Page:Lesser Eastern Churches.djvu/425

Rh city. As often happens in the case of missionary Churches, they were called simply Archbishop or Katholikos of the Armenians. The title "Patriarch" does not occur till after the breach with Cæsarea (p. 408), though later writers sometimes project it back to the earlier period. Nor have they ever used a special local title. This fact explains to a great extent the frequent later disputed successions. If the primacy were attached to a particular see, the man who (whether de iure or de facto) held that see would have an obvious claim to it. But so vague a title as Katholikos of Armenia would be, and was, claimed by various bishops at the same time, each ruling over a political fraction which was called Armenia. So, with the breaking up of the old kingdom, each rival king or prince who called himself sovereign of Armenia had at his court a Katholikos, whose claim was as good as that of the temporal sovereign.

However, till the 5th century, whereas the king resided at Valarshapat, the Primate was not there, but far away, a Ashtishat in Tarōn, on the Euphrates, in the south of Armenia. Ashtishat, not Etshmiadzin, was the first metropolis of the Armenian Church. All early accounts show this. Valarshapat (the later Etshmiadzin), the place of martyrdom of the Saints Gaiane, Hripsime and their companions, has at first no ecclesiastical importance at all. Agathangelos tells us that at Ashtishat, on the site of temples of pagan gods, St. Gregory erected an altar to Christ. "It is here that churches and altars in the name of the Holy Trinity and baptismal fonts were first set up." Faustus calls Ashtishat "the mother, the first and greatest of all the churches of Armenia, the chief and most honoured see. For here for the first time a holy church was built and an altar set up in the name of the Lord." The sons of Yusik lead a disorderly life "in the episcopal palace" at Ashtishat, the first synods are held there, when Hair, the chief eunuch, wants to receive the blessing of Nerses, he goes to find him at Ashtishat. In short, a multitude of evidences leaves no doubt that Ashtishat was the original metropolis.