Hripsime and her company, AD 301

**The event Armenian tradition sets at the founding of the first Christian state.**

Hripsime and a company of consecrated women, with their superior **Gayane**, are said to have fled Roman territory to Armenia and been killed at Vagharshapat by order of King **Tiridates** after Hripsime refused him. The tradition then has Tiridates struck with madness, healed by **Gregory the Illuminator** — whom he had kept thirteen years in the pit at Artashat — and Armenia adopting Christianity as the religion of the kingdom.

## What the archive can and cannot say

**The narrative is Armenian and late.** The principal source is **Agathangelos**, whose *History* survives in several recensions and is generally dated to the second half of the fifth century — roughly a hundred and fifty years after the events. **No contemporary source records the martyrdoms**, and the archive states that rather than presenting the account as documentary.

**What is not in doubt is the outcome.** Armenia's adoption of Christianity as a state religion, traditionally 301 and placed by some scholars a decade or more later, is **earlier than any comparable act elsewhere** — before Constantine's own conversion and twelve years before the Edict of Milan, which the archive holds as its own event. **The dating of the conversion is disputed; its priority is not.**

**And the physical record is at Vagharshapat.** The churches of Saint Hripsime and Saint Gayane at Echmiadzin stand on the traditional sites; the surviving Hripsime church is of the seventh century, and the archive marks the distinction between a seventh-century building and a fourth-century event.