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ARMENIANS OF CILICIA 347
benefit the reader at last interpreted and explained
the passage which caused him all this amusement.
He gave it somewhat thus : The present policy of
England permitted the French mare to wander and
graze in any territory it chose, but the German horse
mio;ht not so much as look over the wall. That he
thought an excellent policy, and the simile moved
reader and listeners to laughter again ; but behind
this amused interest could be detected a dim hope
that the policy might somehow result in benefit for
Armenians in general and Cilician Armenians in particular.
Their instincts told them that in a clash
of the great nations it might be possible for the
Armenian people to get between the bark and the
tree of their difficulties and found an independent
Armenia once more.
For in Cilicia the race has had greater hope of independence
than in Armenia itself. Armenia Proper
lies under the shadow of Russia ; Lesser Armenia, as
this Cilician region once was called, is outside the
sphere of Russian aspirations ; it is also on the sea,
and therefore accessible to the friendly Western
Powers ; and further—not a slight consideration— it
is by nature a rich district, which Armenia Proper is
not. Armenians long have felt that if an independent
Armenia could be re-established anywhere with
prospects of permanence, it would be here. These
hopes, and the expression of them, had much to do
with the Cilician massacres of 1909.
In Cilicia the Armenians are themselves an invading
people who came pushing down from the northern
mountains during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
They made their capital at Sis, in the north-eastern
extremity of the Cilician plain, and for nearly three
hundred years maintained a difficult independence.
Along the coast their territory sometimes ran from
Antioch to Seleike ; the Taurus bounded it on the
north-west ; in the north-east it went up into the
nearer highlands of the Anti-Taurus, where lay their
most warlike population, a district still inhabited