Tbilisi Under the Arab Emirate

In the eighth century Tbilisi was the seat of an Arab emirate, and eastern Georgia (Kartli) lived under Muslim overlordship while retaining its Christian Church and a native princely aristocracy. It was into this world — Kartli ruled by the Christian prince Nerse under Arab suzerainty — that Abo came c. 775, in the returning prince’s service.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Arab Conquest and the Emirate of Tbilisi

The Arab armies reached the Caucasus in the mid-seventh century, and by the 730s Tbilisi had become the center of Arab administration in eastern Georgia. From roughly the 730s the city was governed by an Arab emir appointed by, or answerable to, the caliph, and the emirate of Tbilisi (Tiflis) would persist as an institution — with varying degrees of independence — for centuries, until the city was finally taken by King David the Builder in 1122 (on the emirate of Tbilisi and its long duration, standard Caucasian history; Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, Georgetown UP, 1963; and see, for the eventual liberation, St. David the Builder). In Abo’s lifetime the emirate was at its early height, and the pressure of the Abbasid state on the Caucasus was heavy: the great campaigns of the general Marwan ibn Muhammad (“Marwan the Deaf”) earlier in the century had devastated Kartli, and the region remained a contested march between the caliphate and the still-Christian or newly-converted powers to the north.

Under this overlordship the native Georgian order did not disappear. Kartli continued to be led by its own princes of the house of the Chosroids and, increasingly, the Bagratids, holding the title erismtavari (prince, “head of the people”) as vassals or tributaries under the emir and, above him, the caliph. The Georgian Church, autocephalous under its Catholicos, likewise continued — the eighth century is precisely the period in which the Georgian Church consolidated its identity under foreign political domination, a theme central to the very Life that preserves Abo (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, CSCO 601, Peeters, 2003, on the Georgian Church and identity under Arab rule; see Sabanisdze and the Georgian Church Under Pressure).

The world Abo entered was governed, in matters of religion, by the norms of Islamic rule over a conquered Christian population. The Christians of Kartli were, in the categories of Islamic law, dhimmis — a protected but subordinate community, permitted the practice of their ancestral faith and the governance of their own religious affairs in exchange for tribute (the jizya) and acceptance of a subordinate legal status (on the dhimma framework in the early Islamic Caucasus, standard background; cf. the parallel legal situation set out for al-Andalus in St. Laura of Córdoba). Within that framework, a born Christian could remain a Christian. What the law did not permit — and this is the exact legal fact on which Abo’s martyrdom turns — was apostasy from Islam. A Muslim who abandoned Islam for another faith was, in the prevailing juristic view, subject to the death penalty, and it is this provision, not any general persecution of Christians as such, that made Abo’s open Christianity a capital matter (on the apostasy penalty as the specific legal ground of the neomartyrdoms, treated soberly in The Pattern of the Convert-Martyr; and, for the theological framing, A Martyr for Christ, Not Against a People).

This distinction is essential for reading Abo rightly and for keeping the account sober. The Christian Georgians around him were not, in general, being killed for their faith; they were a tolerated subordinate community. Abo was in mortal danger not because he was a Christian but because he was a former Muslim who had become a Christian — an apostate under the law of the ruling power (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; and see Baptism in Safety, on why he could not be baptized in Tbilisi itself).

Prince Nerse and the Coming of Abo

The particular door through which Abo passed into this world was the household of Nerse, prince of Kartli. Nerse had been summoned to the caliphal court and detained there — the tradition, following the Life, places his detention under the Caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–775) and his release under a new caliph (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; OCA notice, oca.org). [Disputed: the length of Nerse’s detention (often given as three years) and the exact year of his release and return derive solely from the narrative of the Life and its later summaries; no independent document fixes them (Lang, Lives and Legends, 1976).] When Nerse was freed, he gathered a retinue in Baghdad for the return journey, and the young Arab perfumer Abo entered his service and travelled with him to Kartli, around 775 (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976).

Nerse’s own position was precarious in exactly the way that shaped Abo’s story. As a Christian prince holding his lands under Muslim suzerainty, and as a man who had already fallen under caliphal suspicion, Nerse could not simply defy the emir; and when political danger recurred, he did what such princes did — he withdrew, for a time, beyond the reach of Arab power, into the Christian-controlled north (see Baptism in Safety). It was on that northward withdrawal, out of the emirate’s jurisdiction, that Abo could safely be baptized, and it was after the return to Tbilisi that his open Christianity brought him, at last, under the apostasy law. The political geography of the emirate — Arab-ruled Tbilisi, Christian Kartli under overlordship, the free Christian north beyond — is thus not mere background but the very machinery of the martyrdom.

A City That Would Remember Him

There is a final irony in the setting worth naming at the start. Tbilisi, the seat of the Arab emirate, the city whose law condemned Abo, is the city that took him as its patron saint. The place of his burning, on the bank of the Kura (Mtkvari) below the cliff where the Metekhi church would later rise, became a site of veneration, and the memory of the Arab perfumer who died there was woven into the identity of the Georgian capital itself (see The Patron of Tbilisi and Abo and Georgian Identity). The emirate is long gone; the saint it made remains.

See Also

References

  • Ioane Sabanisdze. The Martyrdom of Abo, c. 786–790. Trans. David Marshall Lang, in Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd ed., pp. 115–133. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1976.
  • Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The princely order of Kartli and the emirate of Tbilisi.)
  • Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. CSCO 601, Subsidia 113. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (The Georgian Church and identity under Arab rule.)
  • “Martyr Abo the Perfumer of Tbilisi, Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (Nerse’s detention under al-Mansur.)