4 ideas
In 1098 Thoros, the Armenian ruler of Edessa, was hemmed in by Turkish emirs and invited the crusader Baldwin of Boulogne to help defend the city. Thoros formally adopted Baldwin as son and heir, and within weeks a townsmen's revolt killed Thoros, leaving Baldwin as count of the first crusader state. Matthew records the episode with visible unease, and it is a concrete case of a weak local power importing a foreign protector who ends up replacing it.
Matthew argues that Byzantium's absorption of the Armenian kingdoms, culminating in the takeover of Ani in 1045, removed the native princes and armies that had guarded the frontier. Constantinople then failed to defend the territory it had taken. When the Seljuk raids came, the Armenians had lost both their own defenders and any reliable imperial protection.
A minority that every army conquers in turn grades its rulers by how they treat it rather than by their religion or their promises. Matthew praises the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah as just and merciful to Christians. He condemns Greek Orthodox and Frankish Latin Christians when they tax, persecute, or betray Armenians.
Matthew presents invasions, famines, and earthquakes as divine chastisement for the sins of Armenians and their rulers, and supports this with prophecies such as the one he attributes to Hovhannes Kozern about the millennium after Christ's passion. This scheme sits alongside his accounts of Armenian princes and armies acting in events, and it gives his year-by-year record the character of a moral warning.