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Rh country was swept by nomadic tribes, and can scarcely be said to have had a national existence. The devastating rush of Timour came with fatal force over Armenia. The peasants were driven from the plains, and the whole population reduced to the depths of poverty and misery. Many hid in the mountains. Not a few in despair accepted Islam and intermarried with Kurds. Others escaped to Cilicia and Cappadocia, and there became the nucleus of the Christian kingdom of Lesser Armenia, which contrived to exist in independence, though ringed round with Moslem provinces and not in alliance with the Byzantine Empire. These Western Armenians joined hands with the Crusaders, and when communications with Europe were reopened began to develop the remarkable commercial genius for which the race has been famous all around the Mediterranean down to our own day. Unfortunately this same facility of communication with Europe opened the way for papal aggressiveness. In the year 1335 there was formed an Armenian Uniat Society, which accepted the Roman Catholic form of Christianity. At the council of Florence ( 1439) this body was designated "the United Armenian Church." Subsequently it suffered some persecution from the national Church of Armenia and its patriarch.

The well known monastery of the Mechitaristes on the island of St. Lazaar near Venice belongs to the Uniat Armenian Church. It is named after its founder Mechitar, who was born at Sebaste in Asia Minor in the year 1676, and who entered an Armenian convent at Erzeroum in 1691, but afterwards obtained permission to study at Etchmiadzin. Finding that he could learn little there, he got further permission to go to Rome; but owing to illness was only able to proceed as far as Constantinople, where he fell in with some able Roman Catholic ecclesiastics, under whose influence he joined their Church. Subsequently he founded an order of Armenian monks under a modified Benedictine rule, which was sanctioned by Pope Clement, who made Mechitar the head of the order