La Fleur des histoires de la terre d'Orient, written by Hetoum of Korikos, a prominent member of the Cilician Armenian royal family in 1307, contains a brief historical and geographical survey of the realms of Asia, then an account of the rise of the Mongols and subsequent conflicts between the Mongol ilkhans of Persia and the Muslim sultans of Egypt, and finally, a proposal for a new crusade involving the Mongols and Latin and Armenian Christians. Hetoum's narrative is distinctive and compelling for the range and depth of his knowledge. He was a first-hand observer of many of the events he describes, and a nephew of both the great king Hetoum I and his brother, Sempad the historian, both of whom visited the courts of Mongol Great Khans.
The number of extant manuscript copies of Hetoum's text testifies to its popularity during the later Middle Ages. 15 ms copies of the original French text and 31 copies of the Latin survive. The Latin text was later translated back into French: anonymously in BL Cotton Otho.D.V, and then in 1351 by the monk Jean le Long, as part of a collection of eastern travel literature and works relating to the Mongols. Hetoum's text enjoyed a great popularity with the early European printers as well. There were three undated, early sixteenth-century printings of the French text, under the title Sensuyrent les fleurs des histoires de la terre Dorient. Also, in 1529, Jehan St. Denys printed Jean Le Long's French translation under the title L'Hystoire merueilleuse plaisante et recreative du grand Empereur de Tartarie. Editions of the Latin text were published in 1529, 1532 (twice), 1537, 1555, 1585, and later.
The history of the reception of Hetoum's work by Western audiences is that of a flattening of the specificities of its Armenian diasporic and multicultural location within the normalizing frames of European crusade propaganda or travel narrative. Thus in modern times his text is usually subsumed within European accounts of crusader activity or European travel narratives, appearing as a footnote in other, more central histories or readable only in fragments (surviving, for example, in Mandeville's Travels in the section describing the election of the Mongol Great Khan). And if read through a revisionist, anti-colonialist lens, Hetoum's apparent "nostalgia" for the crusade can seem a simple case of colonial mimicry on the part of privileged member of a Frankish-influenced, Cilician Armenian ruling class. But the record of La Fleur des histoires suggests something more complicated: that it is less a colonial stereotype than an innovative multiculturalism at work on the eve of modern European colonization and in excess of the conceptual hegemony of medieval Europe.
In this paper I will examine first the complexities of Hetoum's location in a diasporic community. There is little sense in Hetoum's text of Cilician Armenia as a colonial extension of a homeland, or of the narrative as a translatio imperii. His identifications as a Cilician Armenian focus on Cilician Armenia's distinctiveness vis à vis its immediate neighbours and provide points of association with the Frankish crusader states, especially Antioch and Cyprus. But these identifications also show a keen awareness of Cilician Armenia's location on the margins of several great empires and its potential assimilation by different cultures and religions. Thus the Cilician Armenian ruling class may intermarry with the local Frankish ruling class, can be clearly conversant with French language and culture, and accept the overlordship of the Western Pope and the establishment of a Catholic Armenian Church. But the same Cilician Armenians will also be close collaborators with the non-Christian Mongols (even when they become Muslim as the Il-Khans of Persia did) and remain far less dominated than Europeans by the idea of crusade as the motivating impulse for foreign policy and alliances.
I will next examine the status of Hetoum's text as crusade propaganda. The explicit aim of Hetoum's fourth book may be to persuade the Pope to lead a new crusade to the Holy Land and to provide useful practical information for the best way to conduct such a venture. But Hetoum's interest in the crusade implicitly harnesses a European crusade ideology to "eastern" security needs, focusing on the means by which significant external resources can be harnessed for the defence and security of the Cypriot and Armenian kingdoms. Moreover, this final section is a relatively small portion of a text largely given over to Asian concerns, for the majority of Hetoum's text focuses on a geography of Asia and a history of its rulers (in which recent Mongol and Egyptian history—and by extension, that of the Crusader states—are but the latest instalment). In other words, Hetoum's propagandizing might be seen as much as an attempt to change the European world view, to realign it geopolitically, as an attempt to whip up European crusading spirit against a monolithic Oriental other.
Implicitly, Hetoum's text maps Jerusalem as one destination among many, sees it in a geographical context quite different from the usual European one: on the periphery of Asia, strategically not conceptually in the centre of Egyptian, Mongol, Frankish, Armenian geopolitical interests. This Jerusalem therefore does not define a whole and originary Christianitas (and with it a supreme Latin Europe) by acting as mirror and translatio. Instead Hetoum's methodology is metonymic rather than metaphoric, a bringing close together into productive contiguity a variety of differences, rather than a process of othering in order to define crucial foundational différence. Hetoum's Asia is thus a productive (and threatening) place of contiguity rather than orientalizing spectacle. For example, in treating the potential difference and sameness of the Mongol other, Hetoum acknowledges, but does not make defining, their ugly appearance to Western eyes; nor does he find it necessary to make them Latin Christians (that is, colonize their difference) in order to make them likely allies. This is part of the mulitiplicity of identifications, and hence the richness of Hetoum's multicultural landscape.