Preserved documents of official diplomatic correspondence between two countries are of vital importance in order to shed light on hidden aspectsof their political interrelations. The reason is that official letters demonstrate realities of a historical process or an event much more vividly than evidences and testimonies on the same event found in historical sources of the same period of time.

Unfortunately, no official document, issued by the Cilician Armenian royal chancellery regarding its contacts with the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, has come down to us. No such document is extant in the scholarship. This, of course, complicates ourtask. But, on the other hand, some valuable material concerning diplomatic protocol for the correspondence with Armenian kings is preserved in Mamluk sources of the 13th-15th centuries, both in histories (chronicles and biographical works) and in chancellery handbooks of the inšāʾ genre as well.

This paper focuses on therepresentation of chancellery manuals and administrative encyclopedias of the three most important authors of the inšāʾgenre in the Mamluk era – al-ʿUmārī (d. 1349), Ibn Nāẓir al-Ǧayš (d. 1384) and al-Qalqašandī (d. 1418). These chancellery manuals contain precious material about the titles, honorifics, formulas and technical terminology used in letters sent by Mamluk sultans to kings of Cilician Armenia. The data provided in these handbooks is analyzed in comparison with the evidence on Armenian-Mamluk diplomatic correspondence extant in Mamluk historical literature, including a unique letter from Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil (r. 1290-1293), addressed to King Hetʿum II (r. 1289-1307 with interruptions). Amazingly, a Latin translation of this letter (and also of another one from al-Ashraf to the same addressee)is preserved in the chronicle of an English historian of the 13th century, which helps to recover the missing parts of the Arabic original.