THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY
(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee)
[ANEC]
The Council of Adana
(July 18, 1316)
Sis in Cilicia – photo by Hrair Hawk Khatcherian
The Armenian state of Cilicia (1080-1375), which had become a kingdom in 1198, started a process of decline in the fourteenth century. The end of the Crusades in 1270 and the fall of the last Crusader bulwark in 1291 were combined with the rise of the Mamluks of Egypt and the Turkmens in Konia, as well as the end of the alliance with the Mongol Empire. As a result, the kingdom looked to the West for help, which was fueled by the pro-Catholic trends of part of the nobility and the ecclesiastics.
The fifth council of Sis (1307) examined the request of Pope Clement V (1305-1314), the beginner of the period of the Avignon Papacy (1307-1377). The Pope demanded that the Armenians adopted Catholicism in exchange for military help from Europe. The pressure exerted by King Levon IV (1301-1307), his father Hetum (the former King Hetum II), and the recently elected Catholicos Gosdantin III (1307-1322) forced the members of the council to adopt the doctrine and the ritual of the Catholic Church, as well as the sovereignty of the Pope. The new rules established, in practice, the union of the Armenian Church and the Catholic Church.
The strongly negative reaction of the public and the ecclesiastics from Greater Armenia led to the councils of Adana (1308) and the sixth council of Sis (1309), which declared null and void the resolutions of 1307.
However, the new King Oshin I (1308-1320) started persecutions against the participants in those councils, and many of them were jailed or exiled. Some 500 ecclesiastics were exiled to Cyprus, where most of them died.
In 1316 Pope John XXII asked Oshin I to restore the resolution of 1307. To that end, the king and the Catholicos called upon the second council of Adana on July 18, 1316, with the participation of 18 bishops, 7 archimandrites, and 10 princes, mostly from the dioceses of Cilicia. The participants confirmed the resolution of 1307, which was again refused by the people and the ecclesiastics of Greater Armenia. The court tried to impose the measures by force and met with an obstinate rejection, particularly in Armenia, and its attempts to do the same in Armenia only deepened the internal division and weakened the resistance against the external enemies.
The help from the West never came, and the eighth council of Sis (1361) declared definitively null and void the resolutions of 1307 and 1316. It was too late. The kingdom of Cilicia, reduced practically to Sis and its surroundings, would fall to the Mamluks in 1375. The last period of Armenian independence before the twentieth came to an end.
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