"For a thousand years, Armenia has been the graveyard of empires"
Avak, Brother of Chieftain Thok of the Cumans, advising against challenging the Armenian Empire, AD 538.
The easily defendable mountain country and hardy inhabitants of Armenia were first threatened by an outside power in 500 BC, beating back the Assyrian invasions of 513, 498, and 443. After the Assyrians collapsed soon afterwards, Armenia was occupied by the Babylonians, who they waged a generational resistance war against, a constant drain on Babylon's resources until they collapsed and the Persians marched in. The Persians made the same mistakes as the Babylonians, Armenia turning into 'the thorn in the Lion's foot' in the words of Xerxes the Great. The next to try to their hand after the fall of the Persians to the Greeks of Alexander the Great was said Greeks, who fell apart due to infighting not long after Alexander's death, breaking his mighty Empire apart. The Armenians, tired of repeatedly being invaded by outside powers, launched a massive campaign of expansion not long afterwards, easily filling the void left by the Greek collapse.
By 100 BC, the Armenians were a major power in Eastern Anatolia, Syria and Northern Mesopotamia. The next Empire to challenge them was the Roman Republic, who after destroying Carthage in the Punic wars was looking for new regions to expand into. The spark was struck in the Balkans, where both the Armenians and the Romans seeked to turn the remaining Greek states into client/buffer states. The long, grinding series of wars (lasting well over two centuries) that followed saw the Armenians slowly lose their allies in the Balkans, Egypt and even western Anatolia, but they were never truly broken, and the human cost paid by the Roman eventually lead to such internal chaos that, like the Greeks before them, they were divided into several smaller states.
The Huns would strike the knockout blow to the Roman remnants two centuries later, by which time Armenia had consolidated its hold over the Middle East. Even after the fall of Rome, the Armenians remained strong, beating back incursions by the resurgent Persians to the East, Egyptians and Ethiopians to their south and Barbarian tribes from the north. Even as their power waned throughout the late 300s and early 400s, their core territories were never truly threatened. In 445 however, their crushing defeat at Gaza to the Egyptians opened one of their most important allies/vassals, Hasmonean Israel, to invasion, and the ensuing campaign would see the near-total collapse of the Armenian southern frontier. Increased pressure from the Persians resulted in the fall of Tessiphon in 476, and twenty years later Yerevan itself was threatened by by a new wave of Huns from the north.
Armenia had by now lost its Empire, but it was still a respectable Kingdom encompassing the whole of the Caucasus, northern Syria and eastern Anatolia. They spent the early decades of the sixth century working to secure their borders, wary of the Egyptians and Persians to their south and especially the Barbarians to the north. These fears would come to fruition in 524, when war broke out with Persia. The ensuing 12 year war would allow the Armenians to push southwards and reclaim lands in southern Syria and northern Mesopotamia, but it would also stretch them to their absolute limit, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the tribes to the north. Over the objections of his brother, Thok of the Cumans would rally the Steppe tribes together to march into Armenian territory, setting out in the spring of 539.
The campaign that followed was initially successful, with the Armenians under King Alexios XX mounting a bloody holding action in the north while hurriedly bringing their army in the south north as quickly as possible. The massive tribal horde that was unable to cross over the mountains until autumn, and a failed assault against Yerevan forced them to attempt a siege. That winter, the horde would be decimated by disease and the elements, before finally being swept away by reinforcing armies from the south.
"All of life is a riddle, but today,
I am the answer."
