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

dietinctive form of Christianity. Thia fact, coupled with
the reality of an Armenian majority in eastern Asia Minor,
in its turn led to yet another phenomenon-also not new
on the highlands, albeit this time affecting the overlords,
not their subjects, i.e, ., what might be termed the Armen-
isation of the Saljuqs .
Not
only did Armenians of differ-
ent faiths-Apostolic, Orthodox, Muslim-constitute the
bulk of the population in eastern Asia Minor during the
Saljuq, domination, but fairly quickly an Armeno-Turkiah
2
community came into existence through intermarriage .
Intermarriage occurred not only between the families of
Armenian civil servants and Turkish lords, but at the
very pinnacle of the state. By the IJth century, few were
1
Armanization which resulted from intermarriage
with Armenian noble families and from the naxararisation
of foreigners occurred in some of .the Arab emirates f
southern Armenia and among some of the Kurdish Shaddadids
'
in the 10th-12th centuries. See Ier-&ewondyan, !oi£a£ea,
PP. 45-50, 97-98, 119, 124? Minorsky, Studies, pp. 39,
43, 47 n.l, 51. 80-106 jassim.
2
Turks also intermarried with Greeks and Georgians.
Greek sources style the offspring of such unions
mixovarvaroi. "Though this phenomenon of intermarriage
and the appearance of a new generation of mixovarvaroi
is only briefly mentioned by the sources, one must assume
that it was no rare or isolated occurrence. These
nixovarvaroi suffered occasionally from a dichotomy of
political sympathy and allegiance, but in .the long run
their appearance in Anatolia resulted in a process that
favored the growth of the Muslim population at the
expense of the Christian population, because Muslim
society dominated politically and militarily. It is
interesting, but unprofitable, to speculate about what
would have happened to the Anatolian mlxovarysroi under
different political circumstances" (DBS p. 176J. Vryonis
continues elsewhere; "There is every reason to suppose
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