STUDIES ON THE ORIENTAL SOURCES AND HISTORIOGRAPHY IN ARMENIA (EARLY Ծր․Ամփ․վերջն1 a5 | Page 66

choosing the notion of “Caliph” versus that of “Patriarch” as a
definition for the term Catholicos, Mufaḍ ḍ al was probably
pursuing a theologically grounded polemical objective: he was
implicitly denying the qualification of “Patriarch” to the religious
leader of a Christian community other than the Coptic Church. In
addition, a political aim may also be envisaged behind this
terminological choice. Indeed, as I show in analyzing a wide range
of references to non-Coptic Christian groups in Mufaḍ ḍ al’s work,
the author seems intensively engaged in de-Christianizing (and, at
times, even “de-humanizing”) the images of those Christian groups
and populations that were fighting against the Mamluks either in
the Crusades or in the “Mongolian” wars (to which the Armenian-
Mamluk conflict was linked). In doing this, he probably aimed to
deny any possible association between foreign Christian groups –
that were enemies to the Mamluk State- and the Egyptian Coptic
Christians, that he wanted to represent as loyal subjects and
supporters of the Mamluks and of the socio-political order that the
Sultan “embodied” and preserved. Thus, he was somehow trying to
redefe the perceived “nature” of those conflicts from a “religious”
one (Christians vs. Muslims) into a merely “ethnic” and “political”
one (foreign enemies vs. subjects of the Mamluk State).
At the opposite end of the spectrum of different translations
of the terms Catholicos in Medieval Arabic sources, another
expression is taken into careful consideration, although it is used in
a source slightly prior to the Mamluk era. It is the odd wording
“Caliph of Christ” that the geographer Yāqūt (d. 1229) applies to
the Armenian Catholicos when describing the city of Hṙ omk-
la/Qal‘at al-Rūm in his famous Kitāb mu ‘jam al-buldān. There, he
defines the Catholicos not only as baț rak al-Arman (“Patriarch of
the Armenians”) but also as khalīfat al-Masīḥ (‘inda-hum):
«Caliph of Christ (according to what they believe)». Far from being
polemically motivated, such term seems to express a “philological”
attitude on the part of the Muslim author, who exploits the
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