Paper long abstract:

The Mongol conquest of the Armenia and the Middle East in the late 13th century was marked by large-scale sociopolitical upheaval and the union of formerly petty principalities into a single political entity. The effects of these transformations were keenly felt by the local populations and their perspectives are captured in a variety of letters, poems, chronicles, and other forms of correspondence. Diversity in primary source documents is a potentially invaluable tool to a historical inquiry of this period because of its ability to enhance our understanding of the different methods of knowledge production and dissemination. In light of this potentiality, the poetry of the author known as "Frik" has emerged as a particularly enlightening source because of its stylistically detailed discussions of intrigues in the Ilkhanid court, the civil war between Arghun Khan and his vizier Bugha, and Frik's own tragic experiences at the hands of the Mongols.

In spite of the wealth of information that this source offers, it is only in recent years that Frik has undergone a critical review in Anglophone scholarship. Although Frik's poetry discusses the events immediately following the Mongol conquests of the 13th century, and does so in the first person, the oldest extant book with his poetry is a printed book of miscellaneous Armenian verse from the early 16th century. In light of this, definitively placing the author as a contemporary of Arghun, and his poetry as an eyewitness account, seems to be a dubious prospect at best. Instead, my project will critically examine Frik's poetry and pay special attention to the images and memories he evokes of the Ilkhans in general and of Arghun Khan in particular in order to shed light on his possible motives for crafting such a vivid and lasting image of the Mongols in the Armenian literary imagination.