The Taking of Tbilisi (1122)

The capture of Tbilisi in 1122, ending some four centuries of Muslim rule over the city and giving David a capital in the heart of his kingdom; and his celebrated policy of tolerance toward the city’s Muslim and Jewish inhabitants — examined for the sourced evidence behind it and for the ways modern memory has idealized it.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

An Islamic City in the Heart of the Kingdom

Tbilisi had been in Muslim hands since the Arab conquest of the eighth century. For four hundred years it was ruled by a Muslim emir and populated largely by a Muslim and Jewish citizenry — a wealthy trading city, an emirate that survived as an island of Islam within the Christian Georgian lands even as the Bagrationi kings rose around it (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3–4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). Earlier Georgian kings had taken and lost it; it remained the great unfinished business of the reconquest, and its possession was the natural capital of a united kingdom.

The victory at Didgori in August 1121 (see The Battle of Didgori (1121)) removed the coalition that had protected the region’s Muslim powers and left Tbilisi exposed. In 1122 — the sources place the fall early in the year, in February — David took the city by storm, ending the emirate and the long Muslim rule (en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” dating the capture to February 1122; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). He made Tbilisi his capital — though the royal seat and the burial-place at Gelati remained in the west at Kutaisi — and its capture is remembered as the completion of the restoration: the Georgian crown at last held the city at the center of its lands (Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015, “David IV”).

The near-contemporary biography, and modern accounts, note that the assault was accompanied by the ordinary violence of a storm — the sources speak of considerable slaughter in the taking of the city — before David imposed order and his policy of protection on the survivors (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). This is worth stating plainly: the celebrated tolerance was a policy of governance imposed after a hard conquest, not a bloodless entry.

The Policy of Tolerance

What David is chiefly remembered for at Tbilisi is his treatment of the conquered Muslim and Jewish population. Rather than expel, forcibly convert, or plunder them, he extended protection and a striking degree of religious and civic liberty to the city’s non-Christian inhabitants. The traditions preserved in the Georgian and, notably, the Muslim sources credit him with a range of conciliatory measures: he protected the Muslims in the practice of their religion and the Friday prayer, maintained the mosque, lightened or regulated the taxation of the Muslim and Jewish communities, forbade practices offensive to Muslims in their quarter (the sources speak of his banning the slaughter of pigs in the Muslim districts), patronized Muslim scholars and poets, and is said even to have attended the mosque and the Friday assembly himself as a gesture of good faith (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4, on David’s conciliation of the Muslim population; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). Muslim writers, ordinarily hostile to a Christian conqueror, record his justice and moderation toward their co-religionists with something like approval — an independent and therefore valuable witness that the policy was real and noticed (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the favorable Muslim testimony).

The policy was not disinterested piety alone. It was also intelligent statecraft: Tbilisi’s wealth lay in its Muslim and Jewish merchant class and its trade with the Islamic world, and a king who wished to rule a prosperous, multi-confessional capital and to be accepted as a legitimate overlord by his new Muslim subjects and neighbors had every reason to rule them with a light and tolerant hand (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The tolerance and the interest ran together, as they often do in able rulers.

The Honest Limits of the Claim

David’s tolerance is genuine and well attested, but it is also a favorite theme of modern Georgian national and even secular-liberal memory, which has sometimes inflated it into an anachronistic ideal of pluralism. Sobriety requires two qualifications.

First, the tolerance followed conquest and slaughter, and was extended to a subjected population within a firmly Christian and royally controlled order; it was the merciful and prudent governance of the conquered, not a modern principle of equal citizenship (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). Second, some of the most-quoted specific details — the banning of pig-slaughter in the Muslim quarter, David’s personal attendance at the mosque, particular remitted taxes — reach us through later and sometimes literary or panegyric channels, and while they are consistent with the well-attested general policy, individual embellishments cannot all be pinned to a contemporary document. [Disputed: the extent and detail of David’s religious tolerance. The general policy of protection and conciliation toward Tbilisi’s Muslims and Jews is well attested, including in favorable Muslim testimony (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). But the more picturesque specifics (personal mosque attendance; the pig-slaughter ban; particular tax remissions) rest partly on later or literary sources and are sometimes idealized in modern national memory into an anachronistic model of pluralism; the sober position affirms a real and unusual policy of tolerant governance while flagging the individual details as of varying attestation.]

Held within those limits, the achievement remains remarkable for its age. A twelfth-century Christian king who took a Muslim city by storm and then governed its Muslims and Jews with protection, moderation, and enough good faith to win the praise of hostile Muslim chroniclers was doing something genuinely uncommon, and it belongs to the substance, not merely the legend, of his greatness (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

Tbilisi and the Kingship

The taking of Tbilisi completed the outward restoration of the kingdom and gave concrete form to David’s imperial titulature — “sword of the Messiah,” ruler of a multi-confessional realm stretching toward the Caspian (see David and the Caucasus). It also crystallized the character of his rule: a Christian and Orthodox kingship (see Section 04) that could nonetheless govern a plural population with justice, and that understood the difference between defending the faith by the sword against invaders and oppressing the conquered who were now the king’s own subjects. That combination — devout, hard in war, moderate in rule — is the David the Church remembers and the historian recognizes (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; and see A King and a Saint).

See Also

References

  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Tbilisi as a Muslim emirate; the capture; the policy of conciliation and its statecraft.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The storm and slaughter; the tolerance; the favorable Muslim testimony.)
  • Mikaberidze, Alexander. Historical Dictionary of Georgia. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (“David IV”; Tbilisi as capital.)
  • “David IV.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_IV. (The February 1122 date of the capture; the summary of the tolerance — cross-checked against Suny and Rayfield.)