Kingdom of Iberia

Not that Iberia

formationDrafted from Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (1963)

The Greeks and Romans called eastern Georgia Iberia. They also called Spain Iberia, and no connection between the two names has ever been established. The country here is the one in the Caucasus.

The Georgians call it Kartli, and their own tradition — the Kartlis Tskhovreba, assembled over centuries out of older material — gives the kingdom a founder and, unusually, gives him something specific to have founded it against.

In the chronicle's account Alexander crosses the Caucasus, takes the fortresses of Kartli one by one over six months, razes the walls of Mtskheta, and leaves a patrik named Azon to govern the country with a hundred thousand men. Azon holds the four fortresses around the capital, takes tribute from the Ossetians and the Leks and the Khazars, and turns out to be a bad ruler in the particular way garrison commanders are: he orders his soldiers to kill any Georgian found carrying a weapon, and then starts killing his own men too. Parnavaz raises the country against him. A thousand of Azon's own Roman soldiers change sides. Parnavaz kills him in battle at Artaani and takes the kingdom.

He then appoints eight eristavis and a spaspet over them, sets the boundaries of each of their provinces, walls Mtskheta again, and sets up an idol of Armazi on the mountain above the city and calls it after himself. The chronicle says the arrangement was modelled on Persian practice, which is the one part of the story nobody disputes.

Armaztsikhe, Mtskheta, Georgia · Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (1963) · Photograph: Kober · CC BY-SA 4.0

Almost none of the rest is verifiable, and one piece of it is certainly wrong: Alexander never campaigned in the Caucasus. The traditional foundation date is a construction, worked backwards from his death. What the archaeology and the classical sources support is a kingdom in the Kura valley from at least the second century BC, with a capital at Mtskheta where the Aragvi joins the Kura, ruled by a dynasty and a nobility, and positioned — like Armenia to its south and Albania to its east — on the route through the Caucasus and between two empires.

Mtskheta, Georgia · Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (1963) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

So the kingdom's beginning is a span rather than a date: somewhere between the foundation the Georgians remember and the kingdom the evidence shows. What is worth keeping from the tradition is not the chronology but the shape it remembers — a garrison government at Mtskheta under a foreign appointee, holding the fortresses and taxing the neighbours, replaced by a native dynasty that took over its machinery and ran it.

The structure is the one all three Caucasian countries share. The eristavi were provincial lords, the aznauri the noble class below them, and both held their positions by inheritance and supplied the king's forces from their own districts. Toumanoff's book is about that system across all three, and the consequence is worth stating early: a king in this arrangement presides. He does not command.

A rumour that struck panic

expansionDrafted from Brodribb, The Annals (1895)

Fifteen years before Rhadamistus murdered his own uncle for Armenia's throne, his father Pharasmanes had already fought a pitched battle over the same kingdom - on the same family's behalf, against the Parthian empire directly, with Rome's tacit encouragement behind it.

A throne contested by proxy

The emperor Tiberius, unwilling to fight Parthia's king Artabanus directly, settled on an indirect strategy: he reconciled the Iberian king Pharasmanes with his brother Mithridates and backed Mithridates's bid to take Armenia for himself. Mithridates persuaded Pharasmanes to back the scheme with force, Parthian officials were bribed with gold to look the other way, and an Iberian army burst into Armenia and seized the city of Artaxata outright. Artabanus answered by sending his own son Orodes with the Parthian army to recover it, while Pharasmanes brought in allies of his own - Albanian troops and hired Sarmatian horsemen from north of the Caucasus, whose chiefs, Tacitus notes dryly, took bribes from both sides at once in the usual fashion of their people.

A battle decided by a false rumor

The two armies met in a set battle in which the tactical distinctions mattered as much as the outcome: the Parthians were purely cavalry, built for the charge and the disciplined retreat, while the Iberians and Albanians, hardened by life in wooded, difficult country, brought real infantry to the field as well - a combination that let them pull Parthian riders bodily from their horses in the close fighting. The two commanders, Pharasmanes and Orodes, recognized each other in the melee and rode straight at one another; Pharasmanes struck first, denting Orodes's helmet with a blow that would likely have killed him outright had his own horse's momentum not carried the Iberian king past before he could finish the stroke. Orodes's own guards shielded him and got him away, but word spread through the Parthian ranks - mistaken, but believed - that their commander had been killed outright. The panic that followed cost Artabanus the battle.

A war Rome never had to fight

Artabanus marched into Armenia himself soon after with the full strength of his kingdom, determined on revenge, and the Iberians, fighting on ground they knew, held their own against him. What finally forced Artabanus to abandon the campaign was not Iberian resistance but the Roman governor of Syria, Vitellius, who mobilized his legions and let a rumor spread that Rome itself meant to invade Mesopotamia - a bluff serious enough that Artabanus's own subjects began deserting a king they already resented as a tyrant. Tiberius had gotten exactly what he wanted without committing a single Roman soldier to the field: a client dynasty doing Rome's fighting for it, and a Parthian king driven out of Armenia by an Iberian army acting, in every way that mattered to Rome, as its own.

Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi · Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (1963) · Photograph: Tamar Kalkhitashvili · CC BY 3.0

A crime in a foreign country

expansionDrafted from Brodribb, The Annals (1895)

Tacitus names the Iberian royal house directly in the middle of the first century AD, and the story he tells about it is one of the ugliest in his whole account of Rome's eastern frontier - a king who destroyed his own brother to get at a throne, and a son who went further still.

A brother given Armenia, and a son who wanted more

Pharasmanes had long held Iberia; his brother Mithridates ruled Armenia with Roman backing after Pharasmanes had helped drive the Parthians out on his behalf. Pharasmanes's own son, Rhadamistus - tall, strikingly handsome, and famous among his neighbors for his physical strength - grew impatient waiting to inherit a kingdom he considered too small for him, and made his ambition obvious enough that his aging father began to fear him. Rather than risk open conflict with a popular, capable son, Pharasmanes pointed him toward Armenia instead: the throne his own brother held. Rhadamistus staged a public quarrel with his father, fled to Mithridates's court pretending to be a refugee from his stepmother's hatred, was welcomed and showered with honors by his own uncle, and spent his time there quietly recruiting Armenian nobles to his cause without Mithridates ever suspecting it.

A handshake used as a trap

When Mithridates finally took refuge in a Roman-garrisoned fortress after Pharasmanes provoked open war, the siege dragged on until a truce was arranged, sealed by the traditional steppe ritual of binding right hands together at the thumb and letting the blood mingle. As the man administering the ritual bound Mithridates's hand, he pretended the knot had slipped, seized Mithridates by the knees, and threw him to the ground; armed men rushed in and chained him. Mithridates was dragged off in fetters - a public humiliation for a king - while his wife followed with their children, filling the air with her cries. Pharasmanes, Tacitus writes, valued power over his own brother and daughter and had the stomach for any crime, though he could not bring himself to watch the killing in person. Rhadamistus, keeping a technical oath not to use blade or poison on his own uncle and aunt, had them thrown to the ground and smothered under piles of heavy cloth instead. Mithridates's own young sons were killed too, for having wept over their father's murder.

A wife stabbed and left for the river

Rhadamistus held Armenia only briefly. The Parthian king Vologeses invaded to install his own brother Tiridates on the throne instead, and when Rhadamistus's Iberian garrison collapsed without a fight, he was reduced to fleeing the kingdom on horseback with his pregnant wife Zenobia riding beside him. Exhausted and terrified of capture, Zenobia begged her husband to kill her rather than let her fall into enemy hands. Rhadamistus, torn between admiration for her courage and horror at abandoning her, finally stabbed her with his own sword and threw her body into the Araxes river to keep it from being found - then rode on alone into Iberia, his father's kingdom, to save himself. Zenobia was not dead. Local shepherds found her still breathing at the river's edge, bandaged her wound, and, once they learned who she was, carried her to Artaxata, from where she was eventually restored with honor - the one person in the whole affair who survived it with anything like dignity.

A throne two empires agreed about

expansionDrafted from Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (1963)

Iberia's position is Armenia's problem one range further north and with less depth to trade. Rome reached the Caucasus under Pompey in the 60s BC; Parthia and then the Sasanians were on the other side of it; and the passes through the mountains — the Darial gorge in the centre, the Derbend defile on the Caspian — were what both empires actually cared about, because through them came the steppe.

So Iberia was worth having as a client and not worth conquering, and both empires arrived at the same conclusion repeatedly.

The Peace of Nisibis in 298, which ended a Roman-Persian war the Sasanians had lost, put Iberia in the Roman sphere and gave Rome the right to invest its kings.

That is the same arrangement Armenia had been living under since Rhandeia in AD 63, running the other way — and it is worth registering what it does to a monarchy. The right to make the king belongs to a foreign capital. The ground the king stands on is an investiture performed by somebody else. Neither the succession nor the legitimacy is a matter for the country whose throne it is.

What the Iberian kings did with that position is the only thing available to them, and it is what small mountain states in this region did for the next fifteen hundred years: submit early, pay, be useful at the passes, and avoid deciding. The Iberian crown passed between Roman and Persian orientation several times without the country being destroyed, which for a small kingdom between two empires over four hundred years is a considerable administrative achievement and reads in the sources as vacillation.

Then in the 330s a decision was made that could not be reversed.

Darial Gorge, Georgia · Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (1963) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Nino

peakDrafted from Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (1994)

Iberia adopted Christianity under Mirian III, conventionally in 337 and probably in the 330s. The Georgian tradition attributes the conversion to a woman: Nino, a captive from Cappadocia, who healed the queen and then the king, and whose shrine is at Bodbe and whose cross — made of vine-wood bound with her own hair — is in Tbilisi.

A national conversion credited to a foreign woman holding no office of any kind is unusual enough to be worth stopping on. The Caucasus produces more of these than most places — Tamar of Georgia, eight centuries later, was styled king rather than queen — and Nino is the earliest of them.

Tsalenjikha Cathedral, Georgia · Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (1994) · Cyrus Manuel Evgenikos · Public domain

Iberia is the second or third of the three Caucasian conversions, depending on which dating of the Armenian one is used: Armenia around 301, Albania around 313 by its own tradition, Iberia around 337. Within four decades the Sasanian empire's entire northern frontier had become Christian, at the moment the Sasanians were consolidating Zoroastrianism as a state religion with a state priesthood.

Everything afterwards follows from that. The Sasanians attempted to reverse it in all three countries and failed in all three; the countries aligned with Rome and then with Byzantium and discovered that Byzantium wanted their churches as well as their loyalty; and when the Arabs arrived in the seventh century they found three Christian populations who had spent three hundred years learning how to be governed by an empire of a different religion without ceasing to be themselves — which is a substantial part of why the Caucasus is Christian today and the countries immediately south of it are not.

The church founded here is the most continuous institution in Georgian history. It is older than the Bagrationi dynasty, older than the united Georgian kingdom, older than Tbilisi, and it is still there.

Mtskheta, Georgia · Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (1994) · Photograph: Bernard Gagnon · CC BY 4.0

Vakhtang Gorgasali

peakDrafted from Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (1994)

Vakhtang I, called Gorgasali — wolf-head, from the device on his helmet — ruled for most of the second half of the fifth century and is the figure Georgian tradition treats as its Charlemagne: the king who reorganised the country, fought the Persians, and founded Tbilisi.

The tradition is thick and the evidence is thin, and Suny's account is careful about the difference. What can reasonably be said is that Vakhtang campaigned against and with the Sasanians in the pattern the position required, that he obtained or asserted autocephaly for the Georgian church — which had until then been under Antioch, and which becoming self-governing turned into a national institution rather than a provincial one — and that Tbilisi, on the Kura where the sulphur springs are, was founded or refounded in his reign and became the capital under his son Dachi.

Follow that city forward and the whole shape of Georgian history is in it. Tbilisi is founded by a Christian Georgian king in about the 490s. It is taken by the Arabs in 736 and is a Muslim emirate for the next three hundred and eighty-six years. In 1122 David IV takes it back and keeps the mosque, the qadi and the Muslim population, setting their taxes below the Christians'.

Tbilisi, Georgia · Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (1994) · Photograph: Abramia Giorgi · CC BY-SA 4.0

Vakhtang's other legacy is the one that decided what came next. He spent his reign strengthening the crown against the eristavi houses, and it did not hold: within sixty years of his death the Sasanians were able to abolish the monarchy without a war, because the nobility preferred a Persian governor to a Georgian king who might tax them. The Armenian nobles had made the same calculation in 428 and the Albanian ones in 510.

Three Caucasian monarchies removed by the same empire within a hundred and fifty years, in each case with the local nobility's acquiescence, and in each case the nobility surviving the crown. That is the region's argument, and this is the third instance of it.

First fight with me, and then with the Greeks

contractionDrafted from Anonymous, The Georgian Chronicle (1991)

The Iberian court's own chronicle records the moment the kingdom stopped being worth having, and it records it as a triumph.

A new shah had come to the throne in Iran and sent to Vakhtang requiring him to act as guide for a Persian army going to war against Byzantium — which is what a client king on that frontier was for. The chronicle has Vakhtang laying the foundations of Tiflis at the time and building it vigorously, and then sending the messenger back with two sentences. The first is a proverb: blacksmith, sharpen the sword so that I may cut off your head. The second is the answer: go and tell the man who sent you, first fight with me, and then with the Greeks — for we spared and preserved you.

The country fortified itself. Vakhtang took his family up the Ujarma valley; his son went east into the cliff-caves of Lopnia among people the chronicle describes as a great multitude of barbarians who worshipped fire and water. The shah came, destroyed the city of Kambechovani and the fortress of Cheremi, reached Kakheti and camped on the river. Then Vakhtang came down against him.

The numbers the chronicle gives are 240,000 against 740,000, which is not arithmetic but scale — a chronicler telling his readers that the whole of Iran came, and that his king went out to meet it anyway. The Iberians broke them, killed the shah's son, and had the shah begging before it stopped; and in the middle of it an Iranian put a spear into Vakhtang's side. He took heart, the chronicle says, and left the field triumphantly, killing a hundred and thirty thousand of them on the way, and rode to Ujarma, and died there of the wound.

Ujarma, Kakheti, Georgia · Anonymous, The Georgian Chronicle (1991) · Photograph: Jonathan Cardy · CC BY-SA 3.0

Everything after that sentence is the consequence. The emperor Zeno had set out to help him and got as far as Speri before the news reached him, and turned round and went home. The shah came back through Iberia, destroyed Tiflis and Armazi and the country round Mtskheta, went on to fight the Byzantines inconclusively, and returned through Kartli again. The kingdom had won its battle and lost its two cities and its king in the same season, and had learnt what it cost to say no.

The chronicle's next paragraphs are the whole of the sixth century and they are about learning to say yes. Dachi rebuilt what the Iranians had destroyed. Two reigns later the Ossetians came down and ravaged Kartli, and Parsman found that Byzantium was too occupied in the west to help him — so he went to the Iranians instead, with an offer: he would submit to them in the matter of taxation, provided they used no force in the matter of faith and the Church. The Iranians accepted it, and the chronicle records with evident relief that they in no way harassed the Iberians about their religion.

Then one further sentence, easy to miss, which is the real terms of the bargain. When the next catholicos died, the Iberians seated his successor without ordination from Antioch — and thereafter, says the chronicle, they designated their own catholicoi from the line of the naxarars, the noble houses.

A kingdom that had refused to march for a shah in 522 was paying him tribute within a generation and had given up nothing except the ability to refuse. What it kept, and quietly made self-perpetuating in the same years, was a church staffed from its own aristocracy and answering to nobody outside the country. When the monarchy was abolished later in the century, that was the institution still standing.

Four centuries without a king

endDrafted from Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (1994)

The Sasanians abolished the Iberian monarchy around 580 and governed through a marzban. It is the last of the three Caucasian crowns to go, after Armenia in 428 and Albania in 510.

What replaced it in 588 is the arrangement that mattered: a presiding prince, an erismtavari, chosen from among the noble houses and recognised by whichever empire was currently paramount. Iberia had presiding princes for three hundred years, under Sasanian, then Byzantine, then Arab suzerainty.

The office worked because it made explicit what had always been true. The country was governed by its nobility. The sovereign at the top was a matter to be negotiated with outsiders, and had been since 298. Removing the king changed who signed the negotiation and changed nothing else.

It is the same finding all three Caucasian kingdoms produce. An empire that takes a crown here has taken the one part of the machinery it could reach. The houses hold their own districts, their own fortresses and their own cavalry; they were there before the crown and they are there after it; and the country goes on being the country, in the same valleys, run by the same families, worshipping in the same church.

What the Sasanians actually achieved in 580 was to stop paying for a king.

Jvari monastery, Mtskheta, Georgia · Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (1994) · Photograph: Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

The city with the hot springs

afterlifeDrafted from Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905)

The kingdom ended in 580. The country did not, and the best evidence for that is what Muslim geographers found when they got there and started writing it down.

Tiflis

Vakhtang's city on the Kura was taken by the Arabs in the 640s and became an emirate under a Muslim amir, which it stayed for the better part of five centuries. Ibn Hawkal, describing it in the tenth century, gives a town with double walls, strongly fortified, and three gates. It sat on both banks of the river, and Muqaddasi says a bridge of boats joined the two halves. The country round about was extremely fertile.

And there were natural hot baths, where the springs came up in the bed of the river itself. That is the thing the city is named for — tpili is Georgian for warm — and it is the detail the Arabic geographers thought worth recording about a place otherwise notable for being the frontier.

Abanotubani, Tbilisi, Georgia · Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905) · Photograph: Amir Hossein Eslami · CC BY-SA 4.0

Not a Muslim country

The striking fact in Le Strange's account is the one he states in a single sentence and does not dwell on. Gurjistan — Georgia — and Abkhazia only enter the Muslim geographies as Muslim districts after Timur's campaigns at the end of the fourteenth century.

Eight hundred years. An Arab amir held the capital from the 640s; the Georgian countryside outside it was governed by Georgian presiding princes and remained Christian throughout; and when the geographers of the tenth century listed the provinces of the caliphate, Georgia was a place they knew about, described, gave distances to, and did not count as theirs.

Muqaddasi files Abkhazia under the Caucasus proper and lists what is in it: a village called the Village of Jonah, inhabited by Muslims, and around it the tribes of the Georgians and the Alans and others. One Muslim village, named in an itinerary, surrounded by people who were not.

What that is

It is the answer to the question the abolition of the monarchy raises.

Removing a king removes the one institution an empire can see. What it does not touch is a nobility holding its own valleys, a church older than the empire doing the removing, an alphabet, and a language nobody else speaks. Those four things carried Iberia through Sasanian, Byzantine and Arab suzerainty for three hundred years of presiding princes, and then in 888 a Bagratid in the south-western marches took the title king of the Kartvelians and there was a Georgian monarchy again.

Three hundred and eight years without a crown, and the country that got one back was recognisably the same country, worshipping in the same church, writing in the same alphabet, ruled by the same houses in the same valleys, from a city built round a hot spring by a king called wolf-head.