The military complexes that contained recruiting organizations, fortification systems, signal beacons, and logistical support were known as sghnakhs (Armenian: սղնախ, romanized: sġnax).
They symbolised the connection between patriarch Hayk, the eponymous progenitor of the Armenian people, considered as a great-grandson of Noah, and medieval monarchs that ruled Armenia in the Middle Ages.
[citation needed] Hasan-Jalal traced his descent to the Aranshahik, a family that predated the establishment of the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia in the region.
[9] In medieval times, the Hasan-Jalalyans branched into two functionally separate but connected lines: landed princes who ruled the Melikdom of Khachen and clergymen who manned the throne of Catholicos of Aghvank at the Holy See of Gandzasar of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
In 1441, a top military commander from the Hasan-Jalalyans in the service of the Kara Koyunlu orchestrated the return of the Holy See of the Armenian Apostolic Church from the Mediterranean town of Sis in Cilicia to its traditional location at Etchmadzin in Armenia.
[10] Shortly after the event, Grigor X Jalalbegiants (1443–1465), representing the clerical branch of the Hasan-Jalalyans, was enthroned as the Catholicos of All Armenians at Etchmadzin.
[18][19] This state, centered on the semi-independent Armenian principalities of Artsakh and Syunik, would be allied with Georgia and both would be protected by fellow Christian Russia and European powers.
[20][21][22] named Israel Ori, who had served in the armies of Louis XIV of France, he tried to convince Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine (1658–1716), Pope Innocent XII and the Emperor of Austria, Leopold I[17] to liberate Armenia from a foreign yoke and to send large amounts of money to the armed forces of Karabakh Armenians.
[25] In the early 18th century, Persia's Nader Shah took Karabakh out of control of the Ganja khans as punishment for their support of the Safavids, and placed it under his own control[26][27] in which he granted the Armenian meliks supreme command over neighboring Armenian principalities as well as Muslim khans in the Caucasus, in return for the meliks' victories over the invading Ottoman Turks in the 1720s.
The Russian Empire recognized the sovereign status of the five Armenian princes in their domains by a charter of the Emperor Paul I dated 2 June 1799.
It became the scene of several ethnic conflicts with neighboring Azerbaijanis, including the establishment of the Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast within Azerbaijan SSR under the Soviet Union in the early 20th century, and the Karabakh movement in the late 20th century which led to the First Nagorno-Karabakh War amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the establishment of the Armenian Republic of Artsakh.