Refugees built a new Armenia on the Mediterranean and befriended the Crusaders
Driven from their highlands by Byzantine annexation and the Seljuk advance, Armenians rebuilt a state on the Cilician coast of what is now southern Turkey. For nearly three centuries this Little Armenia was a Crusader ally, a trading hub and the refuge of Armenian culture, until Mamluk attacks ended it in 1375.
Armenians had ties to Cilicia long before. Tigranes the Great conquered it in the 1st century BC after the Greek elite of Seleucid Syria offered him their loyalty in 83 BC. Much later, after the Byzantines retook the region from Arab rule in 965, emperors resettled Christians from Syria and Armenia there. Two shocks turned migration into a mass movement: Byzantium's formal annexation of Greater Armenia in 1045, and the Seljuk conquest nineteen years later.
A prince called Ruben, a companion of the last Bagratid king Gagik II, rebelled against Byzantium in 1080 and laid the foundations of an independent principality. His Rubenid heirs ruled from fortresses, and his grandson Thoros I moved the capital from Tarsus to Sis. When the First Crusade marched through, Ruben's son Constantine saw a chance to clear out remaining Byzantine garrisons. The Crusaders gave him Western titles, and intermarriage tied the families together; Joscelin I of Edessa married Constantine's daughter.
In 1198 Leo I was crowned, turning the principality into a kingdom. In 1226 the crown passed to the rival Hethumid family through the second marriage of Leo's daughter Isabella to Hethum I, who pursued an alliance with the Mongols against the Mamluks. Contact with Europe reshaped court life: nobles adopted chivalry, Western dress and French names and titles, and society drifted towards feudalism, while Crusaders borrowed Armenian techniques of castle and church building. The port of Ayas became a key link in trade between East and West, and the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church moved his seat into the kingdom.
The collapse of the Crusader states and the Mongol Ilkhanate in the 13th and 14th centuries left the kingdom without friends nearby. Ruled at the end by the Lusignan dynasty and split by religious quarrels, it fell to Egypt's Mamluks in 1375.
Source: Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia
