The medieval Middle East is distinctive in world history for the number of literate classes and scribal traditions which were simultaneously present in the same geographical era. Muslim ʿulamāʾ, Jewish rabbis, and Christian clergy read philosophical texts together or traded polemical treatises, and the literate physicians and merchants were drawn from multiple religious communities. Yet the scholarly history of this society has often been written from the perspective of the ʿulamāʾ, and has therefore developed a bipolar model of society according to which secular authority is vested in Muslim military rulers and cultural capital is held by the learned Islamic religious leaders, what Marshall Hodgson termed the “ayan / amir system.” This model owes much to analogies drawn from medieval European dynamics of Church and State, yet it ignores the fact that powerful non-Muslims remained important social leaders in many parts of the Middle East throughout the Middle Periods. The social functions of prominent non-Muslims, and their political relationships with Muslim elites, are poorly understood. This paper explores the mutual dependence of Muslim and Christian elites in eastern Anatolia and the Jazīra in the post-Mongol period. A high Christian population in this region and the practice of gathering taxes through the church hierarchies guaranteed that Muslim rulers knew and needed Christian ecclesiastical officials. Armenian colophons and Syriac chronicles combine with Persian historiography to portray a society in flux, where the Muslim rulers, ʿulamāʾ, Christian leaders, and a broader population of Muslims and Christians were negotiating issues of relative communal and individual prestige, discriminatory regulations, patronage patterns, and the fundamental relationship between nomadic and sedentary populations. Nora Berend’s work on religious diversity in medieval Hungary suggests that, rather than classifying the society according to a slippery binary as “tolerant” or “intolerant,” historians may identify strategies of inclusion and exclusion adopted by different actors within a society. The dhimma model was one strategy of circumscribed inclusion put forward by some (not all) ʿulamāʾ in this region, but it was neither the only nor the most successful contender for structuring society.