It might have been expected that this arrangement would have satisfied the nobles of Armenia, and have given that unhappy country a prolonged period of repose.  But the personal character of Artaxerxes was, unfortunately, bad; the Armenian nobles were, perhaps, capricious; and after a trial of six years it was resolved that the rule of the Arsacid monarch could not be endured, and that Varahran should be requested to make Armenia a province of his empire, and to place it under the government of a Persian satrap.  The movement was resisted with all his force by Isaac, the patriarch, who admitted the profligacy of Artaxerxes and deplored it, but held that the role of a Christian, however lax he might be, was to be preferred to that of a heathen, however virtuous.  The nobles, however, were determined; and the opposition of Isaac had no other result than to involve him in the fall of his sovereign.  Appeal was made to the Persian king and Varahran, in solemn state, heard the charges made against Artaxerxes by his subjects, and listened to his reply to them.  At the end he gave his decision.  Artaxerxes was pronounced to have forfeited his crown, and was deposed; his property was confiscated, and his person committed to safe custody.  The monarchy was declared to be at an end; and Persarmenia was delivered into the hands of a Persian governor.  The patriarch Isaac was at the same time degraded from his office and detained in Persia as a prisoner.  It was not till some years later that he was released, allowed to return into Armenia, and to resume, under certain restrictions, his episcopal functions.

The remaining circumstances of the reign of Varahran V. come to us wholly through the Oriental writers, amid whose exaggerations and fables it is very difficult to discern the truth.  There can, however, be little doubt that it was during the reign of this prince that those terrible struggles commenced between the Persians and their neighbors upon the north-east which continued, from the early part of the fifth till the middle of the sixth century, to endanger the very existence of the empire.  Various names are given to the people with whom Persia waged her wars during this period.  They are called Turks, Huns, sometimes even Chinese, but these terms seem, to be used in a vague way, as “Scythian” was by the ancients; and the special ethnic designation of the people appears to be quite a different name from any of them.  It is a name the Persian form of which is Haithal or Haiathleh, the Armenian Hephthagh, and the Greek “Ephthalites,” or sometimes “Nephthalites.”  Different conjectures have been formed as to its origin:  but none of them can be regarded as more than an ingenious theory.  All that we know of the Ephthalites is, that they were established in force, during the fifth and sixth centuries of our era, in the regions east of the Caspian, especially in those beyond the Oxus river, and that they were generally regarded as belonging