Latin Christians in the Caucasus and the European/Armenian Community of K῾ṙna

This entry concerns the Upper Monastery of the Holy Mother of God in K῾ṙna, a place of entanglements par excellence. In the early 14th century, the Apostolic Armenian Church was officially in communion with the Latin Church, but this union encountered opposition especially in the Caucasus. However, following contacts with Dominican missionaries in Persia, an assembly of clerics was held in K῾ṙna in 1330. Subsequently, the local monastic community and others in the region accepted union with the Latin Church, and some European Dominicans settled there. The new movement became the order of the Fratres Unitores (“Unitarian Brethren”) between 1337 and 1344 and was approved by Pope Innocent VI in 1356. The significance of the circle of K῾ṙna is linked to its intellectual activities, which took place in a multilingual environment. Its members composed and/or translated from Latin numerous texts and made both new sources of ancient western thought (notably, philosophical commentaries in the Aristotelian tradition) and the recent acquisitions of European Scholasticism accessible to Armenian readers. A member of the community, Peter of Aragon, may have also served as cultural mediator in the opposite direction, translating an Armenian apocalyptic text into Latin for a European audience.