Kingdom of Georgia

One crown, in 1008

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

Georgia before the eleventh century is a set of principalities rather than a country: Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast, Kartli in the centre with Tbilisi in it, Kakheti and Hereti in the east, Tao-Klarjeti in the south-west where a branch of the Bagrationi had built up a principality under nominal Byzantine protection. Christianity had arrived in the fourth century — the conversion of Kartli under Mirian III is dated to the 330s, a generation after Armenia's — and the Georgian church and alphabet are older than any of these polities.

In 1008 Bagrat III inherited both Abkhazia, through his mother, and the Bagrationi lands of Tao-Klarjeti, through his father, and put them together. He added Kakheti and Hereti afterwards. That is the founding: not a conquest but a double inheritance, consolidated by a man who then spent his reign making it stick against the noble houses.

What he could not take was Tbilisi. The city had been an Arab emirate since 736, the seat of a Muslim amir in the middle of the Georgian lands, and it stayed one for another hundred and fourteen years. The kingdom's capital was Kutaisi in the west, and the country was a Christian monarchy with a Muslim city at its centre that it could not reduce.

The dynasty's claim is worth stating at the start, because it is unusual and it was made for eight hundred years. The Bagrationi asserted descent from David, king of Israel; the sling and the harp on their arms are that claim rendered in heraldry, and the Georgian chronicles traced the line in some detail. The Armenian Bagratuni made the same claim through the same tradition, and the two houses are generally taken to be branches of one family.

Nobody outside the tradition believes the genealogy, and that is a different question from whether it mattered. A house that tells everyone for eight centuries that it descends from a king in the Book of Samuel is telling them something about where its right to rule comes from, and in a Christian kingdom surrounded by Muslim powers it is not a random thing to have chosen.

The army the nobles could not withhold

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

David IV came to the throne in 1089 at about sixteen, over a kingdom that had been ruined. The Seljuk incursions of the 1070s and 1080s — what Georgian sources call the great Turkish troubles — had emptied the eastern lowlands, turned agricultural country into seasonal pasture for Turkmen herds, and reduced the monarchy to paying tribute for what it still held.

His answer took thirty years and it was structural rather than tactical.

He broke the great nobles' monopoly on force. The Georgian army had been the levy of the didebulni, hereditary lords who supplied contingents and could decline to; David built alongside it a royal force that was paid, permanently under arms and answerable to him — and he manned a substantial part of it by bringing Kipchak families over the Caucasus from the northern steppe and settling them with land in Georgian territory in return for service. The figure the sources give is forty thousand families. He converted them, married a Kipchak princess, and had an army that did not need the nobles' consent.

So the kingdom had two armies at once: the old noble levy, and a paid force beside it that owed the nobles nothing. That is a rare solution. Almost everyone else who faced this problem solved it by purchase — the slave soldier, bought as a boy, with no kin in the country and no loyalty except to the man who bought him, from Samarra to Bukhara to Cairo. David solved it by immigration instead. It is a different instrument aimed at exactly the same thing, and it came with forty thousand families attached.

In August 1121, at Didgori in the hills west of Tbilisi, he met a coalition assembled against him — Seljuk, and the sources' figures for its size are not usable — and destroyed it. The following year he took Tbilisi.

What he did with Tbilisi is the part worth keeping. He kept the Muslim population, guaranteed the mosque, left the qadi's jurisdiction in place, and is reported to have set the Muslims' taxes below the Christians'. He moved his capital into the city and it has been the capital ever since. A Christian king who has just taken a Muslim city after four centuries and governs it by conciliating its inhabitants is not the ordinary twelfth-century arrangement in either direction, and it is the reason the kingdom that followed could hold Muslim vassals without a permanent war.

Forty thousand Kipchaks

Drafted from Anonymous, The Georgian Chronicle (1991)expansion

The Georgian chronicle's account of David the Builder is not a list of battles. It is a list of instruments, and the instruments are what made the century that followed possible.

He began with the church, and the chronicle is savage about the state he found it in: the leaders blind and avaricious, and robbers entering the churches through the walls and windows rather than through the doors, like shepherds would; bishops ordaining priests for bribes as they had themselves been ordained, appointing stupid and greedy suffragans and planting lawlessness in the house of God. David summoned the catholicos, the bishops and the priests, ordered an election held between the good and the bad, and had the worthless expelled — the chronicler's image is of the inedible and loathsome being picked out of a net. The comparison offered is to Constantine. The practical effect was that the one institution present in every valley of the kingdom answered to the king.

He also stopped paying taxes to the Turks, which the chronicle dates to the fourth year of the reign and connects, correctly, to the death of Malik-Shah.

Then the army. His wife Gurandukht was the daughter of the Kipchak chief Atrak; with Kipchak help he subdued the Ossetian kings, took hostages from them, made peace between Ossetians and Kipchaks, and took the Darial pass and every other gate through the Caucasus. Having secured the road, he brought forty thousand Kipchaks with their families onto Georgian land, armed them, appointed spasalars over them, and used them to hold Iran and Turkestan off. He also kept five hundred Kipchak children at his court and raised them as Christians, and the chronicle notes others being baptised day by day.

That is a standing army of nomad cavalry, resident, paid, converted and attached to the crown rather than to any Georgian lordship — which is the thing every polity in this region spent centuries failing to build, and it was assembled out of a marriage and a mountain pass.

What he did with it reads, in the chronicle, as a calendar rather than a campaign. Ten thousand Turks raiding in Trialeti, beaten in a single day by a king who came up overnight with few troops. Tens of thousands more destroyed in Tayk. Kapa taken on the thirteenth of February, in the middle of the fast; Layzan raided on the fifth of May; the winter spent putting Abkhazia in order; March at Khunan. The point of the dates is that the Turkmen moved with the seasons — up into the Armenian mountains in summer, down to the warm meadows by the Kura in winter — and David had worked out that a king with a standing force could meet them at both ends of the year.

The city came last and came without a siege. A letter reached him from the leading men of Ani: come, and we will place the city in your hands. He went with sixty thousand cavalry and had it in three days, then turned and took Shamakhi and the country round it.

The chronicle ends the reign on two scenes rather than a conquest. David summoned the Georgian catholicos, a translator, and the bishops and vardapets of Armenia, and had them argue doctrine from morning until evening; when it was clear that neither side would accept the other he told them that he was unskilled in such deep words and they were unable to find a way out of them, calmed both sides in plain language, and dissolved the assembly. And he went to confess to an elderly Armenian teacher from Haghpat, and sat with his arm round the old man's neck, and the old man asked to be let go because he was broken and reeked in his old age — and the king kissed him and said, let this fragrance never cease from you, reverend father.

A king who could not make the two churches agree and embraced one of them anyway had understood the country he was assembling better than the theologians had.

Tamar

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

George III had one child and crowned her co-ruler in his own lifetime, in 1178, precisely so that the question could not be reopened when he died. It worked. Tamar ruled from 1184 to 1213, and Georgian tradition calls her mepe — king, not queen — which is a fact about the grammar of the office rather than about her.

The kingdom under her is the largest and strongest Christian state between Byzantium and India. It held the isthmus from the Black Sea to the Caspian watershed; the Shirvanshahs were tributaries; Armenian principalities were held by the Zakarids as Georgian vassals; the Muslim emirates of the eastern Caucasus paid. In 1199 Georgian forces took Ani from the Shaddadids, and the Armenian highland was administered from Tbilisi.

Two things she did outlived the kingdom. In 1204, when the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople, Georgian troops she lent to her Komnenos relatives put them into Trebizond, which is the entire reason there was a Greek empire on the Black Sea coast for the next two and a half centuries. And the court she kept produced Shota Rustaveli's The Knight in the Panther's Skin, dedicated to her, which is the Georgian national poem in the sense that the Shahnama is the Persian one: a work everyone can quote and which fixed the language.

A court that produces the national poem is usually a court in decline or a court that never mattered much — the Muzaffarids and Hafez, the Kara Koyunlu and Haqiqi. Georgia is the other case, where the political weight and the cultural output peak in the same reign, and that is much rarer than it ought to be.

The other permanent instrument was the church and the monasteries, and they went a long way outside the kingdom: Iviron on Mount Athos, the monastery of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem, Petritsoni in Bulgaria, and the academy at Gelati that David IV had founded, which the chronicles call a second Athens. A small kingdom with foundations in three foreign countries is buying something, and what it was buying was standing in a Christian world whose centre was somewhere else.

What the Mongols left in place

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

The Khwarazmian Jalal al-Din, driven west by the Mongols and with five years of his own life left, sacked Tbilisi in 1226. The Mongols themselves arrived in 1236. By 1243 the kingdom had submitted: tribute, a census, a levy of troops for Mongol campaigns, and a resident overseer.

What is interesting is what was not taken. The dynasty stayed. The church stayed, with its property and its jurisdiction. Georgian law and Georgian nobles went on governing Georgian districts. The Mongols wanted soldiers, silver and quiet, and they had worked out across a much larger territory that a client dynasty collecting on their behalf was cheaper than a province.

The cost was the ability to decide anything. When the succession was disputed in the 1240s the Mongols settled it by recognising both claimants, and Georgia spent seventy years as two kingdoms with two kings, both called David, both confirmed from outside. Georgian contingents fought in Mongol armies at the sack of Baghdad in 1258 and at Ayn Jalut in 1260, on somebody else's business, a thousand miles from home.

George V, called the Brilliant, put it back together between 1299 and 1346 — stopped the tribute as Ilkhanid authority collapsed, recovered the western half, restored the law and the roads, and briefly made the kingdom what it had been. He is the last Georgian ruler for four hundred years who was not primarily managing a decline.

Then Timur came, eight times between 1386 and 1403, and the method never varied: take the submission and the plunder, install or confirm somebody, leave, and come back when the submission lapses. Georgia submitted and lapsed repeatedly, and each cycle removed more of the country's population and capital than the last. The kings kept the title through all of it.

A European state in the wrong place

Drafted from Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (1994)aside?What aside means

Look at how the Georgian kingdom was put together and then look at its neighbours, and the thing that stands out is that it does not resemble them at all. It resembles France.

The nobility

The army was the levy of the didebulni: hereditary lords holding defined territories, owing military service by custom rather than by grant, supplying contingents from their own lands and able to decline. A king in that system does not create his nobility, cannot dismiss it, and negotiates with it annually.

That is the ordinary arrangement in Christian Europe and in the Christian Caucasus — Armenia had it under the same name in a different language — and it is not the ordinary arrangement anywhere else nearby. The Islamic world around Georgia solved the same problem differently, with slave soldiers who had no kin in the country, with tribal levies, and with the iqta, a revenue assignment that could be moved or revoked. A Seljuk sultan could take a man's income away. A Georgian king could not.

David IV's Kipchak settlement is the exception that shows the rule: he had to import forty thousand families from the far side of the mountains to get an army that did not belong to somebody else.

The succession

Primogeniture, with the heir crowned as co-ruler in the reigning king's lifetime so the question could not be reopened at the funeral. George III did exactly that for Tamar in 1178 and it worked.

Again: this is a European habit, and the nearest comparison anywhere in the region is Ptolemaic Egypt fourteen centuries earlier. The states around Georgia fought a succession war almost every generation, and a good number of them were destroyed by one.

The church

And then there is the institution that has no counterpart in the neighbourhood at all.

The Georgian church was autocephalous — self-governing, answering to no foreign patriarch, which Vakhtang Gorgasali had obtained or asserted in the fifth century. It held vast property. It ran the law across large areas of life. It supplied the kingdom's literacy, a good part of its administration and all of its ideology. And it maintained foundations well outside the country: Iviron on Mount Athos, the monastery of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem, Petritsoni in Bulgaria, and the academy at Gelati that the chronicles call a second Athens.

Nothing in the Islamic states around Georgia does that job. There are ulama and there are endowments and there are qadis, and none of them is a corporation owning a third of the country, running a legal system, and maintaining branch houses in three foreign kingdoms.

Which is why the country is still there

Put the three together and the answer to a standing question falls out. Georgia was conquered, garrisoned, taxed and partitioned by Seljuks, Mongols, Timurids, Ottomans, Safavids and finally Russians, and it kept its language, its alphabet, its church and its aristocracy through all of it.

That was not because the kings were formidable; mostly they were not. It is because everything that mattered in Georgia was held by somebody hereditary — a noble house in its own valley, a bishop in his own see, a monastery with its own land in another country — and an empire that takes the crown has taken the one part of the machine that was portable.

Three kingdoms

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

The fifteenth century finished it, and not by invasion. The Timurid campaigns and then the Turkmen ones had ruined the countryside and destroyed the crown's revenue; the great noble houses had recovered the autonomy David IV had taken from them, because a crown that cannot pay a standing army has to ask them for one; and Constantinople fell in 1453, which removed the Christian empire Georgia had oriented itself towards for six centuries and left it surrounded.

The last kings of a united Georgia spent their reigns fighting their own princes. In 1490 a royal council formally acknowledged what had already happened and divided the kingdom among three branches of the Bagrationi: Kartli in the centre, Kakheti in the east, Imereti in the west, with several princedoms effectively independent besides.

Nobody conquered anything in 1490. The country came apart, and the three pieces were held by three branches of the same family.

What followed took three centuries. The kingdoms lived between the Ottomans and the Safavids, who partitioned the country between themselves by treaty in 1555 and again in 1639 — Imereti to Istanbul, Kartli and Kakheti to Isfahan. Georgian kings converted to Islam to keep their thrones and reconverted when they could. Georgians were bought and sold as soldiers across the whole Islamic world: Abbas I built the ghulam corps that broke the Qizilbash substantially out of Georgians and Armenians, and Cairo was buying on the same frontier. A country that could not defend itself was, among other things, a source of supply.

Kartli and Kakheti were united in 1762 under Erekle II, who signed a treaty of protection with Russia in 1783, was sacked by Agha Muhammad Khan of Persia in 1795, and whose kingdom Russia annexed outright in 1801.

One number is worth ending on. The Bagrationi held a throne somewhere in Georgia from 888, when Adarnase took the title in the south-western marches, to 1801, when the last of them was deposed by Russia. That is nine hundred and thirteen years.

It is not the tenure of a state — the state broke in 1490 and had been remade several times before that. It is the tenure of a family, holding whichever Georgian throne was available at the time, which is a different and in some ways more impressive kind of durability. There were three kingdoms after 1490 and all three of them were Bagrationi.

The poem

Drafted from Wardrop, The Kingdom of Georgia: notes of travel in a land of woman, wine and song (1888)afterlife

The kingdom came apart in 1490 and what held the country together for the next four hundred years was not an institution. It was a poem, and the strangest thing about it is that Georgia is not in it.

What is known about the author

Very little. Oliver Wardrop, travelling in Georgia in the 1880s and setting down what Georgians told him, gives the whole of it: Shota Rustaveli was born in the village of Rustavi near Akhaltsikhe, was educated at Athens, came home and wrote his great work, was secretary to Queen Tamar, then became a monk, and died at the monastery of the Holy Cross near Jerusalem, where his portrait could still be seen. Tradition adds that he was in love with his royal mistress, and Wardrop notes that a good many passages in the poem seem to bear it out.

Vepkhistqaosani — the Man in the Panther's Skin — is a romance. An old king of Arabia who has given his throne to his daughter Tinatin goes hunting and sees a weeping youth of extraordinary beauty dressed in a panther's skin; the stranger kills several of the guards sent to seize him and vanishes; the king falls into a depression so profound that Tinatin promises her hand to whoever can explain it. Avtandil wanders for three years and finds the man, who is Tariel, a knight of India in love with the king's daughter there.

Arabia and India. Not one of the characters is Georgian, and, as Wardrop puts it, they are all Georgians to the very finger tips. Tinatin is Tamar, and everybody has always known it.

What was done with it

This is the part that matters.

Through what Wardrop calls nearly seven centuries of ceaseless struggle, the Georgians kept the poem fresh in their minds. Its verses were household words in cottage and hall. A good many Georgians, and especially the women, knew the whole of it by heart — and there was a time, he reports, when no woman was allowed to marry unless she could recite the entire poem.

Consider what that means as a mechanism. A country with no state, partitioned by treaty between two Muslim empires, whose kings converted and reconverted to keep their thrones and whose people were being sold as soldiers from Isfahan to Cairo, made the memorisation of six thousand lines of verse a condition of marriage. Every household contained the text. It could not be confiscated, burned, or subordinated to a foreign synod, because it was not written down anywhere that mattered.

What a national poem is for

The obvious comparison is the Shahnama, which did the same job for Persian under Arab and then Turkic rule, and the comparison is exact in one respect and inverted in another.

Firdawsi wrote about Iran, at enormous length, naming it. Rustaveli wrote about Arabs and Indians and mentioned Georgia not at all, and the poem is more completely Georgian for it — the manners are Georgian, the code of loyalty and friendship is Georgian, the queen is Georgian, and every reader for eight hundred years has known it without being told.

A country that cannot say a thing in public says it in a story about somewhere else. That is not a defeat. It is the reason the language survived the loss of the state by four centuries, and had something to say when it got one back.