David and the Caucasus

David IV’s wider power in his last years: the imperial titulature — “King of Kings,” “sword of the Messiah,” “emperor of all the East” — and the reality behind it; the continued expansion after Tbilisi, including the taking of Dmanisi (1124); the extension of Georgian suzerainty over the Armenian lands and the Muslim emirates of the eastern Caucasus; and the making of Georgia into the dominant power between Byzantium and the steppe, protector of the Christian peoples of the region.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Titulature

By the end of his reign David bore an imperial style that expressed a real transformation of his standing. The Georgian royal title as David held it ran, in one full form, “King of the Abkhazians, Kartvelians (Iberians), Ranis, Kakhetians, and Armenians, sword of the Messiah [shamshe mesiisa], emperor (basileus) of all the East” (en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” giving the full titulature; Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963, on the Georgian royal titulature). Each element was a claim: the enumeration of peoples asserted the unification of the Georgian lands and the incorporation of Armenian and other territories; “sword of the Messiah” cast the king as the militant defender of Christ’s cause against Islam; and the appropriation of the Byzantine imperial term basileus and the claim to rule “all the East” asserted a quasi-imperial dignity, a Georgian empire rising as Byzantium’s power in the region receded (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4). The later, fuller “King of Kings” (mepet-mepe) style — reflected in the very title of David’s biography, the Life of the King of Kings David — belongs to this imperial self-understanding (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003, on the royal titulature and the biography’s title).

Titulature can be empty boasting; David’s was substantially backed by fact. The claims were pretensions matched, to a large degree, by power.

Continued Expansion

The fall of Tbilisi in 1122 (see The Taking of Tbilisi (1122)) did not end David’s wars. In his last years he pressed the expansion of Georgian power in every direction. In 1124 he took Dmanisi, another Muslim-held stronghold in the south, further consolidating royal control of the southern approaches (en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” dating the capture of Dmanisi to 1124; Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015). In the same period Georgian arms and diplomacy extended the kingdom’s reach into the Armenian lands: the great Armenian city of Ani and other Armenian territories came under Georgian influence or control in David’s reign or shortly after, and the Christian Armenian population looked increasingly to the Georgian crown as protector against the Muslim powers (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the extension into the Armenian lands; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4). [Disputed: the precise timing and permanence of the Georgian acquisition of Ani and particular Armenian territories are complex — some gains were made or consolidated under David’s successors (Demetre I, George III), and control shifted over the twelfth century; the sources and modern accounts differ on exactly which acquisitions belong to David’s own reign versus his heirs’ (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The direction — Georgian hegemony expanding into the Armenian and Muslim lands — is not in doubt.]

Hegemony over the Neighbors

The cumulative effect was to make Georgia the paramount power of the Caucasus. The Muslim emirates and principalities of the eastern and southern Caucasus — Shirvan on the Caspian, the emirates of the Armenian and Mesopotamian marches, and others — were reduced to tributaries, clients, or defeated neighbors of the Georgian crown; David’s daughter Tamar (not to be confused with the later Queen Tamar) was married to the Shirvanshah, binding Shirvan to Georgia, and David intervened in and dominated the affairs of his Muslim neighbors as the strongest ruler in the region (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the Shirvan connection and the regional dominance; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4). Georgia had passed, in a single reign, from a tribute-paying dependency of the Seljuk sultan to the overlord of the very region that had once devoured it.

David also positioned Georgia as the protector of the Christian peoples of the Caucasus and the Near East. His patronage of the Armenian Christians, his benefactions to the monasteries and holy places of the wider Orthodox world (see The Piety of the King), and his standing as the great Christian victor over Islam in the age of the Crusades gave him a role — and a reputation — beyond his own kingdom. He was known in the Christian East as a mighty Christian king, and his victory at Didgori was noticed in the Latin and Armenian sources as a triumph of Christian arms (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; and the Latin and Armenian attestations of Didgori, see The Battle of Didgori (1121)).

The Reality Behind the Style

How far was the “emperor of all the East” a reality? The sober answer is: substantially, within the Caucasus, but not beyond a regional scale. David did not build an empire on the Byzantine or Seljuk scale; he built a strong, united Georgian kingdom that had become the dominant power of the Caucasus and the overlord of its immediate neighbors — a very great achievement, but a regional rather than a world empire (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963, on the scale of the Georgian “empire”). The imperial titulature expressed a genuine ascendancy and a genuine ambition, and it reflected the reality that within its Caucasian world Georgia was now supreme; but it also reflected, as royal styles do, an aspiration that outran the map (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963). The honest measure of David’s power is neither the deflation that dismisses the titulature as boasting nor the inflation that reads it as a literal empire of the East, but the recognition that a ruined tributary kingdom had become, in one reign, the master of the Caucasus.

The Base for the Golden Age

This regional hegemony was the political foundation of the Golden Age (see The Dawn of the Georgian Golden Age). The wealth of the tributary emirates and the trade of the Caucasus flowed to a Georgian crown that could now protect and tax it; the security of the dominant power allowed the flowering of art and learning; and the imperial self-understanding David articulated became the ideology of the Golden-Age monarchy, carried to its height under Queen Tamar. David’s grandson George III and his great-granddaughter Tamar extended the hegemony further, but they extended what David had established (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

References

Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The Georgian royal titulature; the scale of the Georgian “empire.”)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The regional hegemony; the tributary neighbors; the base for the Golden Age.)
Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The expansion into the Armenian lands; the Shirvan connection; the regional dominance.)
Mikaberidze, Alexander. Historical Dictionary of Georgia. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Dmanisi 1124; the later expansion.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (The “King of Kings” style and the biography’s title.)
“David IV.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_IV. (The full titulature; Dmanisi 1124 — cross-checked against Mikaberidze and Toumanoff.)