar (1189-1213), transformed into a strong military and economical power which boasted total control over this part of the Orient.



It was not long, however, before Armenia was invaded by another Turanian people, the Mongols, who were led by Genghis Khan, "the emperor of the two-legged species". He lived from 1154 to 1227 and created an enormous empire earning among others the name of the "Empire of distress". This empire stretched from Beijing to Erzurum and included present-day Mongolia, northern China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Southern Russia, Caucasus, Persia and Armenia, the largest empire in history. The destruction and catastrophes which he caused are countless and the number of people he murdered impossible to estimate; in northern China alone, according to a Chinese historian, he murdered 18,000,000 people. He also destroyed all traces of the civilization which Persia had left behind in western Turkistan. He burnt the city of Bukhara to ashes and levelled the city of Samarqand to the ground.