The 29 November 1114 CE earthquake had its most catastrophic effects at Marash, which lay firmly within the epicentral zone of this very powerful event. Across Latin, Armenian, Syriac, and Arabic traditions, Marash is consistently identified as the city most completely destroyed, with accounts emphasizing total structural collapse and near- universal loss of life.

A contemporary source living in Jerusalem at the time, Fulcher of Chartres, describes Marash as a city whose “houses and walls were completely demolished,” adding that the inhabitants “were all killed.” His notice draws no distinction between domestic architecture and fortifications, presenting Marash as a fully overturned urban landscape. Also contemporary, but writing from Antioch—one of the affected cities— Walter the Chancellor records that survivors testified Marash had been “entirely destroyed with its lord and bishop, also the clergy and all the people.”

Armenian historiography likewise places Marash at the center of the disaster. Matthew of Edessa, who appears to have experienced the earthquake at a monastery just outside Samosata, a town close to Marash, states that the city was destroyed so completely that “not one person survived,” assigning what is probably a somewhat exaggerated death toll of forty thousand. More than a century later, the Chronicle of Smbat Sparapet, who likely used Matthew as a source, preserves the same memory, stating that Marash was “completely overturned.”

Syriac authors describe extreme ground motion and total collapse. According to Michael the Syrian, the city’s foundations were “thrown upwards and the buildings downwards,” while the Chronicon Ad Annum 1234 reports that Germanicia, identified as Marʿash, was “destroyed and entirely perished,” with its walls collapsed and more than twenty-four thousand dead.

Writing before 1260 CE, Kemal ad-Din (aka Ibn al-Adim) lists Marʿash among the districts laid waste by a terrible earthquake, while Bar Hebraeus summarizes the outcome by stating that the city “became the tomb of the inhabitants thereof.”