Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/171

 largely of the sweepings of Asia Minor, Christian tribes which had taken refuge in the mountains. Their religion was partly Greek, partly Armenian, for the Armenian Catholicos, after resting for a century and a half in Mesopotamia, took refuge at Sis, and founded there an independent or national Catholicate at the close of the thirteenth century. Their rulers were princes descended from the house of the Bagratidæ, who had governed the Greater Armenia as kings from the year 885 to the reign of Constantine Monomachus, and had then merged their hazardous independence in the mass of the Greek empire. After the seizure of Asia Minor by the Seljuks, the few of the Bagratidæ who had retained possession of the mountain fastnesses of Cilicia or the strongholds of Mesopotamia, acted as independent lords, showing little respect for Byzantium save where there was something to be gained. Such was the lord Taphnuz of Edessa, on whose inheritance Baldwin of Boulogne founded his principality; such were the lords Leo, Thoros, Melier, and Rupin of the Mountains, who ruled Cilicia during the twelfth century; trying to balance their position between the Byzantine and Latin influences on each