Dalla guerra alle meraviglie orientali : le letture della Flor des estoires de la terre d’Orient nel Medioevo

Compiled at the pontifical court with the scope of promoting a new crusade, La flor des estoires de la terre d’Orient by the Armenian Hayton/Het‘um of Koykos (1307) rapidly became one of the texts about the Orient most widely widespread in Europe. The reasons for its wide circulation, attested by over fifty manuscripts and numerous translations, were the immediate bilingual transmission of the work, the variety of subjects covered by its four books, and the novelty of the included materials. The reception of the Flor is a still neglected, yet fruitful field for a study of the impact of the accounts about the Orient on late-medieval European cultural history. This paper reconstructs the plurality of readings of Het‘um’s work and analyzes their transformations by following the clues left in the manuscript tradition.