Armenian Christianity in Cilicia

After the Seljuk conquest of the Armenian homeland, Armenians resettled in Cilicia on the Mediterranean coast, where a principality grew into a kingdom — Levon I was crowned in 1198. And the Armenian church went with them. In 1151 the catholicos moved his seat to Hromkla, a fortress above the Euphrates, and there Nerses Shnorhali, 'the Gracious', wrote the finest Armenian religious poetry of the age and conducted a long and remarkably generous correspondence with the Byzantine emperor Manuel I about reuniting the Armenian and Greek churches. The reunion never happened. The Cilician church spent the following century negotiating instead with the Latin crusader states next door. A closeness that some Armenians welcomed and others resented deeply, and that shaped the church's arguments with itself for generations.