02 — Georgia Between Empires
The catastrophe that swept Ketevan to Persia: Shah Abbas I’s campaigns against the defiant eastern-Georgian kingdoms and the mass deportations of the Kakhetian population in 1616–1617, among the darkest episodes in Georgian history; and the diplomacy that placed Ketevan herself in Abbas’s power, sent as her son’s envoy and held, in effect, as an honoured hostage. This section explains how a queen came to be at the mercy of a shah.
Tradition: Georgian Orthodox
The martyrdom of Ketevan did not happen in a vacuum. It was the personal culmination of a political catastrophe: Shah Abbas I’s determination to break the independence of Kakheti and Kartli, which issued in punitive campaigns of extraordinary savagery and in the forced removal of a large part of the Kakhetian people to the Persian interior. Ketevan came into Abbas’s hands as part of the same process — sent, in the customary manner of Georgian royal diplomacy, to plead her son’s cause and to serve as a pledge of good faith, and then kept when the good faith failed.
The two files treat, first, Abbas and the devastation of Kakheti — the campaigns, the massacres, and the deportations of 1616–1617 that gutted the kingdom; and second, the specific circumstances of Ketevan’s embassy and captivity, the making of the “diplomatic hostage” whose refusal to convert would turn a political detention into a martyrdom.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| shah-abbas-and-the-devastation-of-kakheti.md | Shah Abbas I and his Georgian policy; the revolt of Teimuraz and Luarsab; the punitive campaigns of 1614–1617 and the mass deportation of the Kakhetians to Persia; the scale of the catastrophe as the sources and modern scholarship report it. |
| the-diplomatic-hostage.md | Why and when Ketevan went to the Persian court; the practice of royal hostages in Safavid–Georgian relations; her years of captivity at Shiraz under Imam-Quli Khan; and the passage from honoured detention to the demand for apostasy. |
See Also
- Ketevan, Queen of Kakheti — the regent and matriarch caught up in the catastrophe
- The Witness at Shiraz, 1624 — where the captivity ended
- Orthodoxy: World Orthodoxy — the Georgian Church in its long history under empire
References
- Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012.
- Matthee, Rudi. Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012.
- Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.