Not long after the ʿAbbasid Revolution, an Armenian priest named Łewond wrote a history of the Caliphate from the death of the Prophet Muḥammad to his own times. He includes a lengthy passage about the activities of Muḥammad b. Marwān in Armenia: the Armenians, Georgians, and Albanians had rebelled during the fitna of Ibn al-Zubayr and the caliph al-Walīd sent Muḥammad to the North to bring the provinces back into the fold of the Umayyad Caliphate. Muḥammad made promises to the Armenians and called them to come together so that he could enter their names into the dīwān. When they gathered in churches in the cities of Naxčawan and Xram, Muḥammad then gave the order to extract the nobles and to burn the others alive. Łewond’s rendition describes martyrs, praying to God for relief and evoking Old Testament examples of divine protection. This event clearly reverberated throughout the Near East. We have descriptions of “the year of the fire,” as Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ calls it, in Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, and Greek sources. The purpose of this paper is not to decide “what really happened” in the fires in Armenia, but rather to examine closely the discrepancies, such as the date (sometime in the first decade of the 700s), reigning caliph (ʿAbd al-Malik or al-Walīd), and toponyms (Naxčawan/al-Nashawā, Xram, Xlat‘/Khilāṭ, and Vaspurakan/al-Basfurrajān). In doing so, this paper focuses on two main goals. First, it considers the ties between historiographical traditions. There have been several significant studies of the ties between Muslim and Christian historical writing recently, especially those relevant to the relationship between Arabic, Greek, and Syriac literature. This paper is one attempt to pull Armenian sources to the fore and to hypothesize about the transmission of traditions across linguistic divides. Second, this paper considers the fires from the perspective of built memory, questioning the place of the episode in the agendas of later historians and the goals of transmitters as they adapted the story.