2025 Volume 60 Pages 29-40
Het‘um II who reigned over the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia at the turn of the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries is a unique personage who strove to safeguard the country in a tangled political and military situation and curiously did not hesitate to show his passionate devotion to Franciscan spirituality so as to abdicate the throne and to become himself a Franciscan friar. His approaching the Roman Church reminds us of the artistic relationship between Armenia and Italy, which has occasionally been noted. This paper looks for further evidence of this, especially in the representation of martyrdom, in which a number of martyrs are being beheaded in cruel manners. Martyrdom was a key event which made Armenia the first Christian state of the world, and at the same time was an important theme to be pictorialized for Franciscans who were seeking for an ideal, alternative to the excessively rigorous, then anathematized poverty since around the 1310s.
