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546 to give in their adherence to the creed of Chalcedon ( 689). On their return home this act of weakness was repudiated by their Church, and the reconquest of Armenia by the Saracens enabled the National Church to revert to its old position. This was confirmed in a famous synod summoned by the command of the General Omar at Manaschiertum on the confines of Hyrcania in the year 715. It was politic fur the Saracens to promote an ecclesiastical schism that divided their Christian subjects from the Byzantine Empire. At this synod there were six Jacobite Syrian bishops; and it resulted in the fusion of the two communions on the basis of the Monophysite doctrine, except that the Julianists, who were well represented in Armenia, held aloof. After this the affairs of the Armenian Church pass into obscurity.

Even in spite of the rejection of the decrees of Chalcedon the severance of the Armenian from the Greek Church was gradual, fluctuating, and long indefinite. This is proved by the fact that there were Armenian bishops at the three succeeding œcumenical councils—II. Constantinople ( 553); III. Constantinople ( 680); and even II. Nicæa ( 788)—and that the decrees of those councils were acknowledged in Armenia. As late as the year 1166 the catholicos Narses, writing to the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, distinctly repudiated the Eutychian heresy. But then he did not accept the Chalcedonian definition. The position assumed by his Church all along when not disturbed by foreign influences was that its doctrine was ancient primitive Christianity, not Eutychian nor any other peculiar theology, and that the council of Chalcedon had been false to that teaching in leaning towards Nestorianism.

During the mediæval period the Armenians were not represented by any conspicuous ecclesiastic or theologian, and yet the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries all contributed some works to Armenian literature. Turks and Byzantines now made Armenia their battlefield, and the miserable people suffered only less from the latter than from the former. For three centuries the