Guests, strangers, and those in need: cosmopolitanism as hospitality and making relations in High Medieval Armenia

The Silk Road is often viewed as a precursor to contemporary globalization, the merchants who traversed it as early agents of cultural exchange. Missing are the lives of the ordinary people who inhabited the route and contributed as much to its development as their itinerant counterparts. This chapter takes the highlands of medieval Armenia as a case study for examining how early globalization and local life intertwined along the Silk Road. In thinking about Silk Road cosmopolitanism as framed within practices of hospitality, it explores the capacities for ‘making worlds for others to live in’ within local traditions, at the same time raising the question of the ambiguity at the heart of such practices of welcoming, housing, and feeding strangers. Ultimately, the chapter frames cosmopolitanism-as-hospitality as a local praxis of globality and agency within the new worlds of the Mongol thirteenth century.