Hethum of Korykos

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Hethum presents his work to Pope Clement V (MS Paris, National Library, Nouv. Acqu. Franç. 1255, early 15th century)

Hethum of Korykos (* 1230/45; † not before 1309), also Hayt (h) on of Korykos , Hayton of Lampron , French Héthoum de Korikos , old French Hayton du Corc , Latin Hayton dominus Churchi (with other name variants), was a Armenian historian and Lord of Korykos .

Life

He was the son of Baron Oschin von Korykos († 1265) and his wife Alix von Lampron. Thanks to his family ties to the royal family, he played an influential role in the history of the Christian kingdom of Little Armenia . His father was a younger brother of King Hethum I , who founded the Armenian dynasty of the Hethumids in 1226 . Hethum of Korykos was thus also a second uncle of the grandson Hethum I, who was fighting for the throne in his time and with his active participation, as well as a third uncle of Leon IV († 1307), for whose succession he campaigned. His daughter Zabel (Isabella) married the grandson of Hethum I, Oschin III. who succeeded Leons IV. 1307-1320 as king.

In 1299 Hethum made a pilgrimage to France from Korykos to redeem a vow to Mary. The original intention of renouncing the world and entering a monastery after the return of the world was initially postponed in order to stand up for the interests of his country in the critical situation of the kingdom, which was characterized by internal quarrels about the throne and external attacks by the Islamic Mamluks . In 1305 he retired to the Premonstratensian Monastery of Bellapais in Cyprus . According to his own account, his retreat was made possible by an improvement in the political situation, which after a victory over the elite troops of the Mamluk sultan with a subsequent armistice had at least partially stabilized in terms of foreign policy. Cypriot chroniclers, however, report that he had to flee from Lesser Armenia due to his activities against Hethum II , who had been regent for Leon IV since 1301.

However, his stay in Bellapais was short-lived. As early as 1307 he was in Poitiers , where Pope Clement V resided most of the time before the curia was fixed in Avignon , and on behalf of the Pope to support a crusade project , he dictated his description and history of Asia, the Flor des estoires de la terre d ' Orient . His stay also served to represent the deposition of Henry, operated by his brother Amalrich of Tire , at the Curia in the dispute over the crown of Cyprus against the ambassadors of Henry II of Lusignan . After returning from France, he stayed only a few days in Cyprus and then returned to Lesser Armenia, where his adversary Hethum II († 1307) had been murdered in the meantime. Further political activities are documented for 1308/1309: In 1308 he brought Amalrich of Tire a letter from Pope Clement V and for 1309 it is attested by Cypriot chroniclers that he continued the Amalrich affair against Heinrich. His date of death is not known, the assumption made in older research (Kohler) that he can still be identified with a "Hayton, Armeniorum dux generalis" at the Council of Adana (1314), has because of the frequency of the personal name and the designation found as a “dux generalis” contradiction.

The pile des estoires de la terre d'Orient

The four books of the Flor des estoires offer a geographical (Book I) and historical (Book II) description of Asia, a history of the Mongols (Book III) and a crusade plan for the conquest of the Holy Land (Book IV), for which the Mongols as allies should be won. Hethum cites three sources especially for the third book on the history of the Mongols : “Tales of the Tatars” ( estoires des Tartars , on which he relies for the period up to Möngke Khan (up to approx. 1295), then for the period that followed his great-uncle's stories Hethum I, who often told his sons and nephews about his life and had them write down what was told, and finally, for the most recent time, Hethum's own experience, which he was able to relate from his own testimony. Hethum also knew western ones, especially about the history of the crusades Sources that he calls “Tales about Godfrey of Bouillon ” and “Book of the Conquest of the Holy Land”, and based on parallels in content, it has been assumed that he is familiar with travel reports such as those by Johannes de Plano Carpini and Marco Polo could have been.

The circumstances of the transcript of the pile of the estoires are each Explicit the French and the Latin version of the fourth book explains. Afterwards, Hethum dictated the work that he himself had " compiled " (compiled) on behalf of the Pope in Poitiers in French and without the aid of written drafts ( sans note ne exemplaire ) to a Nicolas Faulcon - a premonstratensian from Poitiers who had otherwise not emerged historically then translated the French manuscript into Latin. According to the Latin Explicit , the translation was completed in August 1307, and according to the French Explicit , the work was given to the Pope in 1307. Whether the phrase “sans note ne exemplaire” (“absque nota sive aliquo exemplari”) refers to the entire work or only to the crusade project of the fourth book is questionable due to the abundance of detail in the first three books. As a member of the Armenian aristocracy, which had long since adopted French customs and legal habits under the influence of the "Frankish" crusader states and had a particularly close relationship with the Poitevinian rule of the Lusignan in Cyprus, which was established through political alliances and targeted marriage policies , Hethum was with the French language is in any case sufficiently familiar to cope with his dictation to Nicolas Faulcon.

The concern of forging an alliance with the Mongols against their common Islamic opponent had already preoccupied Clement V's predecessors since Innocent IV and led to embassies and, for the time being, little concrete commitments. In connection with the jubilee year 1300, the hopes of a reconquest of the Holy Land had briefly increased to a kind of "mass hysteria" (Hans E. Mayer), and prophecies about a saving role for the Mongols had also played a role. Clement V himself had just completed his Italian crusade against the followers of the sect leader Fra Dolcino in the spring of 1307 , a process of rather local importance, and now, in association with Philip IV of France, set about dissolving the Order of the Templars on account of heresy to have his vast fortune confiscated. During his reign, Clemens V had at least four other crusade morandas drawn up in addition to Hethum's expert opinion, in 1305 and 1309 by Ramon Llull , 1306 by Pierre Dubois and 1314 by Guillaume de Nogaret , who emphasized the confiscation of the Templar property with the financial needs for the conquest of the saint Country justified. Against this background, it can be seen that Hethum, as a trusted expert on the conditions in the Mongolian Il-khanate of Persia, the last possible Mongolian ally since the collapse of the Mongolian empire, was commissioned by the Pope with his report. The projects fizzled out, but at least the origin of Hethum's writing is owed to them, which, thanks to his good knowledge of the conditions under discussion, has remained an invaluable source for the history of the Mongols and Lesser Armenia in the 13th and early 14th centuries.

Tradition of the Flor des estoires

The work is preserved in a total of 58 manuscripts , which are distributed according to their text versions as follows:

  • 24 French manuscripts, including 18 with the first version of Faulcon, five with the reverse translation from Latin written by Jean le Long in 1351 , and three with independent retranslations by unknown authors.
  • 32 manuscripts with Faulcon's Latin translation (two of which are not actual witnesses, but notes and lists of variants).
  • A manuscript with a Spanish translation from the French Faulcons for Juan Fernández de Heredia (1377–1396 Grand Master of the Order of St. John ).
  • An English manuscript, by an unknown author in the 16th century, presumably translated for Henry VIII from the French Faulcons.

Add to this the Editio princeps of Faulcon's French first version (Paris 1510, reprinted several times), several prints of his Latin translation (Haguenau 1529, Basel 1532, Helmstedt 1585), the Editio princeps of the French reverse translation by Jean le Long (Paris 1529), a print of an English translation by Richard Pynson (London, around 1520), independent of the English handwritten version , as well as prints in German (Strasbourg 1534), Dutch (Antwerp 1563), Italian (Venice 1559, Venice: Horologgi , 1562, Venice: Sansovino, 1562) and Spanish (Córdoba 1595).

Further works by Hethum

Since the 19th century, Hethum has also been assigned a chronograph of Little Armenia written in Armenian, which covers the period from 1076 to 1308. Other works that have occasionally been ascribed to him (a commentary on the Apocalypse of John , a crusade memorial that has come down to us in several Hethum manuscripts, and an Exordium Jerosolimitani Hospitalis ac Ordinis ) are being rejected by researchers today.

literature

The edition of the first French version of the Flor des estoires, which is still relevant to this day, is, despite some editorial flaws, the basic edition by Kohler 1906 in its introduction. The attached, rather scanty edition of the Latin text should be consistently compared with Dbody 1998, the one in its critical edition For the first time in the reverse translation of Le Long, all Latin witnesses are collated and one of these witnesses, who is particularly close to Le Long's original, is edited with all variants.

  • Ukrtitsch Augerean, Hethoum patmitsch thatharac. Venice 1291 (d. I. 1842), here p77-86 edition of the Armenian chronograph attributed since Augerean Hethum, to which V. Langlois, Revue de l'Orient, 3e série, 15 (1863), p.107-114 offers a French translation.
  • Charles Kohler (ed.): Hayton, La flor des estoires de la terre d'Orient. In: Recueil des historiens des croisades, Documents arméniens, 2, Paris 1906 (digitized version of the Bibliothèque Nationale: PDF ).
  • Sven D Körper : The history of the Mongols of Hethum by Korykos (1307) in the reverse translation by Jean le Long, Traitiez des estas et des conditions de quatorze royaumes de Aise (1351). Critical Edition. With parallel reprint of the Latin manuscript Wroclaw, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, R 262. Frankfurt am Main 1998 (= EHS XIII.236).
  • Felicitas Schmieder : Europe and the foreigners. The Mongols in the judgment of the West from the 13th to 15th centuries. Sigmaringen 1994 (= contributions to the history and source studies of the Middle Ages, vol. 16).
  • Wilhelm Baum: The metamorphoses of the myth of the kingdom of the priest king Johannes. Rome, Byzantium and the Christians of the Orient in the Middle Ages . Klagenfurt 1999.
  • Hans Eberhard Mayer : History of the Crusades . 10th edition, Stuttgart 2005.
  • Shahe Ajamian: The Colophon of the Gospel of Hethum “Bayl” . In: Shahe Ajamian (ed.): Text and context: studies in the Armenian New Testament (University of Pennsylvania Armenian texts and studies 13). Scholars Press, Atlanta, Ga. 1994, 1-13. ISBN 0-7885-0033-3 .