The Council of Ruisi–Urbnisi (1103)

David IV’s great reforming synod, convened about 1103 at the churches of Ruisi and Urbnisi in Kartli, which purged the Georgian Church of simony and the hereditary transmission of high office, deposed unworthy bishops, and bound the reformed Church closely to the crown — at once a genuine ecclesiastical reformation and a deliberate extension of royal authority into the ecclesiastical sphere.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Church That Needed Reform

The decades of the didi turkoba had damaged the Georgian Church as they had the state (see Georgia Before David). By David’s day the Church suffered from the same ills that afflicted much of Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and that the Western Gregorian reform was attacking in the same generation: simony (the purchase and sale of ecclesiastical offices), the hereditary transmission of bishoprics and abbacies within noble families who treated sees as private property, and the consequent corruption, worldliness, and neglect of pastoral and disciplinary duty (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; en.wikipedia.org, “Council of Ruisi-Urbnisi,” on the corruption addressed). The infiltration of the episcopate by feudal nobles who held sees by birthright made the Church both a spiritual scandal and a political problem: a hierarchy answerable to noble houses rather than to the crown or to canonical discipline.

The Synod

To remedy this, David convened a reforming council, held at the neighboring churches of Ruisi and Urbnisi in Shida Kartli. The council is conventionally dated to 1103, though some accounts extend the reforming process across 1103–1105 (en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” dating the council to 1103–1105; en.wikipedia.org, “Council of Ruisi-Urbnisi,” dating it 1103). [Disputed: the precise date — the council is usually placed in 1103, but the associated reforming measures are sometimes described as spanning 1103–1105; the sources do not fix a single date with certainty.]

The council legislated a program of reform. It condemned simony and the hereditary holding of ecclesiastical office; it deposed bishops and clergy who had obtained their positions corruptly or who were unworthy of them; it reasserted canonical order and clerical discipline; and it reorganized the hierarchy so as to place worthy men, loyal to the reform and to the crown, in the great sees (en.wikipedia.org, “Council of Ruisi-Urbnisi,” on the expulsion of unworthy clergy and the reassertion of order; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The acts of the council survive and are a significant monument of medieval Georgian canon law (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the surviving acts).

David’s own role was deliberately framed to respect the Church’s autonomy. As a lay sovereign he convened, promoted, and — the sources stress — inspired the council, and he took an active interest in its work; but he is presented as refraining from direct intervention in the doctrinal and canonical deliberations themselves, leaving those to the assembled clergy, so that the reform should have the authority of the Church’s own act rather than the appearance of royal dictation (en.wikipedia.org, “Council of Ruisi-Urbnisi,” on David’s initiating but non-participating role; and the near-contemporary biography’s account of his piety, Life of the King of Kings David, in Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Metreveli, 2014). This framing is itself significant: David wanted the reform to be, and to be seen to be, the Church’s own.

The Chosen Saint: St. George

The council and David’s ecclesiastical program are associated in tradition with a special devotion to St. George the Great Martyr, long the patron and protector of Georgia (whose very name in many languages is bound to the saint’s), and David’s reign and his military and ecclesiastical enterprises were placed under George’s patronage (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; and see St. George the Great Martyr). The alliance of the reformed Church, the warrior-saint, and the restoring king is one of the governing images of David’s kingship.

Reform and Control: The Honest Reading

Modern historians read Ruisi–Urbnisi as a double achievement, and honesty requires holding both sides together. On the one hand it was a real and needed ecclesiastical reformation: simony and hereditary office were genuine abuses, their purge a genuine good, and the restoration of canonical discipline a genuine service to the Church’s spiritual life (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4). On the other hand it was, unmistakably, a political instrument: by breaking the noble families’ hereditary grip on the great sees and replacing corrupt or independent bishops with reform-minded men loyal to the crown, David brought the Church, like the nobility, under royal control, and turned it from a rival power-network into a pillar of the monarchy (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4, reading the council as both reform and centralization; en.wikipedia.org, “Council of Ruisi-Urbnisi,” noting that it “limited the church’s authority” even as it purified it). [Disputed: the primary character of Ruisi–Urbnisi — whether it is best read as, in the first place, a spiritual reformation that incidentally strengthened the crown, or as, in the first place, a royal centralization dressed in the forms of reform. Most historians hold that it was genuinely both, and decline to reduce it to either; the two purposes were, for David, one policy (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994).]

This duality is not a scandal but the ordinary shape of medieval sacred kingship, and it is the same duality the Church accepts in venerating David: the king who purified the Church also mastered it, and did both in the conviction that a holy kingdom required a holy — and a loyal — Church. The institutional expression of that conviction was the great office he created at the summit of the reformed hierarchy, treated in King and Catholicos.

The Fruit of the Reform

The reformed Church of Ruisi–Urbnisi was the Church that raised Gelati (see The Monastery of Gelati), staffed David’s chancery, sanctioned his kingship, and formed the spiritual culture of the Golden Age. Ruisi–Urbnisi is therefore rightly counted among David’s foundational acts: with the standing army it is one of the two instruments by which he turned a battered kingdom into a strong and ordered Christian state (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

See Also

• King and Catholicos — the reordered hierarchy and the chancellor-bishop that crowned the reform
• Georgia Before David — the ruin that damaged the Church as well as the state
• The Monastery of Gelati — the great foundation of the reformed Church
• St. George the Great Martyr — the patron saint of Georgia and of David’s enterprises

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). (David’s piety and his role in the reform.)
• Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The abuses; the council as both reform and centralization.)
• Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The surviving acts; St. George; the reform.)
• “Council of Ruisi-Urbnisi.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Ruisi-Urbnisi. (The corruption addressed; the expulsion of unworthy clergy; David’s initiating but non-participating role; the limiting of church authority.)
• “David IV.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_IV. (The 1103–1105 dating.)