Power, Space and Sanctity Feudal Structures in Late Antique Armenia and the Caucasus

Late Antiquity transformed the Armenian and Caucasian highlands into a contested crossroads of empires, faiths, and dynasties. Caught between Rome and Sasanian Iran, the great naxarar and aznauri houses of Armenia, Iberia, and Albania forged a distinctive social order, one in which lineage, land, and holiness became inseparable instruments of authority. This volume brings together an international group of scholars to reexamine that world through three intertwined lenses: power, the vertical bonds of lordship and service that structured feudal society; space, the fortresses, provinces, and sacred landscapes across which noble houses projected their ambitions; and sanctity, the churches, saints, and ecclesiastical offices that legitimized, and sometimes constrained, secular rule.
Drawing on Armenian, Georgian, Syriac, Greek, and Iranian sources, the contributors trace the rebellions of the Mamikonean and Kamsarakan, the rise of the Bagratid and Bagrationi dynasties, the interplay of marzpans and catholicoi, and the enduring memory of Avarayr. Together, their essays challenge inherited models of "feudalism" and offer a fresh, comparative portrait of a region too often relegated to the margins of Late Antique history.
Rigorous yet accessible, Power, Space and Sanctity is an essential resource for students and scholars of Armenian and Caucasian studies, Byzantine and Sasanian history, and the comparative study of medieval elites, an invitation to see the Caucasus not as a periphery, but as a center in its own right.