Saved from stone-robbers by its remoteness, Ani preserves the finest assemblage of Armenian architectural remains in the world.  A stronghold of the Kamsarakan family from the 4th century, Ani rose to prominence around 953, when the Bagratid King Ashot the Merciful, having failed to dislodge the Muslim emirs from their capital at Dvin, made the defensible and scenic town of Ani his seat.  Trade flourished.  Katholikos Sargis moved his own seat here in 992, amid an ambitious building program of churches and palaces.  Alas, the period of prosperity was brief.  Squeezed between the Byzantine Empire and the Seljuk Turks, the Bagratids lost Ani to the Emperor Constantine Monomachus in 1046. Then in 1064 Ani was captured and plundered by the Seljuk Sultan Alp-Arslan. In 1074, he sold the town to the Shaddadid emir Manuche, scion of a successful clan of Kurdish adventurers. Three generations of Shaddadids tolerated and taxed a prosperous Armenian population, but they were in 1199 driven out along with the Seljuks by the Georgian/Armenian brothers Ivane and Zakare. This new Christian ascendancy and wave of building was cut short by a Mongol invasion in 1239.  Life continued under the Mongols and their successors, the town growing gradually poorer but with its churches still maintained. Tamerlane's invasions in 1400-1403, and the shift of the trade routes, brought Ani to desolation.