Ashot the Carnivorous

Ashot IV Bagratuni (Armenian: Աշոտ Դ Բագրատունի), better known as Ashot Msaker (Armenian: Աշոտ Մսակեր, "Ashot the Meat Eater / the Carnivorous"), reputedly for his refusal to refrain from eating meat during Lent, was an Armenian prince from the Bagratid family. A fugitive from the failed uprising in 775 against Arab rule in Armenia, where his father was killed, over the next decades he gradually expanded his domains and established a predominant role for himself in the country's affairs, becoming recognized by the Abbasid Caliphate as presiding prince of Armenia from 806 until his death in 826.

Ashot IV was the son of Smbat VII, presiding prince of Arab-ruled Armenia. Smbat had participated in the rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate, and had been killed in the disastrous Battle of Bagrevand in 775. Following the battle, Ashot fled from the family's traditional lands in eastern Armenia north to his relatives near the sources of the Araxes river, where he was further from Arab power and closer to the Byzantine Empire. There he also possessed silver mines, which allowed him to buy some of the lands of the Kamsarakan family and establish a new lordship around the fortress of Bagaran, in the province of Ayrarat.

The demise or exile of so many princely families (nakharar) after Bagrevand left a power vacuum in the southern Caucasus: in part this was filled by Arab settlers, who by the early 9th century had established a series of larger or smaller emirates in the region, but among the greatest beneficiaries were the Artsruni, a formerly middle-ranking nakharar family that now came to control most of south-eastern Armenia (Vaspurakan). At the same time, through skilful diplomacy and marriage alliances, Ashot managed to re-establish the Bagratids as the main nakharar family alongside the Artsrunis. As a result, in ca. 806, Caliph Harun al-Rashid chose Ashot as the new presiding prince of Armenia, the office that had lapsed with his father's death thirty years previously. The appointment was designed both as a counterweight to the increasingly powerful Artsruni, as well as a focus for Armenian loyalties away from Byzantium, where many families had fled after 775. At about the same time, the Caliph recognized another Bagratid branch, under Ashot I Curopalates, as princes of Caucasian Iberia.

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