Liturgy, law and self-representation: Christian kingship in England and Armenia from the late-ninth...

© A E Redgate. Revised version of paper available January 2010-January 2012 at www.ichs2010.org

18/03/13

Anne Elizabeth Redgate

Liturgy, law and self-representation: Christian kingshipin England and Armenia from the late-ninth to the mid-

eleventh century1

Very few early medieval

monarchs have left us evidence that gives us a personal

impression of them. Four that have are near-

contemporaries. They are Emperor Leo VI of Byzantium

(reigned 886-912, his neighbour Tsar Symeon of Bulgaria

(reigned 893-927, King Alfred (reigned 871-99) of Wessex

(in southern England) and King Gagik Artsruni (reigned

908 –43) of Vaspurakan (in southern Armenia). Jonathan

Shepard has compared the images of Leo and Symeon in

detail, and in comparison to Alfred’s. They have much in

common with each other. Shepard concluded that there was

mutual incitement, part consensual, part competitive, in

the image of rulership. The impulses behind their

1 A slightly shorter (8,000 words) version of this essay was published in January 2010 on the website of the International Congress of Historical Sciences 2010, which expired in January 2012. Both the essay and a short oral presentation based on it were part ofthe Religion and Power section of the 21st International Congress of Historical Sciences, 2010 (held at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 22-28 August). ‘Religion and Power’, one of the Congress’ s three major themes, was organised and chaired by Professor Mark Gregory Pegg.

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http://www.ichs2010.org/


particular image probably came, he believes, from the

west European Carolingian royal courts, above all that of

Charles the Bald, who reigned as emperor from 875 to 877,

and who was Alfred’s step-grandfather.2

Gagik of Vaspurakan was not

included in Shepard’s study. The evidence for Gagik is

scantier than for the other three rulers, yet comparison

of his and Alfred’s images promises to be both useful and

interesting. This is partly because the early medieval

English and the Armenians were each precocious, and

different from both west European groups, and from

Byzantium, in having a strong sense of national identity.

They likewise differed from west Europeans in each having

a well-developed vernacular literature.3 And the two

kings’ use of religion, that is, in their cases,

Christianity, and of religious imagery to justify their

power and secular claims, was similar both in general and

in particular respects. Yet these resemblances were

combined with great differences. The two societies 2 Jonathan Shepard, ‘The Ruler as Instructor, Pastor and Wise: Leo VIof Byzantium and Symeon of Bulgaria’ in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 339-58. 3 For other similarities and dissimilarities to western Europe see Anne E. Redgate, The Armenians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 244-49.

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differed in their geography, being far apart and having

very different terrain, climate and neighbours – in the

histories of their regions and people, and in their

contemporary situation. Though there were similarities in

royal imagery, the question of royal and ecclesiastical

power over Christian practice and ideas offers two

contrasts between the two societies. The first concerns

the language of the Christian liturgy: the Armenian

Church used a vernacular (Armenian) liturgy but Anglo-

Saxon Christians, whose vernacular was (Old) English, did

not. The second concerns the legal tradition. In England,

the Church contributed to royal written law, which was

itself stimulated by the role model of kingship that the

Old Testament provided. But Armenia, where likewise the

influence of the Old Testament on political ideas was

strong, failed to generate such law. This study will

consider the three issues of liturgy, law, and royal

self-representation from a comparative perspective,

though only some of the questions that are raised by the

comparison can be answered here.

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I have argued elsewhere that

the fact that Armenians’ liturgy was in the vernacular

very probably means that early medieval Armenia saw a

sense of national identity that was truly national, that

is, which crossed socio-economic boundaries and was felt

by the peasantry as well as the elite.4 I have also

addressed the questions of why in Anglo-Saxon England the

Latin liturgy was not replaced with an (Old) English

translation, and of why this may be considered

surprising. This argument may be summarised as follows.5

Vernacular literature is, historically, intimately

connected with national identity. Reaching a wide

audience, even in non-literate societies, through the

mediation of priests, it creates and reinforces senses of

being a community with shared interests, concerns, and

prospects. Especially important in this respect are works

of history which provide a vision of the past for their

4 Anne E. Redgate, ‘National Letters, Vernacular Christianity and National Identity in Early Medieval Armenia’, in 1600: Armenian Letters; International Conference dedicated to the 1600th Anniversary of the Armenian Letters Creation, Collection of papers Yerevan, September 12-17, 2005 (Yerevan: National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, 2006), pp. 168-76.5 Anne E. Redgate, ‘Vernacular Liturgy in England and Armenia from the Fifth to the Eleventh Centuries,’ Armenian Folia Anglistika: International Journal of English Studies 2 (4) (2007), pp. 144-61, where full references will be found.

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audience to regard as shared. Vernacular accounts of

parts, or all, of Armenian history were produced

throughout the period of the fifth to the eleventh

centuries. In England, vernacular literature first

flowered under King Alfred, who decried a decline of

ecclesiastical Latinity, ordered a programme of

translation of certain books, and translated some

himself. Furthermore, original works were composed in

English. The most prolific writer of English literature’s

second flowering was Aelfric (c. 955- c.1010). Aelfric

was a pupil of Aethelwold, bishop of Winchester 963-984,

who was a particularly close associate of King Edgar

(reigned 959-975) and one of the leaders of England’s so-

called tenth-century reformation. Bede’s Latin Ecclesiastical

History of the English People, finished in 731 and translated into

Old English in Alfred’s time, together with the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle that was composed then, gave Anglo-Saxons a

vision of a shared identity under the royal house of

Wessex.

Christianity was essential to

both the Armenian and the English identities. In his

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History of Vardan and the Armenian War, about Armenian resistance

to Persia in 451, Eghishe presented Christianity as

integral to ‘Armenianness’. This was in fact inaccurate

for 451, but it came to be true. For Alfred, one of the

makers of English identity, Christianity set the English

apart from the invading Scandinavian Vikings, and an

understanding of Christianity and of Christian history

would help the English to prevail against them. It is

also clear that for Alfred, Aethelwold, and Aelfric,

language and text were unifiers as well as expressive of

desire for unity. Alfred reveals this in his preface to

his translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Rule.

Aethelwold’s school in Winchester, capital of the West

Saxon kings was, as Helmut Gneuss showed, where the

propagation of a ‘standard’ Old English, a form of West

Saxon, throughout England was begun.6 Aelfric’s homilies

enjoyed a massive circulation, promoted by the

archbishopric of Canterbury. This has been called the

beginning of a form of mass communication that must have

played a significant part in defining a sense of English

6 ‘The origin of Standard Old English and Æthelwold’s school at Winchester’, Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972), pp. 63-83.

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identity around the year 1000.7 The effort to conquer

Scandinavian settlers and to make England secure,

especially after Viking attacks resumed in the 980s

included encouragement of both Christianity and a sense

of ‘Englishness’. In this, Anglo-Saxon endeavours were

not entirely dissimilar to fifth-century Armenian

ecclesiastical resistance of Persian attempts to absorb

Armenia, through embedding Christianity more firmly at

the level of the masses.

Liturgy generates an

‘imagined community’, imagined, that is, in the sense

that members feel part of it but do not all know each

other personally, in several ways. Liturgy is a group

activity in which participants are cognisant of other

groups, and of people, both living and dead, for whose

welfare they pray. When particular saints or occasions

are promoted, they are also conscious that they have a

common past. The liturgically generated ‘imagined

community’ can easily be a political and national one, if

7 Jonathan Wilcox, ‘Ælfric in Dorset and the Landscape of Pastoral Care’ in Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Francesca Tinti (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), pp. 61-62.

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national heroes are memorialised or the king is prayed

for. In the Armenian liturgy, where wording repeatedly

conjures up an ‘us’ who are ‘Armenians’, there is for

example commemoration of Vardan and his fellow-soldiers.

In England, the Regularis Concordia, in which Aethelwold

stated the rule for the reformed English monasteries is

based on Continental texts, but it has an original

feature in its great emphasis on repeated prayer for the

king and queen. Our knowledge of English liturgy is

incomplete, but it is clear both that uniformity was an

aim and that monastic practices were disseminated beyond

the monastic context. A letter composed by Aelfric for a

bishop of Sherborne to circulate to the clergy in his

diocese stipulates that mass priests and servants are to

pray for the king.

A vernacular liturgy would

have been useful in the ‘nation building’ agenda of

English kings and clerics. It would also have helped the

English Church in its attempts to engage the people,

which it made in part because Viking aggression was

thought to be a manifestation of God’s anger, and poor

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religious standards to be something that had provoked it.

By the later tenth century, English Christians were

supposed to attend church frequently. There is, too,

substantial evidence that English lay-clerical engagement

was a reality. Christian ritual was applied to daily

problems; fiscal dues were owed to the Church, the number

of churches was growing and pastoral care at parish level

was given. The liturgy aimed to re-enact Christian

history, making the congregation participants, not

spectators,8 and vernacular homilies to reach the common

people and overcome the problem of unlearned and under-

resourced priests.

It is theoretically possible

that the reason why the Anglo-Saxons never developed a

vernacular liturgy was a belief on their part that there

was no precedent for it, that is, apart from the Latin

one. Latin had been the vernacular of the Western Roman

Empire, into which the books of the Old Testament had

been translated from Hebrew and those of the New

Testament from Greek. The language of the early Church

8 M. Bradford Bedingfield, The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002).

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had been Greek. Certainly those neighbours with whom the

Anglo-Saxons enjoyed the most documented contacts, namely

the Irish and the inhabitants of the Frankish domains,

offered no such precedent. But King Alfred’s circle

certainly and Aelfric’s probably felt themselves to be

part of a wider Christendom, in which vernacular

liturgies did exist. Indeed, Alfred’s Pastoral Rule preface

states that ‘the Law’, originally in Hebrew, and ‘all

other books’ were successively translated by the Greeks

and the Romans and ‘similarly all the other Christian

peoples turned some part of them into their own

language.’9 His references to the law and to the books

have been interpreted by scholars to mean not merely law

in the Bible but the scriptures generally. The

translations to which he was alluding have not however

been identified. Scholarly consideration of them has been

limited to the fourth-century Gothic Bible and the few

ninth-century German partial translations. There are

however two other obvious possibilities. I have contended

that it is inconceivable that Alfred did not know of the

9 Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 125-26 and 295-96 n12.

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existence of the Slavonic Bible and liturgy and that it

is likely, though less certain, that the English then, or

later, or both, knew of the existence of the Armenian

ones.

Alfred could have learnt of

the latter from one or more of three sources. One was

Rome, which had a history of an Armenian presence, and

with which Alfred had regular and frequent contacts. A

second was Jerusalem, which had a well-established

Armenian community and with which Alfred had contact well

before he translated the Pastoral Rule in 890, an Alfredian

embassy having departed from Rome in 883 to take alms to

Judaea. A third was the capital of Byzantium,

Constantinople. In Constantinople, Armenia and Armenians

were politically important. Alfred’s contemporary, Ashot

Bagratuni, for example, revived the Armenian kingship in

884/5 and received imperial recognition. Ashot must have

been talked about at the Byzantine court, especially

since there were Armenians there.10 In another context, it

has been suggested that the route of Alfred’s emissaries

10 For Ashot’s career and Armenians in ninth-century Byzantine society see Redgate, The Armenians, pp. 173-75, 236-41.

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of 883 might have gone through Byzantium and that they

might have visited the imperial palace.11 The case for

Aelfric’s period is stronger than that for Alfred’s,

since we have concrete evidence for direct Byzantine-

English contact then. This includes a ‘Greek’ bishop at

King Edgar’s court12 and a direct influence, of recent

date, in the art of the lavish manuscript of Bishop

Aethelwold’s Benedictional. As in the previous century,

Byzantine contacts might well have brought awareness of

Armenian culture, because Armenian issues were still

current in Constantinople. Edgar’s contemporary, Emperor

John I Tzimisces, who enjoyed great success against the

Arabs, was himself Armenian. John’s successor Basil II

(976-1025) planned and largely accomplished the

annexation of the Armenian kingdoms and principalities.

At the same time English contact with Rome continued, as

did an Armenian element in Rome.

11 Jonathan Shepard, ‘The Ruler as Instructor, Pastor and Wise …’, p.358.12 In his ‘Byzantium, Rome and England in the Early Middle Ages’, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 49 (2002), pp. 363-400, Michael Lapidge suggests, pp. 386-92 that this was Bishop Nicephorus of Herakleia who in 956 had incurred the displeasure of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII.

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That the Anglo-Saxon sources

are silent about vernacular liturgy does not necessarily

mean that there was either ignorance of others’

vernacular liturgies or failure to consider the question

of an English translation. Neither should we suppose that

the Anglo-Saxons’ retention of the Latin was due to a

lack of ability to translate it, or a lack of self-

confidence to be, in a western context, innovative.

Modern scholarly literature is full of evidence to the

contrary. Nor should we assume that the English

authorities regarded use of a vernacular liturgy as being

in itself wrong. It is true that Latin may have been felt

to be more prestigious, as some scholars believe, or more

suitable, or both. Latin was, after all, regarded by the

Church as having been made sacred by usage. English

translators represented their work as necessary, and by

implication regrettable, expedients. On the other hand,

in Alfred’s account of biblical translation, English has,

for the English, the same status as Latin had for the

Romans.

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What is more certain is that

late-tenth-century England there was some fear of heresy,

though the evidence suggests that whatever English heresy

there was was trivial compared to the Thondrakian heresy

that beset the contemporaneous Armenian Church.

Thondrakianism included deviant Christology and rejection

of the sacraments. Aelfric’s concern seems to have been

focussed on such matters as apocryphal legends about the

Virgin’s Assumption, at least one story from which his

teacher Aethelwold had accepted. Aelfric also feared that

translation itself might lead to heresy. St Jerome, who

was responsible for the Latin translation of the Bible

that is known as the Vulgate and was produced between 383

and 405, had had views about whether translation should

be word for word or sense for sense. These views were

familiar to western medieval translators. Alfred’s

translations were sometimes very free. Aelfric’s are

usually adaptations or interpretations, though his

original preference had been for the word for word style.

This had been in order to avoid imposing any

interpretation, which might be erroneous. Yet a lack of

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commentary, he felt, was itself dangerous: for instance

unlearned people might think that they could live as

people had in the Old Testament, for example, practising

incest. In his later translations he did impose his own

view, for example in Maccabees condemning the use of

violence.13

Though they were not

addressed in my original consideration of Anglo-Saxon

England’s lack of a vernacular liturgy, there are also

notable contrasts between England and Armenia with

respect to their biblical translations. First, there is

no evidence that the first translators of the Bible into

Armenian, that is, the circle of St. Mesrop/Mashtots, the

inventor of the Armenian alphabet, knew that St. Jerome

had worked on biblical translation, or were aware of his

views about translation methods. Yet the temporal near-

coincidence of Mesrop’s work and Jerome’s, and the

plausibility of their work being known in the same

circles are very striking. Jerome’s biblical translation

13 Robert Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 104, 131-37, 140, 146, 158. Jonathan Wilcox,Ælfric’s Prefaces (Durham: Durham Medieval Texts, 1994), pp. 1, 23, 37-41,44, 63, 64, 131-32.

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had begun in Rome in the early 380s. His translation of

the Old Testament from Hebrew had been done in the Holy

Land between 390 and 405. The Armenian alphabet is

traditionally dated to 405 but might actually have been

formulated a few years earlier. Jerome’s new translation

would probably have been talked about in the learned

ecclesiastical milieu of at least one of the places that

Mesrop and his pupils visited. These were Edessa,

Samosata, Melitene, and of course Constantinople, which

had a lot of contact with Rome in the fifth century.

Since the Holy Land, where Jerome lived in Bethlehem, was

an object of Armenian pilgrimage, Armenian awareness of

Jerome’s work could have been acquired there too.

Nor, second, is there any

indication that Mesrop or the Armenian translators had

any of Aelfric’s fears about the safety of biblical

translation. Mesrop’s Life, by his contemporary, Koriwn,

does not suggest it. To the contrary, the motive behind

the invention of the Armenian alphabet is presented

therein as the desire to translate the Bible. And in his

report of the beginning of the translation it is not any

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intellectual problem, but only the technical one, namely

the writing of the new Armenian letters and their

adequacy ‘to form all the syllables’ of Armenian, to

which Koriwn gives attention. Later he stresses joy that

Moses, the prophets, Paul, the apostles and the Gospels

became Armenian-speaking, and the utility of this. And

when he recounts that revisions were made, the point at

issue seems to be not methodology but the quality of the

base text – the translations had been done from copies

‘then available’ that were now compared with ‘authentic

copies’.14

Third, the progression of

Armenian translators was the opposite of that of Aelfric,

moving from a freer to a more literal style. The so-

called Hellenizing School of translators was innovative

in vocabulary and syntax in order to give a rigorously

exact image of the Greek original, to the extent, indeed,

of unintelligibility. Unfortunately, when this School

became active is disputed, the parameters being 450 and

14 Koryun, The Life of Mashthots translated by Bedros Norehad (New York: Armenian General Benevolent Union of America, 1964, reprinted in Classical Armenian Text Reprint Series, Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1985), Chapters 6-9, 11, 19.

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572.15 Fourth, the Biblical injunctions that Koriwn cites

in justifying translation concern writing and teaching

rather than translation itself – Moses being given the

Commandments, (Israel’s King) David indicating that

‘divine law shall apply to all nations’, Christ

commanding that ‘all nations’ be taught and the Gospel

‘preached in all the world’.16 Strangely, the miracle of

Pentecost, wherein the Holy Spirit gave the apostles the

ability to be understood in all languages (sometimes

interpreted as a miracle of audiences’ hearing rather

than one of preachers’ speaking) is not included. Yet in

the west the relevance of Pentecost to the use of the

vernacular, and as a justification for it, was well

known, for example to Bede and Aelfric.17 I am not aware

of any evidence that Armenian commentaries on, or

artworks depicting, Pentecost make this connection.

Aelfric’s worries, plus the

scholarly theory of multiple meanings made biblical

15 Charles Mercier, ‘L’École hellenistique dans la littérature arménienne’, Revue des Études Arméniennes, new series 13 (1978-9), pp. 59-75.16 Koriwn, trans. Norehad, Chapter 11.17 Kees Dekker, ‘Pentecost and Linguistic Self-Consciousness in Anglo-Saxon England: Bede and Aelfric’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 104(2005), pp. 345-72.

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translation a huge responsibility. By analogy, the

possibility of facilitating independent but incorrect

thought about the liturgy may have seemed too dangerous

to the authorities in England. They are notable both for

favouring the top-down approach, and for possession of

another, different, means of encouraging national

sentiment, namely an intrusive, demanding, sophisticated

and efficient administration. The reality of late Anglo-

Saxon England was very different from the myth of a

golden age of freedom and independence that was

constructed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

England. English rulers could afford not to use

vernacular liturgy to encourage national sentiment. Their

Armenian contemporaries by contrast are notable for their

so-called centrifugal tendencies. England in 1066, about

to fall to the Normans, was, as James Campbell has

concluded, a nation-state.18 Its boundaries were much as

its present ones. The making of this kingdom, including

its national character had been the deliberate policy of

18 See James Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England: The Anglo-SaxonAchievement’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (London: Routledge, 1995), esp.p. 31. These much-discussed issues are still debated.

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the West Saxon kings beginning with Alfred. Another aim

seems to have been that its territorial dominion should

at least mirror the dominion of the English Church as it

had been represented by Bede. Eleventh-century Armenia on

the other hand, about to fall to Byzantium and to the

Turks, was a collectivity of kingdoms. Ashot Bagratuni

had indeed re-established kingship of the Armenians but

the elite had not thought in terms of a nation-state.

Armenian kingdoms had proliferated. The Artsruni family’s

principality of Vaspurakan had become a kingdom in 908.

Later, Siwnik, in eastern Armenia became a kingdom and

the Bagratuni kingdom split into three. By 1000 there

were five kingdoms where one had been.

Amongst the manifestations of

the strong, aspirational and intrusive power and

authority of the West Saxon kings, the means whereby they

forged unification and national identity, and their

attempts to mould their subjects into a godly Christian

people, the body of royal law codes is of particular

importance. The significance of these codes, which have

been illuminated by the magisterial work of Patrick

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Wormald,19 lies as much in the fact of their existence as

in their content. This is because it would have been

possible to implement legal innovations and operate a

sophisticated judicial system without using writing.

Furthermore, the relationship between the extant legal

texts, what was originally issued and what was actually

practised is complex. Detailed codes attributed to Alfred

(one), and to his successors as king, namely his

descendants Edward (two), Aethelstan (seven), Edmund

(three), Edgar (two) and Aethelread II (ten) and the

Scandinavian Cnut (two) survive. Loyalty, conformity and

rectitude were irresistibly promulgated within them.

Alfred legislated against disloyalty, as Alex Burghart

put it, with almost Stalinist zeal.20 Aethelstan made

theft a felony, that is not simply an offence against the

property’s owner, but a crime against one’s lord, and

hence against one’s king and state. Its punishment

involved forfeiture of the offender’s own property and

execution.21 Behind this policy was the idea that God, 19 The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century. Volume I: Legislation and Its Limits (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).20 Reviewing David Pratt: The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, in The Times Literary Supplement 14 September 2007, no. 5450. 21 In the first clause of the code known as VI Aethelstan, translated in English Historical Documents, Volume I, c. 500-1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock

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having in the Ten Commandments prohibited theft, would

punish a regime that did not prevent it. Thieves were

also, according to Lantfred of Winchester, writing around

975, targeted by Edgar, in a law that they should be

lengthily tortured by extensive mutilation and left in

the open for beasts and birds to devour.22 In English

royal law, sin became a crime against the crown, and

crime against the crown became a sin.

Law meant unity. Whereas

Alfred’s Pastoral Rule preface represented English unity as

related to shared English language and literature,23 that

of his lawcode related it to the people’s Christian

history: conversion had lead to common faith and hence to

shared law. This was God’s law, which was stated in the

Bible, and had been added to, refined and edited by

successive Church councils and now by Alfred himself.24

Once the Scandinavians who settled in England in the

(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968), pp. 387-88. Wormald, pp. 19, 25,304-7.22 Ibid., pp. 125-27.23 Kathleen Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998), pp. 611-37.24 Keynes and Lapidge, pp. 124-26, 163-64; Wormald, pp. 416-29; Catherine E. Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), pp. 38-9, 41-2.

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ninth and tenth centuries were converted and conquered,

royal law applied to them too. This was despite the fact

that some differences in Danes’ law, perhaps involving

merely different terminology, from that of Wessex and

Mercia, are attested in some laws.25 Regional and local

courts met regularly and were subjected to direction from

the king and his officials.26

The involvement of the Church

in English royal law is apparent not only from Alfred’s

account but also from the authorship and content of the

later codes. They owe much to Wulfstan, archbishop of

York 1002-1023. Wulfstan amended earlier legislation when

he preserved it, making the original, or official, texts

of Aethelread’s codes out of our reach. Wulfstan intended

his laws to be guidebooks for a Christian society and for

Christianising backsliders and any continuing pagans. He,

like others, feared lest the English go the way of the

British before them, through sin to defeat by violent

invaders, in their case the Vikings, as divine 25 Cnut’s, in English Historical Documents pp. 420-21. See also Lesley Abrams, ‘King Edgar and the Men of the Danelaw’, in Edgar, King of the English, 959-975: New Interpretations, ed. Donald Scragg (Woodbridge: BoydellPress, 2008), pp. 171-91, pointing out that Edgar allowed only a limited Danish legal autonomy. 26 Wormald, pp. 143-61.

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punishment. The thrust of his legal texts is the same as

that of his sermons.27

It was not only their

lawcodes that associated law and justice with English

kings. As Wormald pointed out, the rhetoric of their

coronation rituals did the same. In that used for Alfred,

his father and brothers before him and his son after him,

prayers ask that in the new king’s reign there be equity

and justice for all. The king himself promises that

robberies and injustice will be forbidden to all and that

he will offer equity and mercy in all judgements. In the

ritual used for Alfred’s grandson and later kings, God is

asked to crown the king with the honour of justice. The

king is admonished to correct the wicked, give peace to

the just and help them to keep to the just path.28 Early

royal lawcodes, and Alfred’s, were as much a statement of

a king’s fitness to rule, following the role models

presented in the Old Testament and in the Christian Roman

Empire, as anything else.29 They continued to have this 27 Ibid., pp. 449-6528 Ibid., pp. 446-47.29 First argued by Wormald in ‘Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: Legislation and Germanic Kingship from Euric to Cnut’, in Early Medieval Kingship, ed.Peter H. Sawyer and Ian N. Wood (Leeds: School of History, Universityof Leeds, 1977), pp. 105-38.

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function in the tenth century. Wulfstan’s editorial work

and Cnut’s statement in his lawcode that in his reign the

laws of Edgar would be adhered30 to, fit well with this

function.

In written royal law, royal

ideology could be expounded and developed. It was a

vehicle for the Christian presentation and self-

presentation of kings. Much used in later Anglo-Saxon

England, it was a vehicle that contemporary Armenian

kings did not have. Armenian texts seldom refer to legal

processes and institutions, other than feud, whereby

crimes might be punished and disputes resolved. Instances

of recourse to outsiders might, indeed, be taken to

suggest a lack of them. The Katholikos (head of the

Armenian Church) John refers, in the History that he wrote

probably between 915/916 and 925/926, to Church synods,

and, in the context of recording earlier Arab spoliation

of the Armenian Church, a tribunal. The implication is

that this was Arab, not Armenian.31 The ninth- and tenth-

century charters of Siwnia (eastern Armenia) that were

30 English Historical Documents, p. 414.31 Chapter 24. The text is translated in Krikor H. Maksoudian, Yovhannēs Drasxanakertcci. History of Armenia (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987).

25



inscribed on churches, themselves manifestations of

family pride, power and wealth, were, much later, copied

into a Siwnian History. They threaten transgressors only

with religious and spiritual sanctions: with Hell, and

taking on responsibility for the sins of the donor and

even his or her relatives’ sins.32 In this respect of

course they do not differ greatly from Anglo-Saxon

charters, whose threats are of supernatural vengeance and

that account must be rendered at Judgement Day. These do

however often refer to the possibility of making amends

before death.33 Certainly some significant association of

late-ninth- and early-tenth-century Armenian kings with

law and justice was made in the contemporary Armenian

Histories, though such association may have been a literary

topos and something that was little implemented. Thus

John presents King Ashot I Bagratuni as a law-giver,

introducing ‘significant regulations’ and passing laws

that applied equally to mountain- and to valley-dwellers.

Significantly, John does this immediately after 32 The text is translated into French in Marie Félicité Brosset, Histoire de la Siounie par Stéphannos Orbélian, 2 vols. (St Petersburg: Académieimperiale des sciences, 1864, 1866). See, for example, vol. I, pp. 124-25, 130-32, 140-41.33 See for examples English Historical Documents, pp. 473-74, 479-91, 499-500, 503-6, 513, 516, 519-20, 522-23, 525-26, 529-32, 537-40.

26



recounting Ashot’s coronation as king. Furthermore, as

his translator points out, John was drawing on what an

earlier writer had said about a much earlier king, the

first of the Arsacid dynasty, a branch of Parthia’s royal

house, to occupy the Armenian throne, who became king in

the first century A. D..34 And the contemporary account of

King Gagik Artsruni, in the continuation of Thomas

Artsruni’s History of the House of the Artsrunis praises Gagik for

providing widows and orphans with justice.35

The fact that, apparently,

these and other tenth- and eleventh-century Armenian

kings’ laws, orders and decisions were never regarded as

sufficiently interesting or important, either for

practical or ideological reasons, to be recorded and

preserved is remarkable. It is especially so since the

canons of the Church were so recorded, and secular

leaders used writing frequently. It certainly seemed

remarkable to the man who put together the first Armenian

lawcode, the priest and scholar Mkhitar Gosh. He began it

34 John, trans. Maksoudian, Chapter 29.35 Robert W. Thomson, Thomas Artsruni, History of the House of the Artsrunikc: Translation and Commentary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985), p. 352.

27



in 1184, motivated by the fact that Armenians had to turn

to Muslim authorities for the settlement of all legal

questions since they lacked a written code of their own,

at which he expressed astonishment. He explained away

Armenians’ forefathers’ negligence by various hypotheses

(including distraction by persecutions and disturbances

and acceptance of the codes of other nations under whose

authority they had fallen). He also claimed that both

foreigners and compatriots had reproached ‘us’ for it.

What he put together was based on the Bible, Church

canons and the early-twelfth-century Armenian Penitential by

David of Ganjak, with some remarks about customs.36 His

sources did not include any otherwise lost Armenian royal

law.

The ubiquity of royal

lawcodes in continental western Europe (Gaul, Italy and

Spain) between the fifth and the seventh centuries as

well as in Anglo-Saxon England prompts the question,

which is unfortunately capable of only speculative

answers, whether the Armenian lacuna was due to conscious

36 Robert W. Thomson, The Lawcode [Datastanagirk′] of Mxit′ar Goš (Amsterdam:Rodopi, 2000), pp. 20-24, 26-36, 69, 74-5.

28



avoidance rather than mere oversight. Perhaps the

nobility, more deeply and historically entrenched in

Armenia than in Europe, felt that the enhancement of

authority and power that a legislator would gain from

issuing a code was intolerable, and were too strong to be

overcome. Or perhaps there was revulsion at and because

of the association of written law with Roman emperors.

For early European kings, demonstration that they

venerated Roman culture and were like the Romans, was

attractive and an enhancement of status and hence

strength. Such veneration had no dangerous implications,

since the Roman emperor (the Byzantine emperor) was far

away and usually too preoccupied with his eastern

frontier or too weak to pose a realistic threat of

western reconquest. For Armenians, whose lands were a

theatre of war and of rivalry between Arabs and

Byzantines, to appear to ape the Romans may not have been

palatable or perceived as safe.

Because of Archbishop

Wulfstan’s involvement in their authorship, the later

Anglo-Saxon lawcodes are perhaps better viewed as

29



incorporating representations rather than self-

representations of kings. Alfred’s however does offer his

own views, fully according with other evidence about

them. Besides his Prefaces to his lawcode and to his

translation of the Pastoral Rule, there are his translations

of Latin texts. As well as the Pastoral Rule, Alfred

translated the first fifty Psalms, the Soliloquies of St

Augustine (bishop of Hippo 395-430), and the Consolation of

Philosophy (written in Italy in the 520s by Boethius).37

Alfred’s translation is often a free rendering, including

personal interpretations and reflections, revealing much

about his attitude to kingship, or at least about what he

wanted his audience to think that he thought. Other works

are so close to Alfred that their representations of him

must have had his approval. The knowledge, themes and

concerns of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggest that its

authorship lay in his circle. His Life, written in 893 by

37 The attribution to Alfred of the Old English version of Boethius’ work is strongly challenged by its most recent editors, who suggest instead an early-tenth-century date or a translator of Alfredian datebut ‘not necessarily under’ Alfred’s rule. This challenge applies to the translation of the Soliloquies too, since that is by the same author. It has however not convinced everybody. See Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine (eds.), The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s “De consolatione Philosophiae” 2 vols. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. vol. 1, p. 144, and the review by Christopher A. Jones in Speculum 86 (2011), pp. 200-204.

30



his associate and adviser Bishop Asser, was addressed

flatteringly to him and so must have been meant to please

him. It also continued both explicitly and obliquely some

elements of Alfred’s self-representation, to which of

course Asser may himself have contributed. The splendid

Alfred Jewel was almost certainly commissioned by Alfred

himself. Its inscription, in Old English, ‘Alfred had me

made’, together with its find site (four miles from

Athelney in Somerset which was once Alfred’s refuge from

the Vikings), its magnificence and its form all suggest

this. It measures 6.2 x 3.1 x 1.3 cm. Alfred sent to each

of his bishops not only a copy of the translated Pastoral

Rule but also, accompanying it, a precious æstel (book-

marker or pointer). The Alfred Jewel may have been one of

these. If so, the portrait it contains, in cloisonné

enamel under a rock crystal, was probably meant to bring

Alfred to the user’s mind38 and hence it offers an insight

into what he wanted his image to be.

The purpose of Alfred’s self-

representation was to establish his worthiness of,

presumably in the hope of gaining or increasing, his 38 Karkov, pp. 28-34.

31



people’s respect and obedience and hence to enhance and

secure his power. Its most noticeable aspects are overtly

Christian. The image that he propagated is one of a wise

king who was appointed by God; who was equivalent to

certain figures in biblical and early Christian history;

who had a Christ-like element; who was associated with

books, whose recurrence in Anglo-Saxon royal portraits

(textual and visual) has been emphasised by Catherine

Karkov,39 and with hunting.

Alfred’s association with

books is very marked. His image is one of writer,

translator, reader and distributor. In addition, in his

Life, Asser constructed a pattern of allusions to earlier

texts and traditions, thereby giving his readers the

opportunity to assess Alfred against models of idealised

authors. Asser used a persona that Alfred himself created

in his Pastoral Rule preface. Here Alfred established a

textual authority for himself, by imitating, in his

account of his own internal dialogue, the Soliloquies and

the Consolation of Philosophy.40 A second recurring theme is

39 Ibid., e.g. pp. 4-5, 20-21, 47, 175.40 Seth Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), pp. 66-79, 84.

32



wisdom. The Alfred Jewel’s figure, which takes up nearly

two thirds of its length, is probably meant as a

depiction of Christ as Wisdom. Wisdom was personified in

the Old Testament book of Proverbs and its necessity,

especially for those in authority, was so emphasised by

Alfred that wisdom has been termed one of his voices. The

stress is most marked in the fact that he chose the

Consolation of Philosophy not only as one of the works that were

to be translated but as one to translate himself. It is

also significant that he changed the original’s

personification of philosophy from female to male.41 A

third motif in representations of Alfred is that of the

ideal ruler as envisaged by Pope Gregory. This is

evidenced most obviously in Alfred’s interest in

Gregory’s Pastoral Rule. It is also clear from Asser’s

portrayal of Alfred as becoming in stages a ruler in the

Gregorian model42 and from his suggestion that Alfred was

personally, not just as a ruler, similar to Gregory.

Asser’s references to Alfred’s ill-health are reminiscent

of Gregory’s own lamentations about his personal

41 Ibid., p. 80. Karkov, pp. 30-33 and n65.42 Ibid., pp. 36-7, 42-6.

33



suffering.43 Both men combined illness with dealing with

invaders, in Alfred’s case Vikings and in Gregory’s

Lombards.

Anglo-Saxon writers thought

of the English in terms of the Israelites of the Bible.

The former were a new Israel, the latter offered them

role models and awful warnings. In the Old Testament, the

Israelites not only constituted a chosen people, whose

duty was to follow the path of righteousness. They were

also a nation-state ruled, ideally, by a strong king who

was cognisant of God’s will. Alfred’s political thought

as evidenced in his translations has been assessed as ‘an

extraordinarily coherent philosophy of theocratic royal

rule’,44 that is, that the government enjoyed divine

guidance. A king’s appointment and favour by God implied

as consequences the favour of the Church too, and also

that the people had a duty to support him. A consecrated

king was the Lord’s anointed and rebellion or violence

against him was perceptible as sacrilege. The Chronicle’s

43 James Campbell, ‘Asser’s Life of Alfred’ in The Inheritance of Historiography, 350-900, ed. Christopher J. Holdsworth and Timothy P. Wiseman (Exeter:University of Exeter, 1986), p. 127 and note 82, p.132.44 Burghart.

34



statement for 853, repeated by Asser, that as a child

Alfred was consecrated king by the Pope may be a result

of Alfred misinterpreting, rather than deliberately

misrepresenting, what had been his ceremonial investiture

as a Roman consul.45 But it probably shows what the adult

Alfred was happy to be believed. Alfred also presented

himself as a modern King David, as a besieged, wise and

teaching king, in his translation of the psalms, which

incorporates subtle alterations to the original.46 This

Alfred-David equivalence occurs also in Asser’s text.47

And in his lawcode, finished probably in 893, Alfred used

number symbolism and words to equate himself and the West

Saxons with Moses and the Israelites. Its 120 chapters

replicated in their number Moses’ lifespan (according to

the Bible). Its preface’s history of law reads like an

intellectual genealogy. It begins with Moses’ reception

of the Ten Commandments, directly from God, and ends with

Alfred’s own legislative activity.48

45 Keynes and Lapidge, p. 232.46 Keynes and Lapidge, p. 153; Stanton, pp. 121-23.47 Karkov, pp. 44, 48.48 Wormald, The Making, pp. 416-29.

35



Karkov has argued that there

is in addition an implicit likening of Alfred to Christ,

both in the lawcode’s Preface, because Christ and His

apostles, as well as Church synods are interposed in the

series of lawmakers, and elsewhere. Asser’s story of

Alfred as a child winning from his mother a book of

English poetry that she had promised to whichever of her

sons first learnt the contents is a case in point. It

seems to be misplaced. For it is recounted after a

reference to Alfred’s twelfth year (860), although by

then his father had been married to his stepmother, and

his mother presumably dead, for four years. But its

chronologically incorrect positioning may have been

deliberate, meant to conjure up a particular biblical

image and thereby suggest that Alfred was Christ-like.

Christ was twelve, according to the Gospel of Luke, when

he conversed with the learned doctors of the Temple in

Jerusalem, telling his anxious mother when she found him

that he was about his Father’s (meaning God’s) business.

Furthermore, she has suggested, the Alfred Jewel may be

making the same point. Christ’s pose therein is one

36



associated with judgement, the colours of His robes are

royal and He is a visual reminder of Alfred’s order that

the book be distributed and read: wise ruler, Christ and

Alfred are fused.49 Another instance is the entry in the

Chronicle for 855, in which Christ is Alfred’s ancestor,

his father’s genealogy being traced back to ‘Adam the

first man and our father, i.e. Christ’.50 The only Anglo-

Saxon dynasty that made such a claim of descent from Adam

was Alfred’s,51 though logically any dynasty could have

done.

Another important aspect of

kingship, symbolically and in actuality, was hunting.

Alfred and Asser both connected wisdom to hunting. In his

versions of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Pastoral Rule,

Alfred used hunting imagery in connection with

intellectual discovery and the search for wisdom.52 Asser

described Alfred as an ‘enthusiastic huntsman’ who worked

to incomparable effect ‘in every branch of hunting’. By

stating this in his account of Alfred’s education in

49 Karkov, pp. 31-4, 39-40, 48.50 English Historical Documents, p. 175.51 Karkov, pp. 18, 6852 Lerer, pp. 77-80.

37



texts and literacy, Asser is implying that, besides

animals, learning and kingship were Alfred’s quarry. As

for practicalities, the hunt offered proof of kings’ and

their followers’ physical capacity, skill, courage and

virtue, practice for war, and a stage for collaboration.

It is the importance of hunting that explains why Asser

emphasised that Alfred pursued it whatever concerns and

distractions beset him, placing it immediately after

governing the kingdom in his list of Alfred’s activities,

and included hunting in his children’s education.53 The

image of king as hunter might seem to lack a strongly

Christian dimension but in fact this is not the case. In

eastern Christendom, hunting imagery was not only a

traditional element of aristocratic and royal

iconography. It also had strong religious overtones, of

victory over evil and hence of salvation. This had been

true too in the pre-Christian period, in Zoroastrian

Sassanian Persia (Iran) and, as has been pointed out in

relation to Pictish Christian sculpture, in Scotland. In

53 Keynes and Lapidge, pp. 75, 90, 91; Karkov, pp. 47-8 ; William Perry Marvin, Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 84-7.

38



Iranian culture the hunt had been a place of epiphany,

where true identity and character were revealed.54

Amongst the evidence for

Alfred’s range of international contacts is Asser’s

statement that Alfred had ‘assembled and commissioned’

craftsmen ‘skilled in every earthly’ aedificium ‘in almost

countless quantity from many races’. Simon Keynes and

Michael Lapidge noted that ‘it is not obvious what Asser

meant by the word, if indeed he always meant the same

thing’. The common idea seems to be construction. Their

consideration of the context prompted them to interpret

this particular reference to aedificium as being to craft,

though the word’s normal sense is building, and Asser

sometimes seems to mean treasure(s). He had said earlier

that Alfred had aedificia ‘incomparably fashioned in gold

and silver’. Alfred also, he says, commanded ‘royal halls

and chambers’ ‘of stone and wood’ to be built, ‘royal

residences of masonry’ moved and splendidly rebuilt,

54 Nina G Garsoïan, ‘The Locus of the Death of Kings: Iranian Armenia – The Inverted Image,’ in The Armenian Image in History and Literature, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1981), pp. 27-64.

39



‘cities and towns’ rebuilt and others constructed where

none had been.55

These remarks of Asser bear

a resemblance to the much more detailed descriptions of

the building activity of the Armenian King Gagik

Artsruni, that are reported in two contemporary sources.

These are the Artsruni family History whose coverage goes

up to about 905, and its anonymous continuation, which

overlaps with the History and begins in 887.56 Gagik built

a number of churches. His most splendid was his palace

church of the Holy Cross, which was decorated on the

exterior with five bands of sculpture, which featured two

portraits of Gagik, and which had frescoes inside. Built

on the island of Aghtamar on Lake Van, between 915 and

921, this church survives in ruins. In its construction,

stones from an Arab fortress that Gagik had destroyed and

that had been transported across Lake Van were used. Many

artisans were ‘assembled at the royal court, honourable

men gathered from all nations of the earth who could

unerringly carry out the king’s plans’ for the island.57

55 Keynes and Lapidge, pp. 101, 106, 249-50.56 Thomson, Thomas Artsruni, pp. 16-20, 325.57 Ibid., pp. 356-57, 359.

40



For apart from church-building, Gagik also seems, like

Asser’s Alfred, to have had an urban building programme,58

despite the Armenian aristocracy’s traditional hostility

to cities. He built a city on Aghtamar, fortifying the

island, providing a harbour, streets, gardens, princely

residences, a splendid palace and storehouses. Before he

became king he had, apparently, provided for the needs of

his palace ‘that was built like a city’ at Amrakan, with

churches, banqueting halls, a staircase and water tunnel.

The stronghold that he built at Marakan resembled a town,

for ‘dwellings, streets, and buildings’ are referred to.

Gagik seems even to have moved some villages in order to

found a new town, for he called the site to which he

transferred them and where he built, Gagkakert, meaning

‘town of Gagik’.59

Gagik’s urban policy was

perhaps in emulation of the Abbasid Caliphs, reflecting

Abbasid courtly ideology, as Lynn Jones has suggested.60

But Matthew Kempshall has pointed out in relation to

58 Lynn Jones, Between Islam and Byzantium: Aght´amar and the Visual Construction of Medieval Armenian Rulership (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 120-23.59 Thomson, Thomas Artsruni, pp. 315-16, 319, 355-59.60 Jones, Between Islam and Byzantium …, pp. 120-23.

41



Alfred that, in the Old Testament, Israel’s King Solomon

rebuilt cities as fortified centres and economic stores,

and recruited craftsmen from other kingdoms, as well as

being a wise king, and a writer, and did several other

things that Alfred did too.61 Solomon was in fact one of

Alfred’s role models, and implicit and explicit

comparison with Solomon is part of Asser’s presentation

of Alfred.62 Alfred’s urban policy, or its representation,

or both, might have been biblical in inspiration and the

same might have been true of Gagik. A Solomonic

comparison in general is certainly implied by the

description of Gagik’s physical appearance, that was

penned by the Artsruni History’s continuator. This follows,

in general order, that of the lady’s beloved (namely

Solomon) in Chapter 5 of the Old Testament book the Song of

Songs, or Song of Solomon.63 It resembles it also in style and

general imagery though not in detail. The beloved’s lips

61 Matthew Kempshall, ‘No Bishop, No King: The Ministerial Ideology ofKingship and Asser’s Res Gestae Aelfredi’ in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, eds. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 106-127, esp. pp 109-10 for the Solomonic model. 62 The importance of the Solomonic model was first discussed in detailby Anton Scharer, ‘The writing of history at King Alfred’s court’, Early Medieval Europe 5 (2) (1996), pp. 177-206. See esp. pp. 191-3.63 Thomson, Thomas Artsruni, pp. 365-66 and n4.

42



for example were like lilies, whereas in Gagik’s case his

eyelids were.

Like the Anglo-Saxons,

Armenians identified their society as a New Israel. Both

the Artsruni historical work (Thomas Artsruni’s History and

its continuation) and the decoration of Gagik’s church on

Aghtamar testify to this. In the former, some events are

said to be fulfilment in Armenia of biblical prophecies,

parallels are drawn between actions of three Artsruni

princes, including Gagik, with those of Old Testament

figures, and Gagik himself ‘reigned like Josiah over a

new Israel’.64 The Aghtamar sculpture expresses this

sentiment and other attitudes that are evidenced in the

text.65 There is a general emphasis on the Old Testament,

Aghtamar’s being ‘the only medieval monument in the

Christian East’ to depict a narrative cycle from it.66

Scenes of Old Testament heroes who were saved from danger

by divine favour, for example David and Goliath, Samson

and the Philistine are included,67 perhaps meant in part 64 Ibid., pp. 205, 263-64, 291, 319, 328, 350, 366.65 Redgate, The Armenians, pp. 205-7. For the most recent study of the church, with many, black and white, photographs, see Jones.66 Sirarpie Der Nersessian, Armenian Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), p. 90.67 Jones, pp. 86, 95.

43



as allusions to Gagik’s own victories against Arab

forces.

And there is, in Gagik’s as

in Alfred’s case, comparison of the king to Christ, in

both text and artwork. This is oblique in the text, but

obvious on the exterior and in the interior of the

church. In the text, the murder of Gagik’s father by the

emir of Her’s troops, when the emir gave him ‘the kiss of

Judas’, is likened to Judas’ betrayal of Christ.

Interestingly, it occurred on a hunting trip. Gagik

himself is described as represented at the church

opposite and in front of Christ, holding the church,

‘depicted as if begging forgiveness for his sins’.68 In

the sculptured scene in question, on the west façade

about four metres above the ground,69 Gagik’s image, which

is over 2.5 metres high, is taller than that of Christ.70

This must have been deliberate and have had meaning.

There are also allusions to Paradise and an implied

68 Thomson, Thomas Artsruni, pp. 290, 327-28, 360-61.69 Jean-Michel Thierry and Patrick Donabédian, Armenian Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 476.70 Jones, p. 59 and n2 for the size of Gagik’s image, and p. 82 for her argument that it is the portrait’s location on the west façade that warranted its description as having a penitential significance.

44



identification of it with Gagik’s kingdom and an

association of Gagik with Adam, the first man. After his

preface, Thomas Artsruni states that he has written what

he had discovered ‘beginning from Adam down to our own

time’ and his early pages include an account of Paradise

and the Fall. The continuator ends with a eulogy of

Gagik, divinely favoured and filled ‘with the spirit of

wisdom’, ‘God’s anointed’ who preserved Armenia from fear

and the ‘arrows of her enemies’.71 The Aghtamar church’s

sculptures include prophets, apostles, saints,

evangelisers, martyrs, princes and animals. Its frescoes

include Adam in the Garden and naming the beasts, the

latter being a scene that is regarded as evoking the

image of the princely hunt.72 As a whole, the church is

not merely informative about Paradise, but an image and

symbol of it.73 The theme of the sculpted reliefs of the

east façade is Paradise regained.74 The Genesis frescoes

71 Thomson, Thomas Artsruni, pp. 67, 72-4, 365-6772 Nicole Thierry, ‘Le cycle de la création et de la faute d’Adam à Aghtámar’, Revue des Études Arméniennes, n.s. 17 (1983), pp. 289-329 esp.pp. 295-96.73 Sirarpie Der Nersessian, Aghtámar: The Church of the Holy Cross (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 20.74 John G. Davies, Medieval Armenian Art and Architecture: The Church of the Holy Cross, Aghtámar(London: Pindar Press, 1991), pp. 72-89.

45



depict God as Christ,75 that is, Son rather than Father.

In the sculpture of Gagik offering his church to Christ

we may be meant to see more than the superficial

identities, and to perceive that Gagik is like Christ in

offering to God something to atone for sin. He is like

the Christ in the Genesis frescoes, in that he has made

Paradise. In offering what he had made to a smaller

figure he is like the frescoes’ Christ again, since God

had entrusted Paradise to Adam.

The Gagik-Christ association

is repeated, both outside and inside the church. Gagik’s

other portrait, on the east façade, is much smaller and

less prominent than that on the west, being higher up and

in a frieze. It associates Gagik with Adam, by its

position above Adam’s portrait, and also, by its content,

with Christ. Gagik holds a drinking goblet resembling a

chalice, the vessel used in the Eucharist for the wine

that becomes Christ’s blood, and reaches for a bunch of

grapes, often used to symbolise Christ and His blood.76

75 Thomas Mathews, ‘The Genesis Frescoes at Aght´amar’, Revue des Études Arméniennes, n.s. 16 (1982), pp. 245-57, esp. pp. 252-56.76 Jones, pp. 57-9, 78-9 for photographs and discussion.

46



And inside the church, as Lynn Jones has suggested, Gagik

himself, when present in his royal gallery on the south

side, was ‘incorporated into the decorative programme’,

to be viewed by the congregation. His gallery is enclosed

within a Christological narrative cycle, the

Annunciation, Visitation and Nativity, including the

three Magi, directly above it and the Second Coming of

Christ below. Since the upper scenes ‘depict the

recognition of one chosen by God’ Jones has taken their

proximity to Gagik as signals that Gagik too was chosen

and his kingship attributable to divine will.77 This must

be true. Yet the thrust of the whole is surely more, that

Gagik was Christ-like. This may have been intended in

part to compensate for Gagik’s not having been

consecrated, as king, by the head of the Armenian Church.

The continuator’s statement that Gagik’s ‘anointing was

invisibly performed by the Holy Spirit’78 suggests that

he, and by implication Gagik himself, was troubled by

this lack. Gagik had been made king by Muslim

authorities, in opposition to King Smbat Bagratuni who

77 Ibid., pp. 67-70.78 Thomson, Thomas Artsruni, p. 348.

47



had, like his father before him, been visibly

consecrated.

As in Alfred’s case, the

representations of Gagik can be regarded as enjoying

their subject’s approval and hence in a sense as self-

representations. The motifs of favour by and closeness to

God, equivalence to Old Testament (though differing)

figures, likeness to Christ, building, including cities,

and the use of international craftsmen as well as victory

over non-Christian enemies are common to both kings. So

too is a concern for written history. The rise of Wessex,

over centuries, as a prominent theme in the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle had the same purpose as the Artsruni History’s

fictional pre-eminence of the Artsrunis in early Armenian

history and as its implications that in the ninth century

the Artsrunis’ role was comparable to that of the

Mamikonean family, who had lead resistance to Persian

oppression, in the fifth. The past was made to justify

the present. Neither Alfred nor Gagik was able to take

internal support for granted. Alfred’s difficulties, with

Vikings and uncooperative subjects, are well known.

48



Gagik’s kingship perhaps lacked, as Jones has argued,

some respectability because of the circumstances of its

foundation.79 Each king used artistic image and text to

generate ‘propaganda’ to buttress his position and each

attained a dominance, greater in Alfred’s case than

Gagik’s, of the surviving evidence. And though Gagik did

not write books as Alfred did, he did resemble Alfred in

commissioning one. The continuator of the Artsruni History

certainly worked for him, and it is possible that its

author, Thomas Artsruni, had too. In his introduction

Thomas stated that he was working at the command of the

prince Gregory (Gagik’s father). But twice, elsewhere, he

refers to Gagik, as the recipient of the work and as the

person who had commanded it. Gregory-Derenik may be a

scribal error, the whole text being Gagik’s commission.80

The epithets ‘most valiant of

literary men’ and ‘great general’ would have pleased

Alfred, could easily have been used of him by Asser and

79 See pp. 65-7 for the argument that aspects of the careers of his grandfather, father and brother, twoinvolving temporary conversion to Islam, and one excommunication, as well as his own oppositionto Smbat, who subsequently became a martyr, had given Gagik an image problem, which his churchwas in part, by stressing his piety, meant to rectify.80 Thomson, Thomas Artsruni, pp. 19-20, 63, 108, 142.

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encapsulate much of Alfred’s self-representation, though

not its Christian dimensions. Actually they were

addressed by Thomas to Gagik.81 Gagik too belongs to the

‘wider field’ to which Shepard’s study has ascribed

Alfred, Symeon of Bulgaria and Leo of Byzantium.82 This

should be set against the possibility of Gagik’s

indebtedness, in his image-building, to the Abbasids that

Jones has suggested.

Finally, Gagik’s ‘glorious

image’ opposite Christ was, Thomas Artsruni’s continuator

states, ‘in a true likeness’.83 Its face does not seem

dissimilar to that in the Alfred Jewel.84 At the court of

Charles the Bald, Alfred’s step-grandfather, there had

been a dish that was for centuries known as the cup of

(King) Solomon Solomon. It too depicts a ruler, and it

has been suggested as a possible inspiration for the

Alfred Jewel portrait.85 This artefact is known now as the

81 Ibid., p. 142.82 Shepard, ‘The Ruler as Instructor, Pastor and Wise …’, p. 357.83 Ibid., p. 360.84 For photographs see Jones, p. 60, and Keynes and Lapidge, front cover.85 Leslie Webster, ‘Ædificia nova: treasures of Alfred’s reign’, in Alfred the Great …, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 96-98, 102-3 and Figure 10 (p. 97) which shows the Chosroes Dish.

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Chosroes Dish, because it is a work from sixth- or

seventh-century Sasanian Persia, Armenia’s neighbour in

late antiquity, and the ruler is thought to be, probably,

Chosroes II of Persia (reigned 591-628). Armenia’s

culture owed a great deal to that of Iran. But visual

portraiture, these three portraits and their relationship

if any, are another story.

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Liturgy, law and self-representation: Christian kingship in England and Armenia from the late-ninth...

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