Assessment

A sober final weighing of David IV, held honestly in the §4 both-sides manner: the historical king, the saint of the Church, and the modern national symbol distinguished from one another; the reliability of the sources considered; the ways Georgian nationalism magnifies and idealizes him acknowledged; and an honest judgment of a genuinely great, genuinely holy, and genuinely hard medieval king.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Three Davids

Any honest assessment must first distinguish three figures who bear the one name, because the confusion of them is the chief source of distortion.

There is the historical David — the king reconstructed by the modern scholarly narratives from the near-contemporary biography, the Armenian and Arabic sources, the surviving acts and monuments: an unusually able medieval monarch who inherited a ruined tributary kingdom at sixteen and left it, thirty-six years later, the dominant power of the Caucasus, by a combination of military skill, administrative reform, ecclesiastical control, ruthless mastery of his nobility, and genuine statesmanship (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

There is the saint David — the holy king venerated by the Georgian Orthodox Church: the reformer of the Church, founder of Gelati, penitent poet of the Hymns of Repentance, and humble Christian who chose to be buried beneath the feet of the faithful, received by the Church as a life fundamentally offered to God (OCA, “Blessed David IV,” oca.org; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; and see His Repose and Canonization).

There is the national symbol David — the Aghmashenebeli of modern Georgian patriotism: the icon of national greatness, unity, resilience, and independence, invoked in the name of the state’s highest order, its avenues and monuments, and its self-understanding (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; and see Legacy).

These three are not contradictory — they are three true aspects of one man — but they answer to different standards of evidence and are prone to different distortions, and a sober assessment keeps them distinct.

The Sources, Weighed

David is, by the standards of medieval Georgian and hagiographic subjects, comparatively well attested — but the attestation must be weighed, not simply trusted. The central source, the Life of the King of Kings David, is a near-contemporary royal panegyric, written by a member of David’s own court to glorify him; it is invaluable for its closeness to the events and for much circumstantial detail, but it is systematically laudatory and shapes David to the ideal of the holy king, and its testimony to David’s virtues, his piety, and even the darkness of the pre-David ruin must be read with that tendency in mind (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003, on the panegyric character of the biography). The external sources — the Armenian Matthew of Edessa, the Latin Walter the Chancellor, the Arabic Ibn al-Athir and others — are precious precisely because they are independent and often hostile, and they broadly confirm the outline of David’s achievements (the reality of Didgori, the fall of Tbilisi) even as they give the inflated numbers characteristic of the age (see The Battle of Didgori (1121)). The monuments — Gelati, the tomb, the Hymns — are the hardest evidence of all, and they anchor the reconstruction. The net result is a figure whose outline is secure — the achievements are real and independently attested — but whose details, especially the large numbers and the picturesque anecdotes of piety and tolerance, are of varying reliability and have been flagged as disputed throughout this collection.

The Nationalist Magnification

The chief distorting force on David’s modern memory is Georgian nationalism, and honesty requires naming it. A small nation with a long history of foreign domination and a short, brilliant medieval golden age has every emotional reason to magnify the king who founded that age into a flawless national ideal — the wise, just, tolerant, pious, victorious Aghmashenebeli, a figure of unbroken greatness against whom the losses of later centuries can be measured (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, on the uses of the medieval past in modern Georgian nationalism; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). This magnification tends to three specific idealizations, each flagged in this collection: the troop-figures of Didgori and the Qipchaq resettlement, inflated in the sources and sometimes taken literally in national memory (see Sections 02–03); the religious tolerance of David, real but sometimes idealized into an anachronistic model of modern pluralism (see The Taking of Tbilisi (1122)); and the smoothing-away of the hard measures — the blinding, the storm of Tbilisi, the coercive breaking of the nobility — into an unblemished icon (see A King and a Saint). The corrective is not to debunk David but to hold the real king, with his real hardness, beside the idealized symbol.

The Both-Sides Judgment

Where, then, does an honest assessment come to rest? Two poles must be avoided.

The hagiographic-nationalist pole presents a David without shadow: the perfect Christian king in whom sanctity, statecraft, wisdom, and tolerance were flawlessly one. This is the David of panegyric and patriotism, and it is not quite the historical man; it suppresses the blinding, the slaughter, the coercion, and the inflation of the sources (the tendency of the near-contemporary biography, Life of the King of Kings David, in Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Metreveli, 2014, and of much popular memory).

The reductive-critical pole would present a David without light: merely an able and ruthless medieval warlord whose piety was policy and whose sanctity is a nationalist myth. This too is false to the evidence; it cannot account for the Hymns of Repentance, written in the king’s own hand and confessing his sin, or for the deliberate humility of the gate-tomb, or for the genuine reform of the Church (the evidence surveyed in Sections 04–06; and Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 4, which, while critical, does not reduce David to mere Realpolitik).

The truthful judgment lies between and holds both: David IV was genuinely great — one of the ablest rulers of the medieval world, who saved and remade a nation; genuinely holy — a devout, penitent, reforming, and humble Christian, rightly venerated by his Church; and genuinely hard — a coercive, sometimes ruthless medieval monarch who broke his nobles, blinded a traitor, and stormed a city. These are not three men but one, and the refusal to let any of them cancel the others is the whole of an honest assessment. The Church venerates the holiness without denying the hardness; the historian records the hardness without denying the holiness; and the nation may honor the greatness most truly by honoring the real and complicated king rather than the flawless idol (METHODOLOGY §4; and see A King and a Saint).

The Final Word

That balance is, in the end, David’s own. He did not present himself as flawless: in the Hymns of Repentance the victorious king calls himself a sinner and pleads for mercy, and by the gate-tomb he asked to be trodden underfoot. The man was more honest about himself than his admirers have sometimes been. An assessment faithful to David the Builder will be as honest as he was — neither the panegyric that he refused for himself nor the debunking that his real achievements and real repentance do not deserve, but the sober truth of a great, holy, and hard king who built a nation and confessed himself a sinner before God (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the penitential self-presentation; and see The Galobani Sinanulisani).

See Also

• A King and a Saint — the sanctity-and-statecraft tension this assessment rests on
• Legacy — the national cult this assessment weighs
• The Galobani Sinanulisani — David’s own penitential self-presentation
• St. Xenia: Hagiography vs. History — the repository’s flagship source-critical method
• METHODOLOGY.md — the citation and verification standard, esp. §4

References

• Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The historical king; the uses of the medieval past in modern Georgian nationalism.)
• Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The critical narrative; the national memory.)
• Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (The penitential self-presentation of the Hymns.)
• Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (The panegyric character of the royal biography.)
• Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (The saint of the Church.)
• 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 panegyric source.)
• “Blessed David IV of Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org/saints/lives/2019/01/26/100326-blessed-david-iv-king-of-georgia. (The saint as the Church venerates him.)
• METHODOLOGY.md §4, this repository. (The both-sides standard for live tensions.)