We know of the monastic universities and cultural centers in Medieval Armenia through the manuscripts themselves and the comments written by scribes in their margins. Sadly, we know of these centers through descriptions of how they were destroyed by invaders.

One scribe wrote: "Tamerlane gave an order to seize and destroy a vast number of ancient manuscripts, some of which he carried away to Samarkand."

"In 1179, a library with ten thousand manuscripts was burnt to the ground in the city of Baghaberd by invading Seljuks" another writes.

In 1386, the scribe Hakop described the ordeal endured both by him and his teacher, the philosopher Hovhan Vortnetsi, during the Mongolian invasion: "This manuscript was finished in a bitter sorrowful year"

Invading Mongols captured the Vorotan Fortress, and Vorotnetsi was forced to flee. The scribe Hakop continues. "And I followed him, heavily burdened by a bag containing papers and a copy of the manuscript, ink and pen, reading and writing as much as I could amidst many difficulties and hardships, for whenever I began writing I couldn’t finish"

On the last page there is a drawing which has no relation whatsoever to the subject of the manuscript. An old man wearing a purple mantle is lying on the floor with blood flowing from his chest. Blood stained swords and spears lie by his side. Under the picture is the young scribe’s memorial inscription in which he asks the reader "to remember and pray for my spiritual father and teacher slain by foreign invaders before my very eyes."

The letters are stained with tears and the handwriting is jerky. He continues: "In the last pages of the book there are many errors, and the letters are large and uneven. This is because sorrow is profound and I am the most unworthy of my master’s pupils."

The first line of defense against invaders, many were killed in their cells as they worked, or had to wander for years to foreign countries to try and buy back captured manuscripts. Others were cheated out of promised remuneration a plot of land or an ox and dismissed from the monastery, penniless.

So prized were Armenian manuscripts, invaders went to extremes to obtain them. In one case, when a Persian Shah seized one, he put the offending manuscript in chains.

During the Mongol invasion, manuscripts from the Sanahin and Haghbat monasteries were hidden in gorges and caves in Lori. To make them reveal their hiding place, the Mongols tortured the monks, during which three senior and twelve junior clergymen are reported to have retorted with a line from the Gospel: "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine."

This incident was not unique in Armenian history. Through the genocide when two starving Armenian refugee women saved the Homilies of Mush, the largest manuscript created, by carrying it on their backs through hostile territory, burying half in Erzerum in order to save part of the priceless treasure (the other half was found and returned to the Matenadaran by a Polish officer in the Russian army) through all of Armenia’s manuscript history, scribes and clergy, peasants and simple folk revered the font of their culture through the care and reverence for their writings.

The treasure was not in the gilt bindings, or the beautifully painted illustrations. It was not in the expensive inks and liquid gold used to adorn the books these were but symbols of something deeper in the Armenian culture. The treasure was in the effort to create substance from inspiration. It was the intangible made present by words. In our times, words are taken for granted, they are functional tools. But to the people who struggled to copy books, to explore the universe through manuscripts, to those who preserved them, and saved them from destruction, they were nothing less than the spirit made flesh, then inspiration and understanding made tangible on earth. They were a gift from God, and they were Armenia’s legacy.