The Turco-Mongol Invasions and the Lords of Armenia in the 13 ...

lust for booty. From toward the end of the 13th century
to beyond the end of the 14th century,anti-Christian
persecutions prevailed almost uninterruptedly. What earlier
had been punishment meted out to an occasionally recalcitrant
naxarar became the generalized fate of all Christiana
refusing to convert. Nomads of all kinds of backgrounds,
circulating in different parts of the Armenian highlands,
attacked churches, monasteries, wealthy and poor Christians.
During the resurgence and expansion of Georgia
in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, the Georgian
monarchs used three control mechanisms in dealing with the
nobles: (1) manipulation of precedence among the lords
and its corollary, the co-optation of allegiance; (2) cir-
cumvention of the lords, and (3) de-naxararization. By
the end of the 12th century the Georgian Crown had managed
temporarily to rein in the most dangerous centrifugal
forces—but only for the moment. In that brief historical
moment (from the last decades of the 12th century until
ca. 1236) Georgian culture flourished and blossomed. Under
the aegis of the Georgian Crown and the Armeno-Georgian
family of Zak'arean/Mxargrceli, Armenia recovered much of
its irredenta, and flourished as a united state.
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