n 1066/7, a Turkish emir named Afshin1 led his troops on a raid on the numerous monasteries of the Amanus mountains, north on Antioch.2 he result, mourned the twel th-century Armenian chronicler Matt‘eos Urhayets‘i (Matthew of Edessa, ca. 1070–ca. 1136), was that “many of the holy monks were subjected to the edge of the sword and to being burned; moreover, their corpses became food for the beasts and the birds.”3 Despite the holiness of the monks, their sufering and death fulilled divine will, accomplish- ing the words of Psalm 78: “heir young men were devoured by ire and no one grieved for their virgins; their priests fell under the sword and no one grieved for their widows.”4 he biblical verses appeared as more than a rhetorical lourish from a clerical writer: they evoked themes woven throughout Matthew’s chronicle. While the immo- lated youths and the slain priests of Psalm 78 died by the will of their own wrathful God, the psalm ended with a comforting evocation of God’s love for the tribe of Judah and for his servant David. Similarly, Matthew’s chronicle depicted an angry God punishing his wayward lock (Christian Armenians), but ultimately it focused on an abiding sense of the imminent arrival of the end of the world and the atten- dant promise of redemption. he massacre on the mountains was evidence in a long list of violent episodes that proved that Matthew lived in a dark era domi- nated by God’s wrath. Like other Christian chroniclers, including Hydatius of ith-century Hispania and Ralph Glaber of eleventh- century Burgundy,5 Matthew was inspired to write by the sense of living at the turn of the ages, watching the ancient, corrupt order peel away and the new, perhaps glorious, perhaps terrifying, emerge. All he Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa: Apocalypse, the First Crusade, and the Armenian Diaspora Christopher MacEvitt 1 Named Oshen in the 1898 edition, and Evshen in the 1869 Jerusalem edition of Matthew’s text, Patmut‘ iwn (Jerusalem, 1869), 223. Dostourian surmises that this is a version of the Persian name Afshin. 2 hroughout this article, I will be citing the Armenian text of Matthew of Edessa’s chronicle, using the 1898 Vagharshapat edition, which, as discussed below, relies upon the largest number of manuscripts and includes some critical apparatus: Matt‘eos Urhayets‘i [Matthew of Edessa], Zhamanakagrut‘iwn (Vagharshapat, 1898), hereater Matt‘eos Urhayets‘i, Zhamanakagrut‘iwn. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are from Ara Dostourian’s English translation: Matthew of Edessa, Armenia and the Crusades, trans. A. E. Dostourian (Lanham, Md., 1993), here- ater Matthew of Edessa, Armenia. 3 Matt‘eos Urhayets‘i, Zhamanakagrut‘iwn, 185; Matthew of Edessa, Armenia, 125. 4 Ps. 78: 63–64. his passage also evokes Ps. 79: 2–3: “heir blood lowed like water all around Jerusalem and there was no one to bury them” (Matt‘eos Urhayets‘i, Zhamanakagrut‘iwn, 186; Matthew of Edessa, Armenia, 125). 5 R. W. Burgess, ed. and trans., he Chronicle of Hydatius and the Consularia Constantinopolitana (Oxford, 1993); Burgess, “Hydatius and the Final Frontier: he Fall of the Roman Empire and the End of the World,” in Shiting Frontiers in Late Antiquity, ed. R. W. Mathisen and H. S. Sivan (Aldershot, 1996), 321–32; Rodulphus Glaber, he Five Books of the Histories, trans. J. France and P. Reynolds (Oxford, 1989).