Matthew of Edessa wrote about an earthquake that he apparently experienced firsthand. The quake struck on the night of Sunday, 29 November 1114 CE, while people were sleeping. Matthew described the motion as being like a churned up sea and the noise as horrible—crackling, reverberating, echoing, and like the clanging of bronze or the din of a large army camp. He also reported rockfalls, landslides, trees swaying violently, and roughly an hour of aftershocks, suggesting that he was near or within the epicentral region. Matthew recorded that Samosata, Hisn-Mansur, Kesoun, and Raban were destroyed. Marash was also destroyed; according to Matthew, no one survived there, and forty thousand people perished. Destruction and loss of life in Mamistra were said to be comparable to those in Marash. Two monasteries were also destroyed: in the Basilian Monastery of the Black Mountains (its precise location debated), monks and Armenian vardapets died during a divine service when the church collapsed upon them, while a monastery of the Jesuits near Marash suffered a similar fate. After the earthquake and the cessation of aftershocks (when the tremors had ceased), Matthew wrote that snow began to fall and cover the entire land.