This fortified monastery was founded, like Sanahin, by Queen Khosrovanush around 976.  It has a S. Nshan church finished in 991 by Smbat Bagratuni and his brother Gurgen, and served as the religious headquarters of the Kyurikians.  The gavit was built in 1185, with the following inscription on the N facade:  “In the year 634/AD 1185, I Mariam, daughter of King Kyurike, built with great hope this house of prayer over our tombs --  those of my paternal aunt Rousoudan, my mother Tamara, and myself, Mariam, under the superior Ter Barsegh, archbishop, who finished the construction.  You who enter through its door and prostrate yourself before the cross, in your prayers remember us and our royal ancestors, who rest at the door of the holy cathedral, in Jesus Christ.”  A smaller S. Grigor church was built in 1025 and rebuilt in 1211. There is a huge, self-standing gavit of the Abbot Hamazasp built in 1257, a “grand and marvelous bell tower” of 1245, and a library built in 1262. There is a large dining hall incorporated in the defensive wall, and several other picturesque chapels and mausoleums. Haghpat was a major literary center in the Middle Ages. It controlled the income and inhabitants of numerous villages and lands, gradually usurped by the Russian state and influential Armenian bureaucrat/princes during the course of the 19^th c.
   In the late 18th century, the Archbishop of Haghpat claimed responsibility for the clergy and church revenues of all the Armenians of Georgia. This Armenian community grew rapidly with the Russian expansion into the Caucasus, particularly refugees who followed the Russians in retreat from Karabakh in and Yerevan in 1804. The Russian governor Tsitsianov, an imperious and somewhat anti-Armenian Georgian prince, unilaterally transferred this authority in 1805 to the Armenian archbishop in Tbilisi, a pro-Russian ecclesiastic it was easier to keep an eye on.  The Archbishop of Haghpat, Sargis Hasan-Jalalean, scion of an ancient family of meliks of Karabakh and brother of the late Katholikos of Aghvank, protested in vain, noting that his brother had been killed and he himself imprisoned by the Khan of Karabakh as a result of their friendly correspondence with the Russians.  Archbishop Sargis eventually moved back to Karabakh to become in 1810 the last Katholikos of Aghvank. This Katholikosate, founded (Armenians say) by the grandson of S. Gregory the Illuminator, controlled the religious affairs of the Caucasian Albanians, the pre-Turkic population of what is now Azerbaijan.  During the Middle Ages its geographic basis shrank and it became culturally assimilated to the Armenian church.  In the 18th century it was a near-exclusive family holding of the Hasan-Jalalean family, operating out of the monasteries of Gandzasar and Amaras in Karabakh.  The Russian Empire abolished the Katholikosate of Aghvank in 1815.