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Nersēs of Lambron (d. 1198) was a prolific Armenian writer whose works contain several colophons, of which five have a bearing on the Third Crusade. While some colophons serve as prefaces to his writings, others are addenda on circumstances at the time of writing or on later events. The scant history of scholarship devoted to them reveals an unwarranted assumption that has led early scholars to conclude that Nersēs was in Jerusalem when the city fell to Saladin in 1187. The article focuses on the five colophons in chronological order, offering a literary-historical analysis. The colophons composed in quatrains are of particular interest, as are others where a continuator's hand is discernible—whether on the piety of Benedictine monks in the Holy City or on naval movements around Acre. While the study disproves the assumption that Nersēs was in Jerusalem then (or at any time), it underscores the historical significance of these colophons in reflecting Armeno-Cilician sentiments during the period—such as toward the apparently unsatisfactory outcome of the battle of Arsuf (1191). Subsequent hopes of victory and the eventual redemption of Jerusalem were hence anchored in the nascent kingdom of Cilician Armenia (1199–1375). The conclusion draws attention to the absolute necessity of scrutinizing 'eyewitness' accounts surrounding the crusades and to the need of reading the rest of Nersēs's colophons critically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the petitions, letters, opinion pieces and scholarly works that Armenian intellectuals generated to convince French decision-makers to carve an Armenian nation-state out of Cilicia (present-day southern Turkey). This colonial encounter took place within the process by which European powers dismembered the defeated Ottoman state following the First World War. These "geo-texts"—textual representations of territory and population—were strategic attempts at adjusting the parameters of French imperialism, and thus tapped into French notions of history and ethnology to make a case for an Armenian state. First, I show how Armenians adopted and inflected French epistemologies to depict their ancient homeland. Then, I trace the shift from a representation based on historical commonalities between the Armenians and French to one that stressed the ethnological specificities of Armenian nation and territory. Finally, I argue that the static notions of territory, text and population that lobbyists produced continue to fuel scholarly debate over the confessional and ethnic make-up of Cilicia. This study on "geo-texts" provides insights into how, at a certain historical moment, differences and similarities among people, both within a society and between societies, are established in text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]