The Kingdom of Kakheti

Kakheti was the easternmost of the Georgian kingdoms — a small Orthodox realm in the valleys of the Alazani and Iori rivers that, by the time of Ketevan, survived as a vassal state pressed between the Ottoman and Safavid empires. This file sets out the political geography of a divided Georgia, the ancient faith it preserved, and the Bagrationi dynastic order into which Ketevan was born and married, so that her later fate at Shiraz can be read against the predicament that produced it.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

A Kingdom Among the Fragments

By the sixteenth century the once-unified medieval kingdom of Georgia — the realm of David IV the Builder and Queen Tamar, at its height in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries — had long since broken apart under the successive blows of the Mongols, of Tamerlane, and of internal division. In its place stood a patchwork of smaller polities: the kingdom of Kartli in the centre around Tbilisi and Mtskheta, the kingdom of Kakheti in the east, the kingdom of Imereti in the west beyond the Likhi range, and the semi-independent principalities of Samtskhe, Guria, Mingrelia, and Abkhazia (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3, on the fragmentation of the Georgian kingdom; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the successor states). Kakheti, Ketevan’s kingdom, occupied the fertile country east of Tbilisi, its heartland the Alazani valley under the Caucasus, its old capitals at Gremi and, earlier, Greti, its spiritual centre the great eleventh-century cathedral of Alaverdi dedicated to St. George (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Kakheti and Gremi).

Small as it was, Kakheti had a certain prosperity — its wine, its silk, its position on the caravan routes between the Caspian world and the Black Sea — and a certain resilience, having preserved through every catastrophe the Christian faith and the Georgian language and letters. But it had no capacity to defend itself alone against a great power, and by 1600 it lay directly in the path of two.

Between the Ottoman and the Safavid

The defining fact of Georgian political life in this period was that the country lay along the fault line between the two Muslim empires that dominated the Near East: the Sunni Ottoman empire to the west and south, and the Shia Safavid empire of Persia to the east and south. The long series of Ottoman–Safavid wars, fought intermittently across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, repeatedly turned the Georgian lands into a battlefield and a prize; the Peace of Amasya (1555) had notionally partitioned the Caucasus between the two empires, assigning the eastern Georgian kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti to the Persian sphere and the western lands to the Ottoman (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, on the Ottoman–Safavid partition; Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 2012, on Safavid policy in the Caucasus).

For the kings of Kakheti this meant a permanent and dangerous diplomacy. They were obliged to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Safavid shah, to send tribute and hostages, and at times to profess or feign conversion to Islam at the Persian court, while remaining, at home, Orthodox Christian rulers of an Orthodox Christian people. They played the two empires against each other where they could, sought Christian allies further off — Russia above all, to whom Kakhetian kings sent embassies seeking protection from the later sixteenth century — and rebelled when Persian demands grew intolerable (Lang, A Modern History of Georgia, 1962, on Kakhetian diplomacy and the Russian embassies; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). It was a strategy that bought survival at the price of chronic instability, and it had a fatal ceiling: when a shah as formidable and as determined as Abbas I resolved to break Kakheti’s independence, no manoeuvre could save it.

The Faith of St. Nina

What made Kakheti worth preserving, in the eyes of its own people and its queen, was above all its faith. Georgia counted itself among the oldest Christian nations, its conversion in the fourth century ascribed to the Equal-to-the-Apostles St. Nina, whose preaching under King Mirian and Queen Nana had made Christianity the religion of the Iberian kingdom (see St. Nina of Georgia). The Georgian Apostolic Church, autocephalous and possessing its own ancient liturgy, letters, and monastic tradition, had carried that faith through the Arab, Seljuk, Mongol, and Timurid periods; the cathedrals of Mtskheta and Alaverdi, the monasteries of the desert of David-Gareji, the hymnody and the Georgian Bible were its living inheritance (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, on the Georgian Church; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Georgian Christianity under Muslim pressure).

To this Church Ketevan belonged wholly, and it is essential to the meaning of her death. The demand that Abbas would later put to her — to abandon Christ for Islam — was not, to a Georgian, a private religious question but a demand to sever herself from the whole national and spiritual identity that Kakheti existed to preserve. Her refusal was of a piece with the centuries in which Georgian Christianity had survived precisely by refusing, again and again, to dissolve into the surrounding Islamic world. The Georgian Church and later tradition would read her passion in exactly that light: as the faith of St. Nina confessed unto death in the person of a queen (Georgian Patriarchate hagiographic tradition; cf. Ancient Faith / OCA, “Greatmartyr Ketevan,” on her confession of the faith).

The Bagrationi and the House of Mukhrani

The kingdoms of Georgia were ruled, all of them, by branches of a single ancient dynasty: the Bagrationi (Bagratids), who traced their line back through the medieval Georgian monarchy and, in their own legend, to biblical King David — a claim they advertised in their heraldry and their sense of sacred kingship (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the Bagrationi and their Davidic claim; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994). By Ketevan’s time the dynasty had divided into the several royal and princely houses that ruled Kartli, Kakheti, Imereti, and the appanage principalities, among them the house of Mukhrani (the Mukhranbatoni), a cadet branch of the Kartlian Bagrationi seated at Mukhrani in Kartli.

Ketevan was born into this Mukhrani branch — a Bagrationi princess of Kartli — and married into the ruling Bagrationi house of Kakheti, so that she was of the dynasty on both sides (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the Mukhrani line; Orthodox Church in America, “Greatmartyr Ketevan,” naming her father as a ruler of the Bagrationi house) [Disputed: her exact birth year is not securely recorded — it is given variously as c. 1560 (so most reference works) and c. 1565 (so some genealogical sources); no contemporary document fixes it, and the collection reports the range rather than a single year]. This dynastic fact matters for her story in two ways. First, it made her marriage a union within the Georgian royal order and gave her, as queen and later queen mother, a genuine political standing — the standing from which she would act as regent and then as her son’s envoy. Second, it meant that when she went to the Persian court she went as a Bagrationi, a member of the royal house that Abbas was determined to subdue; her value as a hostage, and the political charge of her fate, followed from who she was by blood as much as by faith.

The kingdom of Kakheti, then, is the necessary frame for Ketevan: a small, ancient, Orthodox realm of the Bagrationi, prosperous but indefensible, preserving the faith of St. Nina in the narrow space left between two empires, and living always one Persian campaign away from destruction. That campaign came in her lifetime, and it is the subject of the next section.

References

Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Kakheti, Gremi, Alaverdi; the Bagrationi and the Mukhrani line; Georgia between the empires.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The fragmentation of medieval Georgia; the Ottoman–Safavid partition; the Georgian Church.)
Lang, David Marshall. A Modern History of Georgia. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962. (Kakhetian diplomacy; the Russian embassies.)
Matthee, Rudi. Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. (Safavid policy toward the Caucasus.)
Orthodox Church in America. “Greatmartyr Ketevan, Queen of Georgia.” oca.org, commemoration of 13 September. (Her Bagrationi parentage and confession of faith; used to locate the tradition.)