On the Avarayr Plain, at what is modern-day Churs in West Azerbaijan province, the Armenian army under Vardan Mamikonian clashed with the Sasanian one.

By the first half of the 11th century, the Byzantine emperors were actively trying to round off their eastern territories, in an attempt to absorb the unstable Armenian dynasties.

In 1021-1022 emperor Basil II led his army as far as Khoy within 175 km of Dvin, and obtained the surrender of royalty from the Artsruni dynasty of Van.

[19] The Seljuk Turkic tribes, who the local Hadhabani Kurds initially resisted, eventually conquered the region in the 11th and early 12th centuries.

After a long and bloody siege led by the Safavid grand vizier Hatem Beg, which lasted from November 1609 to the summer of 1610, the Castle of Dimdim was captured.

All the defenders were killed and Shah Abbas I ordered a general massacre in Bradost and Mukriyan (reported by Eskandar Beg, Safavid historian in the book Alam Aray-e Abbasi) and resettled the Afshar tribe in the region while deporting many Kurdish tribes to Khorasan region, where many of their descendants still reside of as of today.

The districts of Maku, Khoy, Salmas, and Arasbaran, and the region of Urmia, according to 19th-century administrative division became a part of the northwestern Iranian province of Azerbaijan.

Some events in the 19th and 20th centuries are: Some Muslim researchers[24] have proclaimed that the birth of the prophet Zoroaster was in this area, in the vicinity of Lake Orumieh, Chichest or Ganzak; recent scholarship, however, indicates that sites in Central Asia are more likely.

However, our own preliminary investigations of this topic, which are based on district-by-district calculations... suggest that Kurdish may in fact be the mother tongue of a slight majority of the province's population.The counties of Bukan,[26] Mahabad,[27] Oshnavieh,[28] Piranshahr[29] and Sardasht[30] are populated by Kurds, while Chaldoran,[31] Maku,[32] Miandoab,[33] Naqadeh,[34] Salmas[35][36] and Takab[37] have a mixed population of both Azerbaijanis and Kurds.

The population history and structural changes of West Azerbaijan province's administrative divisions over three consecutive censuses are shown in the following table.

[45][46][47] Gooy Teppe is another significant site, where a metal plaque dating from 800 BC was found that depicts a scene from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Ruins such as these and the UNESCO world heritage site at the Sasanian compound of Takht-i-Suleiman illustrate the strategic importance and tumultuous history of the province through the millennia.