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\u201cPeace\u201d was recently achieved between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which had been fighting for nearly two months, after the Christian nation\u00a0agreed to cede<\/a>\u00a0its ancestral lands in Artsakh to its Muslim neighbor.<\/p>\n From a temporal and myopic point of view, such a settlement may seem progressive; from a long point of view it is regressive and reflective of the continuum of Armenian\/Islamic history and relations: in exchange for peace, Christians have always been forced to cede territory to Muslims.\u00a0 Indeed, the heart of the Muslim world\u2014the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia Minor\u2014was all Christian before the sword of Islam invaded.<\/p>\n Thus, before Islam violently conquered eastern Anatolia (Asia Minor) in the eleventh century, Armenia was significantly larger than today. Beginning a thousand years, however, Turks chipped away at and absorbed ethnically Armenian territory.\u00a0 What is happening today is simply part of that continuum.<\/p>\n The Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa (d.1144), an Armenian historian who lived close to the initial conquests, makes all this clear.\u00a0 \u00a0According to this valuable historical resource, in 1019, \u201cthe first appearance of the bloodthirsty beasts \u2026 the savage nation of infidels called Turks entered Armenia \u2026 and mercilessly slaughtered the Christian faithful with the sword.\u201d Three decades later the raids were virtually nonstop. In 1049, the founder of the Turkic Seljuk Empire himself, Sultan Tughril Bey (r. 1037\u20131063), reached the Armenian city of Arzden, west of Lake Van, and \u201cput the whole town to the sword, causing severe slaughter, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons.\u201d<\/p>\n Other contemporaries confirm the devastation visited upon Arzden. \u201cLike famished dogs,\u201d writes Aristakes (d.1080) an eye witness, the Turks \u201churled themselves on our city, surrounded it and pushed inside, massacring the men and mowing everything down like reapers in the fields, making the city a desert. Without mercy, they incinerated those who had hidden themselves in houses and churches.\u201d<\/p>\n Eleven years later, in 1060, the Turk\u2019s laid siege to Sebastia (which, though now a Turkish city, was for the preceding 400 years Armenian).\u00a0 Six hundred churches were destroyed, \u201cmany and innumerable people were burned [to death],\u201d and countless women and children \u201cwere led into captivity to Persia.\u201d<\/p>\n Between 1064 and 1065, Tughril\u2019s successor, Sultan Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri\u2014known to posterity as Alp Arslan, one of\u00a0Turkey\u2019s unsavory but national heroes<\/a>\u2014laid siege to Ani, the fortified capital of Armenia, then a great and populous city. The thunderous bombardment of Muhammad\u2019s siege engines caused the entire city to quake, and Matthew describes countless terror-stricken families huddled together and weeping. \u00a0Once inside, the Islamic Turks \u201cbegan to mercilessly slaughter the inhabitants of the entire city . . . and piling up their bodies one on top of the other\u2026.\u00a0 Innumerable and countless boys with bright faces and pretty girls were carried off together with their mothers.\u201d<\/p>\n Not only do several Christian sources document the sack of Armenia\u2019s capital\u2014one contemporary succinctly notes that Muhammad \u201crendered Ani a desert by massacres and fire\u201d\u2014but so do Muslim sources, often in apocalyptic terms: \u201cI wanted to enter the city and see it with my own eyes,\u201d one Arab explained. \u201cI tried to find a street without having to walk over the corpses. But that was impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n Such is an idea of what Muslim Turks did to Christian Armenians\u2014not during the Armenian Genocide of a century ago but one thousand years ago, starting in 1019, when the Islamic conquest of Armenia first began.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was the beginning of the misfortunes of Armenia,\u201d Matthew of Edessa concludes his account:\u00a0 \u201cSo, lend an ear to this melancholy recital.\u201d\u00a0 This has proven to be an ominous remark; for the aforementioned history of blood and tears was, indeed, just \u201cthe\u00a0beginning<\/em>\u00a0of the misfortunes of Armenia,\u201d whose \u201cmelancholy recital\u201d continues to this day,\u201d most recently by the nation\u2019s recent concessions which, in the long run, may well have been in vain.<\/p>\n Little wonder many Armenians are displeased with their government\u2019s surrender of even\u00a0more<\/em>\u00a0land\u2014to the point of\u00a0storming parliament<\/a>\u00a0and \u201cbeating Parliament Speaker Ararat Mirzoyan unconscious in front of his family.\u201d\u00a0 Perhaps they are aware that, as history suggests, true and permanent peace between Armenia and its Muslim neighbors will only be achieved when the Christian nation has ceded itself into nonexistence.<\/p>\n