The Liberation of the Land

The reversal of the Seljuk conquest: David IV’s repudiation of the tribute to the sultan and his patient, decades-long reduction of the Turkish garrisons and reincorporation of the lost Georgian lands — Kakheti and Hereti in the east, the border fortresses, and the strategic marches — until the Seljuks had been pushed back to the edge of a kingdom they had once grazed at will, and their alarm produced the coalition of 1121.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Repudiation of Tribute

The first act of the reconquest was a refusal. In his father’s day the Georgian crown had paid an annual tribute (kharaj) to the Great Seljuk sultan, the token of Georgia’s status as a dependency. Taking advantage of the disorder that followed Sultan Malik-Shah’s death in 1092 and the westward diversion of Seljuk energies by the succession wars and the First Crusade (see The Young King (1089)), David ceased paying the tribute in the 1090s — a declaration, in the only language that counted, that Georgia was again a sovereign kingdom (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The refusal committed him to making the claim good by arms.

A War of Attrition

The reconquest was not a single campaign but a war of attrition spread across nearly three decades, waged as the balance of forces allowed. In the earlier years, before the standing army and the Qipchaqs (see Rebuilding the State and the Army) gave him overwhelming force, David fought a mobile war: harrying the Turkish nomads, cutting off their seasonal migrations between winter lowland pasture and summer highland pasture, storming isolated garrisons, and gradually making the settled Georgian lands untenable for the raiders (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The strategy was to reverse the logic of the didi turkoba: as the Turks had made cultivation impossible for the Georgians, David now made pasturage impossible for the Turks.

As his forces grew he moved to the reduction of fixed places. Over the 1100s and 1110s David and his commanders took a succession of fortresses and towns, restoring royal control over the countryside piece by piece and pushing the effective frontier of Turkish power steadily southward and eastward (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015, “David IV,” on the progressive reconquest).

The Reincorporation of Kakheti and Hereti

A major object of the reconquest was the reunification of the Georgian lands proper. The eastern kingdoms of Kakheti and Hereti, which had drifted from the crown’s control amid the eleventh-century troubles, were brought back under Georgian rule in David’s reign; his campaigns in the east, culminating in the decisive victory at Ereti/Hereti and the reduction of the eastern strongholds, are associated with the battle at Ercukhi (Ershukhi), where David defeated a Muslim force and secured the east (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the eastern campaigns; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4). By these campaigns the united kingdom of Bagrat III was substantially restored, and more: David held it as his forebears had not, with an army that could keep it.

The Strategic Squeeze and the Coalition of 1121

The cumulative effect of the reconquest was to make David not merely a survivor but a threat. By the late 1110s the Georgian kingdom had recovered its lands, repudiated its subjection, built a formidable standing army, and begun to press on the Muslim towns of the eastern Caucasus — and Tbilisi itself, the Muslim emirate in the heart of the kingdom, was now nearly surrounded and clearly marked for eventual absorption (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The rising Georgian power alarmed the Muslim rulers of the region and the wider Seljuk world. It was this alarm — the recognition that a resurgent Christian kingdom was overturning the settlement Manzikert had made — that produced the great coalition assembled against David in 1121, the coalition he shattered at Didgori (Mikaberidze, “Miraculous Victory: Battle of Didgori, 1121”; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; and see The Battle of Didgori (1121)).

The point is worth holding: Didgori was not an isolated miracle but the culmination of a generation of methodical rebuilding and reconquest. The “miraculous victory” was won by an army and a state that David had spent thirty years constructing, provoked by a strategic pressure he had deliberately applied. The providential and the strategic readings of Didgori (treated in the next section) both begin here, in the patient liberation of the land.

What the Reconquest Left Undone

By the eve of Didgori two great objects remained. Tbilisi, though nearly encircled, was still an independent Muslim emirate, and would not fall until 1122 (see The Taking of Tbilisi (1122)). And the wider expansion into the Armenian lands and the eastern Caucasus — the reduction of Ani, Dmanisi (taken 1124), and the extension of Georgian hegemony over neighboring Muslim and Christian principalities — belonged to the last years of the reign and to the Golden Age that followed (see David and the Caucasus) (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015, on Dmanisi 1124 and the later expansion). But the essential work — the recovery of the Georgian homeland from Seljuk domination — was done by David’s patient war of attrition, and it made everything else possible.

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 campaigns of reconquest.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The repudiation of tribute; the war of attrition; the reunification.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The eastern campaigns; Kakheti and Hereti; Dmanisi.)
  • Mikaberidze, Alexander. Historical Dictionary of Georgia. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (The progressive reconquest; Dmanisi 1124.)
  • Mikaberidze, Alexander. “Miraculous Victory: Battle of Didgori, 1121.” (The strategic background to the 1121 coalition.)