Shah Abbas and the Devastation of Kakheti

Shah Abbas I of Persia, the greatest of the Safavid monarchs, resolved to break the independence of the eastern Georgian kingdoms after the revolt of their kings Teimuraz of Kakheti and Luarsab of Kartli. This file follows his punitive campaigns of 1614–1617 and, above all, the mass deportation of the Kakhetian population to Persia — a catastrophe that killed tens of thousands and uprooted a large part of the nation, and that forms the immediate background to Ketevan’s captivity and death.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Abbas I and the Georgian Question

Shah Abbas I (r. 1588–1629) was the ruler under whom Safavid Persia reached its height — the monarch who reorganized the army, curbed the Qizilbash tribal aristocracy, recovered territory from the Ottomans, and made Isfahan one of the great cities of the world (Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 2012, on Abbas’s reign; Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavids, 1980). Central to his statecraft was the ghulam system: a corps of soldiers and administrators drawn largely from Caucasian converts — Georgians, Armenians, Circassians — taken by capture, tribute, or deportation and raised in the shah’s service as a counterweight to the old tribal nobility (Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 2012, on the ghulam system and the Caucasian element). The Georgian lands were thus, to Abbas, not only a strategic frontier against the Ottomans but a reservoir of the human material on which his new state depended.

His policy toward the eastern Georgian kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti was accordingly one of tight control through client kings — ideally Georgian Bagrationi princes who had converted to Islam and been raised in Persian service. For a time this worked: both Teimuraz of Kakheti and Luarsab II of Kartli held their thrones as Abbas’s vassals. But both were Christian Georgian kings at heart and by the loyalty of their peoples, and when Abbas’s demands became insupportable, they defied him.

The Revolt and the First Campaigns

The breach came in the mid-1610s. When Abbas summoned Teimuraz and Luarsab to attend him — a summons the kings feared would end in their imprisonment or death — they failed to appear, and in 1614 Persian armies moved into the two kingdoms (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the outbreak of war in 1614; Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 2012). Teimuraz’s open defiance and his attempts to enlist Ottoman and Russian support enraged the shah. Luarsab of Kartli, who surrendered himself, was eventually imprisoned and, in 1622, put to death for refusing to apostatize — a martyrdom parallel to Ketevan’s own, and a warning of how Abbas dealt with recalcitrant Christian Bagrationi (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the fate of Luarsab II; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994).

In 1615 Teimuraz returned to rally Kakheti, and a Kakhetian revolt inflicted a sharp defeat on the Persian forces, killing a Safavid commander and driving the occupiers out for a season (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the 1615 rising; Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 2012). It was this success that sealed Kakheti’s fate. Abbas, who did not tolerate such reverses, returned in 1616–1617 with overwhelming force and with a purpose that had passed from subjugation to devastation.

The Devastation and the Deportations of 1616–1617

The Persian campaign against Kakheti in 1616–1617 was one of the most destructive episodes in the whole of Georgian history. Abbas’s army ravaged the kingdom systematically: towns and villages were burned, churches and monasteries sacked, vineyards and fields destroyed, and the population subjected to massacre and, above all, to mass deportation. The old capital Gremi and the Kakhetian heartland of the Alazani valley bore the worst of it (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the devastation of Kakheti; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994).

The human toll was immense, and the sources and modern scholarship report it in ranges rather than a single figure. [Disputed: the scale of the 1616–1617 Kakhetian catastrophe is given in varying estimates. Contemporary and traditional accounts, and the historians who follow them, speak of on the order of 60,000–100,000 Georgians killed and of some 100,000–200,000 deported to the Persian interior — figures that would mean the removal of a very large fraction, by some estimates as much as two-thirds, of the Kakhetian population (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 2012, on the Safavid deportations of Caucasians). The precise numbers cannot be recovered; the collection reports the scholarly ranges and the order of magnitude — a national catastrophe — rather than a false exactness.] The deportees were resettled in the Persian interior, above all in the region of Ferahan and Isfahan and in Mazandaran, where their descendants — the Georgians of Fereydan and elsewhere — formed lasting communities (Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 2012, on the resettlement of Georgians in Iran; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The deportation was thus not incidental violence but a deliberate instrument of Safavid policy: the depopulation of a rebellious kingdom and the transplantation of its people into the shah’s service and realm.

The Royal Family in the Catastrophe

The house of Kakheti did not escape. Teimuraz himself survived, fleeing to Imereti and then continuing decades of resistance, but his family fell into Abbas’s hands. Two of his young sons — Ketevan’s grandsons, given by some accounts as Alexander and Levan (Leon) — were held at the Persian court and there castrated, in an act of dynastic mutilation intended to end the line; one of the boys died of the wound, the other was broken in mind (Orthodox Church in America, “Greatmartyr Ketevan,” on the castration of the princes Alexander and Levan at Isfahan; the episode is reported in the Georgian tradition and in the near-contemporary accounts). And Ketevan herself, the dowager queen, was already or soon to be in Persian custody, sent to treat with the shah and held against her son’s continued defiance.

The devastation of Kakheti is, then, the true setting of Ketevan’s martyrdom. She did not die in an isolated act of religious persecution but as one figure — the most exalted — in a Safavid campaign that had killed and deported her people by the tens of thousands and mutilated her own grandsons. This is why the framing of her death is genuinely contested (see Confessing Christ Under Islam and Ketevan and Georgian Identity): the political revenge of a shah against a rebel dynasty and the religious demand that a Christian queen apostatize were, in her case, inseparably fused. What is not in doubt is that when the demand came, she refused it — and it is to that refusal, and its attestation, that the next section turns.

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Abbas’s Georgian policy; the war of 1614; the 1615 Kakhetian rising; the devastation and deportations of 1616–1617; the fate of Luarsab II and of the royal family.)
  • Matthee, Rudi. Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. (Abbas’s reign; the ghulam system; the Safavid deportations and resettlement of Caucasians in Iran.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The catastrophe of Kakheti; the eastern kingdoms under Safavid pressure.)
  • Savory, Roger. Iran under the Safavids. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. (The reign and statecraft of Shah Abbas I.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Greatmartyr Ketevan, Queen of Georgia.” oca.org, commemoration of 13 September. (The castration of the princes Alexander and Levan; used to locate the tradition.)