Conflicted Coexistence: Christian-Muslim Interaction and its Representation in Medieval Armenia

Abstract

During the course of the eleventh century, the Armenian kingdoms of the Bagratuni and Arcruni dynasties were annexed by the Byzantine Empire.1 The invasions of the Seljuk Turks precipitated the collapse of the Armenian kingdoms and then swiftly removed the Byzantines from their newly acquired territory.2 Although Armenians had a long relationship with Islam, Islamic peoples, and Islamic rule,3 Seljuk dominance in Anatolia inaugurated a new social reality resulting from the demographic shift of emigrating Armenians and new influxes of Islamic groups of Turkish, Kurdish, and Persian ethnicity. The new political and cultural topography consequently engendered a renewed Armenian narrative about Islam and Muslims that refashioned elements of the earlier discourse as well as introduced new interpretative strategies to contextualize and determine the radical transformation of contemporary Armenian life. In this chapter, I first present evidence concerning both creative and conflictual Armenian and Muslim interactions in the period approximately between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and then turn to cotemporal Armenian literary depictions of Muslims and of the Seljuk Turks in particular.4