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Chapter 1 Satan Unleashed: The Christian Levant in the Eleventh Century When the Armenian communities of the Kingdom of Ani, located in the highlands of what is now eastern Turkey, experienced an eclipse and an earthquake simultaneously in 1036/7, they knew that something beyond the ken of ordinary men had occurred. King Hovhannes and the kat‘olikos Petros, the leader of the Armenian church, seeking the significance of these omens, sent an embassy of eminent men to consult Hovhannes Kozern , a venerable vardapet1 whose wisdom and piety wreathed him with the stature of an Old Testament prophet. When the emissaries from the king and kat‘olikos arrived at the hermit’s cell, they found the holy man prostrate in prayer, bathed in tears and unable to speak. After the vision that gripped him passed and his grief subsided, he explained to his alarmed audience what the ominous portents presaged. Soon overwhelming calamities would strike the Armenians, Hovhannes warned. Christians would turn away from the Church, blaspheming and ignoring God’s law, forgetting the fasts, and neglecting their prayers. Even patriarchs and priests would abandon their altars , and princes and kings would grow cruel and capricious in the use of their God-given authority. Harlots and whoremongers would lead the people , and parents and children would turn against each other. The cause of these disasters, the hermit explained, was the release of Satan from the confinement in which Christ’s crucifixion had placed him; the end of the world was at hand. With the strength of Satan behind them, a cursed people—the Turks—would burn the lands of the Armenians, kill their families, level their cities, and desecrate their churches. Their sufferings would end, Hovhannes predicted, only after sixty years, when “the valiant nation called the Franks will rise up; with a great number of troops they will capture the holy city of Jerusalem, and the Holy Sepulcher, which contained God, will be freed from bondage.”2 Yet the crusaders would achieve only a temporary victory; the Turks would then return with ferocity seven-fold. After fifty years,“the Roman Emperor will be awakened as if from a sleep, and like an eagle, rapidly will come against the Turks with a very great army, as numerous as the sands of the seashore. He will march forth like a burning fire, and all creatures will tremble in fear of him.”3 His triumph over the Muslims would be complete, and once again the known world would be under the rule of the Roman emperor. Hovhannes did not explicitly predict the return of Christ, but his depiction of the ultimate triumph of the emperor drew on the apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, a seventh-century Syriac account. Pseudo-Methodius first described the figure of the “last emperor,” who would defeat the Muslims and lay his crown on the cross at Golgotha; cross and crown would then ascend to Jesus in heaven, signaling the end of earthly dominion and the inauguration of the kingdom of God on earth.4 Hovhannes’s vision appears in the chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, an Armenian monk living in northern Syria under Frankish rule in the early twelfth century. The vision the chronicler described was not a prediction from 1036/7, but a description of the dilemma Matthew believed Armenian communities of the Middle East, who had already witnessed the arrival of the crusaders in Syria and heard of their capture of the holy city of Jerusalem in 1099, faced in his own day. He saw his people as orphans, exiles from their motherland and abandoned by their leaders. Byzantine diplomacy had robbed Armenians of their independence, dispersed their rulers, and divided the church, while Turkish attacks ravaged their land and sacked their cities. Nevertheless, the threat that Armenians such as Matthew of Edessa perceived was not persecution or war, but the danger of integration with surrounding communities. Leaderless, their church divided by schism, and surrounded by Byzantines, Franks, and Turks, many Armenians drifted easily in the political and cultural currents of their neighbors, buoyed by values shared among the diverse communities of the Middle East. Just as Matthew of Edessa inserted the crusaders into an apocalyptic narrative as a way to transform the unexpected into the predicted, other Levantine Christians brought their own paradigms and expectations to their initial encounters with the crusaders, which continued to underlie their relationships for decades after. This chapter discusses the origins of those paradigms and expectations, and also provides a...

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