Rebuilding the State and the Army

David IV’s reconstruction of the Georgian monarchy: the centralization of the administration under a great minister-bishop; the creation of a permanent, salaried royal army independent of the feudal levies — above all through the resettlement of tens of thousands of Qipchaq (Kipchak) families from the North Caucasus; and the systematic humbling of the great noble houses whose private power had nearly destroyed the kingdom.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Problem: A Crown at the Mercy of Its Nobles

David’s central domestic problem was structural. The Georgian monarchy rested on a levy of noble contingents: when the king went to war, the great dynasts (didebulni) — the Baghvashi, Orbeli, Abuletisdze, and others — brought their retinues, and the royal army was therefore only as reliable as the nobles’ loyalty on any given day. In his father’s reign that loyalty had failed repeatedly, and rebellion had become chronic (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Allen, A History of the Georgian People, 1932, on the feudal levy). No lasting reconquest of the Seljuk-held lands was possible until the crown had force it could command absolutely. David’s reforms were all, in the end, directed at that end: a strong, centralized monarchy with an army of its own.

Breaking the Great Houses

The first and hardest task was to subordinate the nobility. David moved earliest and most decisively against the most dangerous house, the Baghvashi of Kldekari and Trialeti. He arrested Liparit Baghvashi in 1093 and expelled him from Georgia in 1094; when Liparit conspired again, David imprisoned him and eventually exiled him permanently to Constantinople; and when Liparit’s son Rati died in 1103 the Baghvashi domains of Kldekari and Trialeti passed to the crown, extinguishing the house’s independent power (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the Baghvashi; Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015, “David IV”). The World History Encyclopedia’s summary of the episode captures its intended effect: the summary disposal of the once-mighty Baghvashi “chilled independent streaks in other Georgian nobles” (worldhistory.org, “David IV the Builder,” drawing on the standard narratives). Other great families — such as the Abuletisdze, and later plotters — were dealt with as sharply when they resisted; the sources record, among the harder measures, the blinding of at least one conspirator, an episode treated soberly in A King and a Saint (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

The taming was not mere destruction. David rebuilt the nobility into a service aristocracy, binding leading men to the crown through a reorganized court and a hierarchy of offices in which status flowed from royal appointment rather than from independent landed power (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4). The result, over a generation, was a monarchy in which the king commanded rather than negotiated.

The Reformed Administration

David reorganized the central government into a more coherent, centralized apparatus. The near-contemporary sources and the standard reconstructions credit him with developing the institutions of a mature medieval monarchy: a royal council or high court of state (later called the darbazi), a supreme judicial function (the saajo kari, the “court of petitions/complaints”), and a chancery staffed by literate clerics and officials (Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015, “David IV”; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4). Some of these institutions reached their developed form only under his successors, and historians caution against reading the fully articulated administration of Queen Tamar’s day back onto David; but the direction — centralization, professionalization, the concentration of authority in the crown and its appointed officers — is his (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4).

At the apex of this administration David placed a single great minister: the office of the mtsignobartukhutsesi (chief secretary/chancellor), which he fused with the bishopric of Chqondidi to create the combined dignity of the mtsignobartukhutsesi-chqondideli, the chancellor-bishop who was, after the king, the most powerful man in the realm. This fusion of the highest civil and a high ecclesiastical office is the institutional heart of David’s throne-and-altar system, and it is treated in King and Catholicos (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

The Standing Army and the Monaspa

Against the unreliable feudal levy David set a permanent, professional force. He built up a standing royal army and a corps of household troops — the monaspa, a royal guard maintained by and loyal to the crown rather than to any noble — so that the king would always have disciplined force at his direct command, independent of the great houses’ cooperation (Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015, “David IV,” on the monaspa and the abolition of dependence on the feudal militias; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4). This professionalization is one of the reasons the Georgian army of Didgori could execute the disciplined, coordinated maneuvers that a feudal host could not (see The Battle of Didgori).

The Qipchaq Resettlement

The most striking single measure — and the most disputed in its scale — was David’s resettlement of the Qipchaqs (Kipchaks / Polovtsy / Cumans), a Turkic nomadic confederation of the North Caucasian and Pontic steppe. David had a personal tie to them: his second wife, Gurandukht, was the daughter of the Qipchaq chief Otrok (Atraka), son of Sharaghan (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the marriage). Around 1118, negotiating with the Qipchaq leaders in the North Caucasus, David arranged for a vast migration of Qipchaq families across the mountains into Georgia, settling them in strategic border zones (Shida Kartli, Hereti, and the southern marches) on condition of military service, so that each family furnished a mounted soldier to the crown (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015).

The traditional figures are large. The Georgian sources and the standard reference summaries give the resettlement as about 40,000 Qipchaq families — reckoned at nearly 200,000 individuals — furnishing a standing cavalry army on the order of 40,000 to 60,000 troops (Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015, “David IV,” giving c. 40,000 families / ~200,000 people and an army of “almost 60,000”; and the summary in en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” to the same effect). These figures should be read with caution. [Disputed: the scale of the Qipchaq resettlement — the traditional and most-cited figure is c. 40,000 families (~200,000 persons) yielding an army of some 40,000–60,000 (Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015); but medieval demographic figures of this kind are notoriously unreliable and probably inflated, and modern historians treat the number as an order-of-magnitude tradition rather than a census (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4, treating the resettlement as large but the figures as uncertain). What is not in doubt is that the migration was real, substantial, and militarily decisive.]

The Qipchaqs were converted to Christianity, integrated over time into Georgian society, and became the backbone of David’s standing army and a permanent counterweight to the native nobility — a force that owed everything to the king who had brought them and could be trusted against his domestic rivals as the noble levy could not (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The policy was not without cost: settling a huge body of steppe nomads inside the kingdom created its own frictions, and the loyalty and conduct of the Qipchaqs was not uniform. But as an instrument of state it worked, and it made the reconquest and Didgori possible.

The Shape of the Restored State

By the second decade of the twelfth century David had assembled the components of a strong medieval monarchy: a cowed and reorganized nobility, a centralized administration under a chancellor-bishop, a permanent royal army stiffened by tens of thousands of Qipchaq horsemen, and a reformed Church (see Section 04) bound to the throne. This was the machine that would win Didgori, take Tbilisi, and open the Golden Age. The “Builder” built institutions before he built churches, and the churches rested on the institutions (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015).

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 reforms and the army as the royal biography presents them.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The centralization; the nobility; the Qipchaq resettlement and its uncertain scale.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The Baghvashi; the marriage to Gurandukht; the Qipchaq migration.)
  • Mikaberidze, Alexander. Historical Dictionary of Georgia. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (The monaspa; the administrative offices; the c. 40,000-family / ~60,000-troop figures.)
  • Allen, W. E. D. A History of the Georgian People. London: Kegan Paul, 1932. (The feudal levy and the great houses.)
  • “David IV.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_IV. (Summary of the resettlement figures, cross-checked against Mikaberidze.)