ABSTRACT
The Jews, the Armenians and the Muslims played a very specific, special role in the early medieval history of Central and Eastern Europe. From a historian’s point of view, they all pose a similar problem, namely the lack of source material. The Jewish population benefited from scholarly attention in Hungary (Sámuel Kohn, Nora Berend, Géza Komoróczy), Poland (Tadeusz Lewicki, Hanna Zaremska), but there are also many works on them in the Czech historiography from the 1920s all the way to the newest works of Tamáš Visi. Lewicki and Berend dealt with both Muslims and Jews. To be sure, sources are more generous for the Hungarian Jewry. There is some evidence for Poland and Rus’, and a fairly good amount of information may be found on the Bohemian Jewry. By contrast, Armenians were not that lucky. The sources for the period examined are very scarce (which is true for all three populations), but especially for the Armenian population in the region, which is known only from a couple of sources that document their existence in some communities. As for Muslims, there are a lot of works, interesting data, and sources written in Greek, Latin and Arabic, but almost all of them are about Hungary.
