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It is (not only) the will of god»: the king-doms of Cyprus and Cilician Armenia... 151

actions deriving from political necessity in the East as later scholarly
opinion has suggested? This comparative study suggests that the an-
swer to this question cannot come from viewing the establishment of
the Latin Church in Cyprus and Cilician Armenia as singular events
in Mediterranean history. Rather, they should both be seen in the con-
text of a pattern of crusader rulers ’attempts to seek legitimation for
their status and grow their power through ecclesiastical acts pleasing
to papal authority, which worked to increase not only their dominance
but also the legitimacy and control of their successors. This article
delineates the core characteristics of that pattern through a close
treatment of Cyprus and Cilician Armenia and suggests its potential
application to other polities.
As Bernard Hamilton notes: «scholars interested in the religious
history of this period have tended to treat ecclesiastical developments
in isolation from their political context» . The aim of this article, re-
4
sponding to this critique, is thus to reinterpret both sources and schol-
arship with respect to the role of politics in the birth of the kingdoms
of Cyprus and Cilician Armenia, taking both the religious sentiments
of the participants and their political aims and constraints seriously.
It does not seek to subordinate the religious to the political but to un-
derstand the two as fundamentally interdependent for all parties in
this region and period. Although there are studies in which scholars
have outlined the politics in the Crusader east with respect to partic-
ular kingdoms, this work looks beyond the specificities of either polity
in a synthetic thematic approach in an effort to identify how political
and religious policies worked for two different kingdoms with politi-
cally comparable situations in the same period: the Kingdom of Cyprus
and the Kingdom of Cilician Armenia.
To acknowledge the political results of particular actions is not to
deny their ecclesiastical significance or the sincerity of the beliefs un-
derpinning them but to draw a dynamic, complex, and interdiscipli-
nary picture. Drawing out the comparison between the Kingdom of
Cyprus and Cilician Armenia is useful for several reasons. First of all,
at the end of the twelfth century, these two states, at that time princi-
palities, had to strengthen politically weak positions stemming from
the political turmoil in the Eastern Mediterranean in the aftermath of
the Third Crusade. To do this, they had to ally with important political
actors such as the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, and this

4 B. Hamilton, The Armenian Church and the Papacy at the time of the Crusades,
«Eastern Churches Review: A Journal of Eastern Christendom», 10 (1978), p. 61. See
also B. Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: the Secular Church,
Routledge, London, 1980.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XIX - Aprile 2022
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)