The King’s Mellifluous Tongue Study, Social Bonding, and the Making of Middle Armenian as a Language of the Elite in Medieval Cilicia

This article on social history examines the study of Middle Armenian manuscripts at the Cilician court, placing the language’s development within a Mediterranean context that includes Outremer French and Byzantine Greek. In particular, it argues that King Het‘um I (d. 1270) bolstered his status as educated king through the commission of two works from theologian Vardan Arewelc‘i (d. 1271): an encyclopedic compendium and commentary on grammar, which aided vernacular study in different ways. By balancing the microhistory of these manuscripts against the macro-history of Cilician Middle Armenian’s configuration in writing, this article shows how vernacular Armenian became an object of elite study, seemingly capable of representing all the knowledge in the world.