The Territorial History of Armenia and Azerbaijan
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The territorial history of Armenia and Azerbaijan is marked by centuries of complex geopolitical shifts and cultural interactions. Both nations have ancient roots and have experienced changes in borders and control over the years.
Armenia, with a history dating back to the Urartian Kingdom, was the first nation to officially adopt Christianity as its state religion in the 4th century. Throughout the medieval period, Armenia experienced periods of independence and foreign rule, including Persian and Byzantine domination.
Azerbaijan, historically influenced by Persian and Turkic cultures, had periods of Persian rule and played a role in the Silk Road trade route, fostering cultural diversity.
The boundaries of both Armenia and Azerbaijan were fluid during these times, as various empires vied for control over the South Caucasus. The region’s geography and mountainous terrain contributed to the formation of distinct political entities and principalities.
The map below from the “Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus” created by Arthur Tsutsiev and published in Yale University Press in 2014 shows the Territorial History of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus also contains the following interesting information describing the historical processes that took place in the southern Caucasus:
“The Armenian historical view centers on the global threat associated with the expansion of Turkic-speaking tribal groups into former Armenian territories, including Artsakh (Karabakh). Today’s Azerbaijan is itself largely the former Caucasian Albania, a land which became Christian in the middle of the 4th century, submerged from the 11th century by Turkish invasions and which, in the 19th century, completely disappeared, transformed into a territory Turkish and Muslim.
Azerbaijan comes from the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan of 1918-1920, created following Turkish intervention and taking its name from a Persian region located further south. This part of Eastern Transcaucasia, incorporated into Russia between 1803 and 1828, is in fact a former Persian territory with an indigenous sedentary Armenian population and a nomadic Turkish-Kurdish population who arrived later.
After the First World War, the Armenians would not have a state in the former Ottoman territories but a small formerly Russian territory around the city of Yerevan, southwestern part of the Transcaucasian Federative Democratic Republic (April -May 1918) which takes the name of the Democratic Republic of Armenia. From June 1920, the Kemalist Turkish nationalists began negotiations with the Soviets and the demarcation of the borders of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (born December 2) was ultimately to the detriment of the Armenians themselves, since it did not do not include Karabakh, included entirely in Azerbaijan, at the insistent request of the Turks.
From then on, the Armenians are a people who have the particularity of being deprived of a large part of their historical territory even though it dates back to the 9th century BC with the kingdom of Urartu and its territorial peak dates from the end of the 2nd century BC when King Tigranes dominated a territory stretching from the Caspian to the Mediterranean.”
You can learn more about Caucasus from the following books:
