Peripheral Christianity and Peripheral Islam in the South-Eastern Caucasus According to David of Gandzak (ca 1065–1140)

Abstract

We shall examine the social and religious conditions in the city of Gandzak/Gandja at the beginning of the 11th century. Gandzak is situated on the Western edges of the Caspian planes, which were largely Islamized by the 8th century. Facing the hardly accessible ravines of the Lesser Caucasus, which from the 14th century were known as Karabagh, Gandzak durably remained a north-western outpost of Islam, hosting successive waves of Arabic, Kurdish, Turkic, and Mongol settlers. The proximity of the Armenian highlands explains how, notwithstanding the ongoing assimilation to the city’s Muslim majority, the Christian population of Gandzak could continuously be sustained and maintain its cultural and religious identity. We shall focus on the activity and writings of the Armenian ecclesiastical author David of Gandzak, which afford a lens through which to observe cultural interaction in these marchlands between the Armenian plateau and the Caspian plains during the first decades of the Turkic colonisation of the lowlands. David’s "Admonitory Exhortations", which do not easily fit into any known category of historical documents, have but very seldom been used as a source of this crucial moment in the history of the South Caucasus. They contain, in particular, rare information concerning the relationships between the Muslim population of Gandzak and their Christian inhabitants, as well as instances of cultural blending and religious syncretism. Such phenomena – comparable in many respects to those which would later occur in the Balkans – have largely determined the history of the South Caucasus during the subsequent centuries. The analysis of these phenomena allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the reciprocal perceptions of the region’s diverse ethnic and religious groups. Attesting the wide spread of intermarriages and shared veneration of holy places, David’s work sheds light on the process of the Islamization not only of the Caucasus but also of Anatolia.

^{The seminar is part of the program "Religion, Center, and Periphery: The Orient in Europe, Europe in the Orient" of the Center for the Study of Religions, supported by the Scientific Research Fund of Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski in 2023.}