Reconceptualizing the Seljuk-Cilician Frontier: Armenians, Latins, and Turks in Conflict and Alliance during the Early Thirteenth Century SARA NUR YILDIZ Introduction ationalist agendas continue to shape the writing of the history of the multi- ethnic and politically fragmented Anatolia. Modern nationalist frameworks have determined how the polities of the Anatolian Seljuk sultanate (c. 1086– c. 1308) and the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia (1198–1375) have been conceived by scholars and laymen alike. Any attempt to treat the history of either in an unbiased way and escape the distortions of nationalist historiography will ultimately fail with- out first exploiting all available documentary and narrative sources, whether they represent a Muslim or a Christian perspective, and without integrating the two mutu- ally exclusive and, at times, incompatible strands of scholarship on the respective polities. With this in mind, I will explore the interethnic relations between Seljuks, Cilician Armenians, and Turkmen in the frontier region of south-central Anatolia, a topic which has received scant attention by historians to date, and an examination of which necessitates exploitation of the sources and scholarship from both sides. It is by integrating these two fields of historiography into a cohesive narrative that one can begin to reveal the fault lines of nationalist paradigms which obscure the com- plexities of the mutual relations of these groups. The medieval sources as well as modern works dealing with the history of the medieval polities of the Anatolian Seljuks and the Cilician Armenians, taken on their own, are highly biased and full of lacunae, especially in regard to their mutual rela- tions and interaction along their common frontier. Osman Turan and other scholars of the Anatolian Seljuk sultanate make the exaggerated claim that the Armenian king of Cilicia, Lewon I, was reduced to vassalage by the Seljuks. According to Turan and others, the Seljuks succeeded in conquering the western part of Cilician Armenia N