L'Egypte vue par des armeniens (XIe-XIIe).

• Author: Cowe, S. Peter

This work comprises the accounts of two very different Armenian visits to Egypt, the earlier one by Catholicos Grigor II Vkayaser (Martyrophile) in the second half of the eleventh century, the later by the manuscript copyist Symeon Lehac i in about 1615, framing a detailed description of Egyptian politics and administration from the famous compilation Fleur des historiens de la terre d'Orient dictated by prince Het um of Korikos in the early fourteenth century. Since the original Old French text of the latter is available, it is assigned to an appendix, while the author has edited and improved existing French versions of the sources pertaining to the hierarch's travels and has masterfully rendered Symeon's extremely complex stylistic idiom, which vacillates between the classical and vernacular registers and is liberally interspersed with loanwords from several languages.

The gradual Byzantine annexation of the historic Armenian lands, compounded by their inability to defend them, led to a major demographic redrawing of settlement patterns in Anatolia during the second half of the eleventh century. Among the Armenian leaders who rose to positions of power in different parts of the eastern Mediterranean in the aftermath of this crisis was Badr al-Jamali, who inaugurated a succession of Armenian viziers at the Fatimid court in the period from 1075 to 1163. His good fortune attracted a significant Armenian influx, so that the community in Egypt rose to about thirty thousand by the following century.

Unfortunately, there are no eyewitness reports of Catholicos Grigor's visit to Egypt. The earliest chronicler was but a stripling in the Levant at that time. Consequently, as Kapoian-Kouymjian demonstrates, it is hard to reconcile the widely divergent accounts of his visit and its significance. Indeed, the same could be said of his rather controversial primacy. This has repercussions for his appointment of his nephew Grigoris as catholicos of the Armenians of Egypt. The author questions the validity of this term to designate the bishop of a local see (p. 18), and yet I think the nomenclature is justified in terms of the dispersion and decentralization of ecclesiastical authority in this era. The Byzantines had allowed a hiatus of some years in the catholicosal line until...