In the winter of 1586, Hakob Jughayets'l, one of Armenia's most celebrated illuminators, completed work on a Gospel Book with an extensive and extraordinary programme of narrative miniatures and marginal figures. Produced in an era of warfare between the Safavid and Ottoman empires over the possession of Armenia, and while Hakob himself was a wandering artist, this manuscript provides a compelling witness to the development of Hakob's artistic personality during a period of personal and political unrest. Tracing his work from the 1580s to the 1610s, this groundbreaking study sets Hakob's extraordinary oeuvre within the political and artistic context of late 16th-century Armenia.