Mashdots and Badarakamadouyts, with rituals and Holy Masses, in Armenian, decorated manuscript on paper, with vellum leaves from a French service book in Latin reused in its binding [Caesarea in Cappodocia and northern France, dated 1601 and second half of the thirteenth century (most probably c.1260-70)]

237 leaves, 165mm. by 135mm., one paper endleaf and single leaves perhaps wanting after fols.14, 45, 74, else apparently complete, 15 lines of black ink in bolorgir script, with some letters in uppermost and lowermost lines with elaborate ornamental cadels (that on fols.110r and 130v ending in flowerbuds, that on 195v forming a hand holding another letter), rubrics and one-line initials in red, each major section opening with a coloured initial formed from animals and stylised foliage, opening 2 lines in blue, purple or iridescent brown, with large coloured floral cartouches or birds (that on fol.201r with a crowned human head), frontispiece with a half-page panel of floral tiles shaded in crystalline purple, surmounted by two facing birds holding grapes in their mouths, notes in Armenian dated 1858 in front from a scholar in Constantinople, the volume with some water damage with small stains, edges woolly, some leaves with edges repaired or tipped in on more modern paper stubs, contemporary binding of brown leather with marks of a cross once on front board within tooled chevrons and other attachments, remnants of silk and two leather tags inside back board, small scuffs and cracks to spine, with two substantial vellum cuttings from a very large thirteenth-century French service book in Latin reused as pastedowns and endleaves at each end, cropped at top of present volume, that at back of book bound in upside-down, with remains of double column, 14 lines in black ink in a fine and angular gothic bookhand, some capitals touched in red, four 2-line initials in red or blue with contrasting penwork, stained and with small holes, that at front still half glued to board, the lifted area here and at back leaving  offset of Latin letters on wood, overall volume in good and solid condition

The survival of these Latin leaves within this Armenian book is remarkable, and sets this book apart from any other. The colophon of the Mashdots and Badarakamadouyts records its scribe as the Monk Mardiros, and the completion of the work in 1601 (during the reign of the Armenian Catholicos Hovhannes IV of the House of Cilicia), in Caesarea in Cappadocia (in the centre of Modern Turkey). The volume was doubtless bound there. The Latin leaves most probably date to the third quarter of the thirteenth century, and compare closely to numerous examples surviving in Western collections (cf. Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris in the Reign of Saint Louis, 1977, figs.377, 379, 387, and 391; and the Bute Psalter made c.1260-70, now Getty 46: Kren, French Illuminated Manuscripts, 2007, p.32). It seems almost inconceivable that their parent volume should have been carried into the interior of modern Turkey in the years immediately before 1601, an area nearly unknown to Western travellers until the nineteenth century, and they are more probably relics of a book carried to the Near East closer to the time of their production, during the last Crusades.

Following the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, the Third Crusade was launched, taking the city of Acre in 1191 and refounding it as the capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. However, despite the efforts of Pope Gregory IX to incite crusading zeal in the populations of Europe, by the mid-thirteenth century the European footholds in the Levant began to collapse and were swallowed up by the Muslim armies. Caesarea on the Levant coast fell in 1256, Lattakia in 1278, followed by Tripoli in 1289. By 1291 Muslim forces were beseiging Acre, and appeals were sent for reinforcements from Europe. Not enough arrived and under catapult bombardment the towers of Acre fell, the city was overrun and despite attempts to establish peaceful withdrawal the Templar knights of the city fought to the death there. Only a tiny number of Latin books once in the crusader kingdoms have survived, and all of these are de luxe copies, worth sufficient sums to justify their carrying back to Europe (Buchtal, Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1957, lists only 3 of the twelfth century and 13 of the thirteenth century). Little evidence survives of the fate of more ordinary volumes, and apart from a small collection of Latin, Greek and Armenian leaves with later Arabic inscriptions and disbound from Arabic books (sold in our rooms, 6 December 1993, lot 3, for £12,000, and now Schøyen, MS.1776), these fragments here may be the only other surviving remnants of such Western books, and are the only known ones still in their host-binding.

From the collection of Jack Geuvrekian (1931-2008) of New York.