Georgia Before David: The Bagrationi Kingdom and the Great Turkish Troubles

Georgia on the eve of David IV’s reign: the eleventh-century unification of the Georgian lands under the Bagrationi dynasty, and the near-catastrophe that followed the Seljuk invasions after the Battle of Manzikert (1071) — the devastation that Georgian sources call the didi turkoba, the “Great Turkish Trouble,” which reduced the kingdom to a tribute-paying dependency and emptied its fertile lowlands.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Making of a Kingdom

The Georgia that David IV would restore was itself a recent creation. For most of its Christian history — since the conversion of Kartli (Iberia) under St. Nina in the fourth century (see St. Nina of Georgia) — the Georgian lands had been a patchwork of principalities: the eastern kingdom of Kartli-Iberia, the western kingdom of Abkhazia (Egrisi-Abkhazia), the southwestern realm of Tao-Klarjeti, and the border marches of Kakheti and Hereti, variously under Byzantine, Arab, and local control. The unification of these into a single monarchy was the achievement of the Bagrationi (Bagratid) dynasty, whose senior line drew its prestige from Tao-Klarjeti and from a claimed — and much-elaborated — descent from the biblical King David (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963, on the Bagratid dynasty and its Davidic legend; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 2).

The decisive figure was Bagrat III (r. 975–1014), who by inheritance, conquest, and the extinction of rival lines united Abkhazia and much of eastern Georgia and was crowned the first king “of the Abkhazians and the Kartvelians” — the founder of the united Georgian monarchy (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 2; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Bagrat III). His successors — George I (r. 1014–1027), Bagrat IV (r. 1027–1072), and George II (r. 1072–1089), David’s father — held and contested this inheritance against two great pressures: the Byzantine Empire to the west, which sought to absorb the Georgian marches, and, from the mid-eleventh century, a far more dangerous power from the east.

By the time of Bagrat IV the kingdom was real but fragile. Royal authority was perpetually challenged by a turbulent high nobility — the great dynasts (didebulni) such as the Baghvashi of Kldekari, the Orbeli, and others — whose castles and private armies made them near-sovereigns in their own domains and whose rebellions are a constant of eleventh-century Georgian history (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 2; Allen, A History of the Georgian People, 1932, on the feudal nobility). The taming of these houses would be one of David’s central tasks.

The Seljuk Storm

Into this world came the Seljuk Turks. A Central Asian Turkic dynasty that had seized Baghdad and the caliphate’s temporal power in 1055, the Great Seljuks under Alp Arslan and Malik-Shah drove westward across Armenia and the Caucasus in the 1060s. Alp Arslan campaigned in Georgia and Armenia in the 1060s, sacking towns and exacting submission; the Georgian lowlands, rich and exposed, lay open to the horsemen of the steppe (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the Seljuk invasions).

The hinge was the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, where Alp Arslan destroyed the Byzantine field army and captured the Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes. Manzikert did not directly involve Georgia, but its consequences were catastrophic for the whole Christian Caucasus: it shattered Byzantine power in Anatolia, removed the counterweight that had partly shielded Georgia, and opened Asia Minor and the Caucasus to Turkish settlement and raiding on a new scale (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). In the years after Manzikert the Seljuks turned in force on George II’s kingdom.

The Great Turkish Troubles (didi turkoba)

The decade and a half before David’s accession is remembered in Georgian tradition as the didi turkoba — the “Great Turkish Trouble” or “Great Turkish Invasion” — and the phrase is not rhetorical. The near-contemporary Life of the King of Kings David and the Georgian Chronicles describe a systematic devastation: Turkish nomads pastured their flocks in the Georgian lowlands, so that the settled agricultural life of Kartli collapsed; towns were sacked, churches burned, populations killed, enslaved, or driven into the mountains; and the pattern of transhumant raiding — the Turks wintering in the warm lowlands and moving to the highlands in summer — made ordinary cultivation and habitation impossible across much of the country (Life of the King of Kings David, in Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Metreveli, 2014, on the didi turkoba; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

Two blows fixed the low point. First, George II was forced into tributary submission: after Seljuk campaigns he agreed to pay an annual tribute (kharaj) to Sultan Malik-Shah, acknowledging Georgia as a dependency of the Seljuk empire (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). Second, in the terrible year the sources associate with a great earthquake and the loss of the fortress-town of Tbilisi’s environs and other strongholds — and with the sultan’s grant of parts of Georgia to his commanders — the kingdom’s independent existence seemed nearly at an end (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3). Tbilisi itself had been in Muslim hands since the Arab conquest of the eighth century, ruled by a local emir, and remained an Islamic city-state in the heart of the kingdom — a standing wound that David would not close until 1122 (see The Taking of Tbilisi (1122)).

Modern historians are careful here. The devastation was real and severe — on this the Georgian, Armenian, and Islamic sources agree — but the Life of the King of Kings David is a royal panegyric written to magnify the restorer, and it has every interest in painting the pre-David darkness as deep as possible so that David’s dawn shines the brighter. Scholars therefore read the chronicle’s account of total ruin as substantially true in outline but rhetorically heightened, and they note that Georgian society and its institutions, though battered, were not annihilated: the Church, the dynasty, and the nobility all survived to be reorganized (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3, on the sources and their tendency; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003, on the panegyric character of the royal biography). [Disputed: the severity of the didi turkoba is agreed by all sources, but the completeness of the collapse is a matter of emphasis — the near-contemporary royal biography heightens the ruin to magnify David’s restoration (so Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003), while the underlying survival of Georgian institutions is stressed by modern narrative historians (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994).]

The Inheritance

This was the inheritance: a kingdom barely two generations old, its unity always provisional; a high nobility as much a threat as a resource; a capital, Tbilisi, held by a Muslim emir; the lowlands grazed by Turkish nomads; the crown a tributary of the Seljuk sultan; and the Church itself, as the reformers would soon charge, corrupted by the sale of offices and the collapse of discipline (see The Council of Ruisi–Urbnisi (1103)). That a boy of sixteen inherited this in 1089 and left it, thirty-six years later, the strongest Christian power between Byzantium and the steppe is the measure of what “the Builder” would mean (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3–4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

See Also

References

  • The Life of the King of Kings David (Cxovreba mepet-mepisa Davitisi), in Kartlis Tskhovreba: A History of Georgia, ed. Roin Metreveli, trans. Dmitri Gamq’relidze et al. (Tbilisi: Artanuji, 2014). (The near-contemporary royal biography; the account of the didi turkoba.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The Bagrationi unification; the Seljuk invasions; the sources and their tendency.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Bagrat III; Manzikert; George II’s tributary submission.)
  • Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The Bagratid dynasty and its Davidic legend.)
  • Allen, W. E. D. A History of the Georgian People. London: Kegan Paul, 1932. (The eleventh-century nobility.)
  • Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (The panegyric character of the royal biography.)