The Dawn of the Georgian Golden Age

How David IV’s reign inaugurated the Georgian Golden Age — the era of unmatched Georgian power, wealth, and culture that runs from David through the reigns of his son Demetre I and grandson George III to his great-granddaughter Queen Tamar (r. 1184–1213) and the epic of Shota Rustaveli; and how the state, army, reformed Church, and learning David built became the foundation of a century of greatness.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Founder of an Age

Georgian historiography conventionally dates the Georgian Golden Age — the high point of medieval Georgian statehood and civilization — from the reign of David IV, and names David as its founder (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; en.wikipedia.org, “Georgian Golden Age,” dating the era from David the Builder through Queen Tamar). The age is not merely a succession of strong reigns but a coherent phenomenon — a united, centralized, independent, and expanding Georgian monarchy, wealthy on the trade and tribute of the Caucasus, culturally brilliant, and militarily dominant — and every one of its foundations was laid by David.

The point can be put institutionally. The Golden Age rested on: a united kingdom, which David recovered from the ruin of the didi turkoba and reunified (see The Liberation of the Land); a centralized monarchy with a professional administration and a subordinated nobility, which David built (see Rebuilding the State and the Army); a standing army stiffened by the Qipchaqs, which David created and which won Didgori; a reformed and loyal Church, which David purified at Ruisi–Urbnisi and bound to the throne (see Section 04); a learned culture, which David planted at the Gelati and Ikalto academies (see The Gelati Academy); and a capital and regional hegemony, which David won at Tbilisi and extended across the Caucasus (see David and the Caucasus). The successors of the Golden Age inherited, extended, and enjoyed what David had built; they did not have to build it (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4).

The Line to Tamar

The dynastic line from David to the summit of the Golden Age is direct and short:

  • David IV (r. 1089–1125) — the Builder, founder of the age.
  • Demetre I (r. 1125–1156), David’s son — who completed the great church of Gelati (see The Monastery of Gelati), consolidated his father’s conquests, and continued the expansion (taking, among other trophies, the gates of Ganja).
  • George III (r. 1156–1184), David’s grandson — who extended Georgian power further into the Armenian lands and the eastern Caucasus and who raised his daughter to the throne as co-ruler.
  • Queen Tamar (r. 1184–1213), David’s great-granddaughter — under whom the Golden Age reached its zenith: the Georgian kingdom at its greatest territorial extent and prestige, overlord of neighboring states, patron of the arts, and the sovereign under whom Shota Rustaveli composed the national epic The Knight in the Panther’s Skin (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” naming David as great-grandfather of Queen Tamar). Tamar, like David, is venerated as a saint by the Georgian Orthodox Church — the two royal saints who bracket the Golden Age.

That the age reached its height under a queen, and a canonized one, is itself a mark of the stability of the throne David had built: a monarchy strong enough to pass, without civil war, to a woman, and to flourish under her.

The Cultural Flowering

The Golden Age was a cultural as much as a political phenomenon, and here too David is the founder. The philosophical and theological learning of the Gelati and Ikalto academies (see The Gelati Academy) — Ioane Petritsi’s Neoplatonism, Arsen Ikaltoeli’s patristic theology — created the intellectual soil from which the literature of the age grew. David’s own Hymns of Repentance (see The Galobani Sinanulisani) stand at the head of the age’s religious poetry, as Rustaveli’s epic, two generations later, stands at the head of its secular literature (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4). The monumental art of the age — the mosaics and frescoes of Gelati and the other great churches, the illuminated manuscripts, the metalwork and enamels — likewise flowered from the wealth, security, and patronage David’s restoration made possible (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998).

The Historian’s Caution

Two cautions keep the founder’s role in proportion. First, the Golden Age was the work of several reigns, and much of what is most celebrated — the greatest territorial extent, Rustaveli’s epic, the fullest development of the administration — belongs to Tamar’s day, three generations after David; it is a distortion to credit David personally with achievements that were his descendants’ (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4). Second, the “Golden Age” is partly a construction of later Georgian and modern national memory, which has reason to magnify a lost period of greatness; the age was real, but its golden coloring is also a product of the centuries of foreign domination that followed and that looked back to it with longing (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; and see Assessment). With those cautions, the judgment stands: David built the foundations, and the age was his in its origin if not in its every fruit.

See Also

References

  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (David as founder of the Golden Age; the dynastic line; the cautions.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Demetre I, George III, Tamar; the age and its later coloring.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (The literary flowering; Rustaveli.)
  • Eastmond, Antony. Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. (The monumental art of the age.)
  • “Georgian Golden Age” and “David IV.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_Golden_Age; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_IV. (The dating of the age from David through Tamar; David as Tamar’s great-grandfather.)