And the merchants of Venice and
Genoa, and other countries, come thither to sell their goods, and to buy
what they lack. And whatsoever persons would travel to the interior (of
the East), merchants or others, they take their way by this city of
Layas.[NOTE 4]
Having now told you about the Lesser Hermenia, we shall next tell you
about Turcomania.
NOTE 1. - The Petite Hermenie of the Middle Ages was quite distinct from
the Armenia Minor of the ancient geographers, which name the latter
applied to the western portion of Armenia, west of the Euphrates, and
immediately north of Cappadocia.
But when the old Armenian monarchy was broken up (1079-80), Rupen, a
kinsman of the Bagratid Kings, with many of his countrymen, took refuge in
the Taurus. His first descendants ruled as barons; a title adopted
apparently from the Crusaders, but still preserved in Armenia. Leon, the
great-great-grandson of Rupen, was consecrated King under the supremacy of
the Pope and the Western Empire in 1198. The kingdom was at its zenith
under Hetum or Hayton I., husband of Leon's daughter Isabel (1224-1269);
he was, however, prudent enough to make an early submission to the
Mongols, and remained ever staunch to them, which brought his territory
constantly under the flail of Egypt. It included at one time all Cilicia,
with many cities of Syria and the ancient Armenia Minor, of Isauria and
Cappadocia. The male line of Rupen becoming extinct in 1342, the kingdom
passed to John de Lusignan, of the royal house of Cyprus, and in 1375 it
was put an end to by the Sultan of Egypt. Leon VI., the ex-king, into
whose mouth Froissart puts some extraordinary geography, had a pension of
1000l. a year granted him by our Richard II., and died at Paris in 1398.
[Illustration: Coin of King Hetum and his Queen Isabel.]
The chief remaining vestige of this little monarchy is the continued
existence of a Catholicos of part of the Armenian Church at Sis, which
was the royal residence. Some Armenian communities still remain both in
hills and plains; and the former, the more independent and industrious,
still speak a corrupt Armenian.
Polo's contemporary, Marino Sanuto, compares the kingdom of the Pope's
faithful Armenians to one between the teeth of four fierce beasts, the
Lion Tartar, the Panther Soldan, the Turkish Wolf, the Corsair
Serpent.
(Dulaurier, in J. As. ser. V. tom. xvii.; St. Martin, Arm.; Mar.
San. p. 32; Froissart, Bk. II. ch. xxii. seqq.; Langlois, V. en
Cilicie, 1861, p. 19.)
NOTE 2. - "Maintes villes et maint chasteaux" This is a constantly
recurring phrase, and I have generally translated it as here, believing
chasteaux (castelli) to be used in the frequent old Italian sense of a
walled village or small walled town, or like the Eastern Kala' applied
in Khorasan "to everything - town, village, or private residence -
surrounded by a wall of earth." (Ferrier, p. 292; see also A. Conolly,
I. p. 211.) Martini, in his Atlas Sinensis, uses "Urbes, oppida,
castella," to indicate the three classes of Chinese administrative cities.
