Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti

Two of the three

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

A royal council divided the kingdom of Georgia in 1490 among three branches of the Bagrationi: Kartli in the centre, Kakheti in the east, Imereti in the west.

What followed was two and a half centuries of the three kingdoms between the Ottomans and the Safavids, who partitioned the country between them by treaty in 1555 and again in 1639 — Imereti to Istanbul, Kartli and Kakheti to Isfahan. Georgian kings converted to Islam to hold their thrones and reconverted when the opportunity came; Georgians were bought and sold as soldiers across the Islamic world, in the Safavid ghulam corps that Abbas I built to break the Qizilbash and on the frontier Cairo bought its Mamluks from. Shah Abbas deported tens of thousands of Kakhetians to Iran in the 1610s and settled Turkic tribes in their place.

In 1762 Teimuraz II of Kartli died and his son Erekle II, who was already king of Kakheti, inherited it. Two of the three were one kingdom again for the first time in two hundred and seventy-two years.

What Erekle inherited was a small kingdom in a ruined country, with a nobility that had spent two centuries becoming more powerful than the crown, a population reduced by deportation and raiding, and two Muslim empires on either side of it that had each spent the period treating Georgia as a province they had mislaid.

He was fifty-two, had commanded troops for Nadir Shah in India, and had thirty-six years left.

What Erekle tried to build

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

Erekle II is the last Georgian ruler before the twentieth century who attempted to build a state, and the list of what he tried is short, coherent and mostly unsuccessful.

He reopened the mines at Akhtala and Alaverdi and brought in Greek miners from the Ottoman empire to work the silver and copper. He set up a printing press. He tried to attract European advisers and craftsmen, corresponded with Catherine II's court, and sent students abroad. He established a standing bodyguard, a regular tax on the tavadi estates, and courts under royal rather than noble jurisdiction.

And in 1773 he instituted the morigeoba: a rotational military obligation under which households across the kingdom served in arms for one month a year in turn, in rotation, so that the crown would always have a force in the field that did not depend on the great houses agreeing to supply one.

It is worth setting that beside what David IV had done six centuries earlier, because the problem was identical — a nobility monopolising force — and the resources were not. David brought forty thousand Kipchak families over the mountains and settled them on land against service. Erekle had nothing to offer anybody and had to raise the equivalent out of the population he already governed, by administrative obligation, which is a thing almost no state before the nineteenth century managed to do.

It lapsed within about a decade. The tavadi houses resisted it, the peasantry resented it, and a kingdom of perhaps half a million people could not simultaneously farm, defend a frontier that was raided annually from Daghestan, and staff a rotating national militia.

The mines, the press and the advisers went the same way, for the same reason. It takes revenue to build a state and it takes a state to raise revenue, and the kingdom had neither and was being raided while it tried.

Georgievsk

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

In July 1783, at the fortress of Georgievsk in the north Caucasus, Erekle's envoys and Catherine II's signed a treaty of protection.

The terms were explicit. Russia guaranteed the territorial integrity of Kartli-Kakheti and the succession of the Bagrationi; the kingdom kept its internal government, its church and its law. In exchange Georgia renounced all dependence on Iran or any other power, undertook to conduct no foreign relations without Russian consent, and accepted Russian troops.

From Tbilisi the calculation was straightforward and, on the information available, sound. Two Muslim empires had partitioned the country for two centuries; a Christian empire to the north was expanding, had just taken the Crimea, and wanted a position in the Caucasus. A guarantee from it against the Ottomans and against whatever emerged in Iran — where the Zands were failing and nobody yet knew what would follow — was worth the loss of a foreign policy the kingdom could not exercise anyway.

From St Petersburg it was cheap. Two battalions were sent and withdrawn again in 1787 when the Russo-Turkish war began.

The judgement to make about it is not that Erekle was naive. He was a considerably more experienced ruler than most of the people who have written about the treaty, and the alternative he was choosing against was the one the kingdom had been living under. The judgement is that a guarantee is worth what the guarantor's interests make it worth on the day it is called. The Ak Koyunlu waited for Venetian guns that never came. Trebizond married its daughters to everyone who might protect it and was protected by none of them. This is a general fact about small states with large protectors, and Erekle had no way of knowing which kind of guarantee he had bought until it was tested.

It was called in 1795.

Krtsanisi

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

Agha Muhammad Khan Qajar had spent fifteen years reassembling Iran and regarded Georgia as a Safavid dependency that had been mislaid. In 1795 he sent Erekle a demand: repudiate the Russian treaty and return to Iranian suzerainty.

Erekle refused, and appealed to Russia under the treaty of 1783.

The Qajar army came north through Azerbaijan in the late summer. On 11 September 1795, at Krtsanisi outside Tbilisi, Erekle met it with a force the sources put at a small fraction of its size — the Imeretian and Kartlian nobles had not all come — and was destroyed. He was seventy-five and had to be carried off the field by his grandsons.

Tbilisi was taken and burned. The accounts of what followed are consistent across Georgian, Persian and Russian sources: a large part of the population killed, and something in the order of fifteen thousand carried off as slaves. The city Vakhtang Gorgasali had founded, that David IV had taken back from a Muslim emirate in 1122 and governed by conciliating its inhabitants, was destroyed by a Persian army in a single day.

No Russian troops came. The sack of Tbilisi was, from the Iranian side, the act that established Agha Muhammad Khan as shah; from the Russian side it produced a punitive expedition in 1796 which was recalled when Catherine died, and then nothing at all.

Erekle never returned to Tbilisi and died in 1798. His son George XII inherited a burned capital, a divided nobility, a treasury with nothing in it and a treaty that had been demonstrated to be worthless in the one circumstance it existed for.

He asked Russia for a closer union.

The sheepskin cloak

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

Agha Muhammad Khan burned Tbilisi in September 1795. What Georgia remembered about it afterwards was not the battle but what happened to the king, and the memory had already been shaped into literature by the time an English traveller wrote it down.

Oliver Wardrop went up the military road from Tbilisi in the 1880s and stopped at Ananuri, which he calls the darkest page in the mournful latter-day history of Georgia. Erekle II had escaped from the ruins of his capital with a few servants and taken refuge in the fortress there. He was seventy-seven. Wardrop then quotes a Georgian account of what a passer-by would have seen: in the corner of the monks' orchard, in an old half-ruined cell, a man in a rough sheepskin cloak, sitting with his face turned to the wall, and beside him one elderly Armenian servant.

The passage that follows is the servant answering people who ask who that is, and it is worth taking as what it is — a piece of nineteenth-century Georgian writing about a national humiliation, not a transcript — because the choices it makes are the argument.

He whom thou seest was once a man of might, and his name was honoured throughout Asia. His people never had a better ruler; he strove for their welfare like a father, and for forty years kept his empire together. Then the three explanations, in order. Old age had weakened him. To prevent quarrels after his death he had divided the kingdom among his children while he still lived, and his hopes in them were deceived; when the invasion came they refused to help him or their native land, because there were so many of them that each calculated he would be fighting for a brother's advantage rather than his own. And the King of Georgia had to ask help from the King of Imereti, and anyone who had been in Tbilisi would have seen how shamefully the Imeretians behaved. Erekle fought with a handful of men against a hundred thousand and lost his throne only because his children pitilessly forsook him.

Then the sentence the whole speech is built to arrive at. He who was chief eunuch of Nader Shah when Erekle was a leader in the Persian army now marched against him in his feeble old age — and Erekle was left to be defeated by a wretched gelding.

Two men out of the same wreckage of Nader's empire, one of them a Georgian prince commanding in it and the other a castrated hostage in it, ending fifty years later with the second burning the first's capital. That is accurate, and it is also the part a Georgian writer would reach for, because it turns a strategic catastrophe into an insult and an insult can be borne.

The servant's closing line does the same work in the other direction. His courtiers, all those who have eaten his bread and been pressed to his bosom, have left him — not one has followed his master, excepting only me, a poor, despised Armenian.

Erekle never returned to Tbilisi. He died at Telavi in January 1798, having spent his last years trying to hold together a kingdom he had already divided, and the succession he had arranged produced exactly the quarrel he had divided it to prevent. Six years after the fire, the arrangement he had signed at Georgievsk to prevent all of this was used by the other party to abolish the kingdom.

1801

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

George XII's request was for something like an incorporation that preserved the dynasty: Georgia inside the Russian empire, with a Bagrationi still on the throne under Russian sovereignty. What he was negotiating for is disputed and what he got is not.

He died in December 1800. Paul I issued a manifesto annexing the kingdom; Alexander I confirmed it in September 1801 in terms that abolished the monarchy outright. The Bagrationi were deported to Russia. The kingdom's institutions were dissolved and replaced with Russian provincial administration.

Then in 1811 the autocephaly of the Georgian church was abolished and the church was subordinated to the Russian Synod. That is the part worth stopping on. The Georgian church had been self-governing since the fifth century, when Vakhtang Gorgasali obtained or asserted its independence from Antioch. It had survived the Sasanians abolishing the monarchy in 580, four centuries of presiding princes, an Arab emirate in its own capital, the Seljuks, the Mongols, eight visits from Timur, and two hundred years of partition between the Ottomans and the Safavids. It did not survive a Christian empire, which is the only kind that had any interest in it.

The rest went in the same twenty years. Imereti was annexed in 1810. The eastern Caucasus passed to Russia by the treaties of Gulistan in 1813 and Turkmanchay in 1828, and Shirvan, Derbend, Ganja and the country of every dynasty in the isthmus went with it.

The Bagrationi had held a throne somewhere in Georgia from 888 to 1801 — nine hundred and thirteen years, across four kingdoms, ending with a deportation to Russia. There was no Georgian state again until 1918.

A gendarme in the market town

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

Eighty-seven years after the annexation, a young Englishman travelled through Georgia and wrote down what he saw. Oliver Wardrop's book is affectionate, opinionated and full of the assumptions of 1888, and it is also a first-hand description of what had actually happened to the kingdom.

Tsinondali

He went to Tsinondali in Kakheti, in a beautiful valley beyond Akuri. It had been the home of Prince David Chavchavadze. It was now, he notes, the property of Alexander Alexandrovich, Autocrat of All the Russias, who was having a vast palace built on it at the time of the visit.

That is the annexation in one sentence of description. The estate of a Georgian prince, held by the family that had held it, is a summer residence of the emperor.

Wardrop also records what Tsinondali was famous for locally, and it is worth putting beside the palace: it was the place from which the Princesses Chavchavadze and Orbeliani were carried off by Shamil's men in July 1854. One of the two had been widowed weeks before, her husband killed fighting the Turks. So the same valley supplies the two facts about nineteenth-century Georgia — a country raided from the mountains, and a country whose gentry's houses were becoming imperial property.

What the villages thought Russia was

Wardrop is precise about this and it is not what a reader might expect. In the rural districts, he says, the people knew Russia only as a foreign power that sent them tax collectors, justices of the peace and other civil servants, who performed obnoxious functions in a manner not calculated to conciliate the ratepayers. He adds that the chinovnik had an unpleasant reputation even among Russians, and that those who accepted a posting in Transcaucasia were not precisely the flower of the service.

Then he reports a conversation that does more work than the rest of the chapter. A country squire, talking about a small market town near his house, told him: they have posted a gendarme there; until he came nobody ever bothered about politics; now there is nothing else talked of.

The thing the empire made

Wardrop's judgement follows directly, and eighty-seven years of hindsight have not improved on it: the measures produced the very thing they were intended to prevent.

Young Georgian nobles serving in the Russian army had gone through a phase of revolutionary socialism in the 1870s, and some of them had suffered for it. By the 1880s, he says, the national feeling had become so strong as to leave no room for those ideas. While he was in Tiflis a rumour ran that a hundred or two young noblemen were to be exiled before the Tsar's visit to his new palace at Tsinondali. Nobody knew whether it was true. Wardrop's point is that everyone concerned believed it, which tells you what kind of administration they thought they were living under.

What was left to take

The kingdom's institutions had been dissolved in 1801 and the church's autocephaly in 1811. What the empire had not been able to dissolve was the language, the poem everybody could recite, and the sense — sharpened by the gendarme in the market town — of being a nation that had lost a state rather than a province that had always been one.

That is what was standing in 1918 when the Russian empire went and the Georgians declared a republic.