The Diplomatic Hostage

Ketevan came into Shah Abbas’s power not as a captive of war in the ordinary sense but as a diplomatic hostage: sent, in the customary manner of Safavid–Georgian relations, to treat with the shah on her son Teimuraz’s behalf and to stand as a pledge of his good conduct. This file examines why and when she went, the institution of royal hostage-taking that placed her there, and the years of honoured but inescapable captivity at Shiraz that ended in the demand to apostatize.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Practice of Royal Hostages

Hostage-giving was a structural feature of Safavid relations with the Georgian kingdoms, not an exceptional cruelty. The vassal kings of Kartli and Kakheti were routinely required to send sons, brothers, or other members of the royal house to the Persian court — partly as guarantees of loyalty, partly to be raised in Persian service and religion and so bound to the shah (Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 2012, on hostage-giving and the raising of Georgian princes at the Safavid court; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). Teimuraz himself had been sent as a boy to the court of Abbas before his accession, in exactly this way (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Teimuraz’s youth at the Persian court). To send a senior royal figure to the shah as envoy and pledge was thus a normal, if dangerous, move in the repertoire of Georgian diplomacy.

The danger lay in the shah’s readiness to convert a pledge into a prisoner and a prisoner into a victim. A royal hostage was safe only so long as the shah found it useful to keep the fiction of vassalage; when a king defied him past endurance, the hostages in his hands became instruments of revenge. This is precisely what happened to Ketevan and to her grandsons.

Why Ketevan Went to Persia

The exact circumstances and date of Ketevan’s coming into Persian custody are reported with some variation in the sources, and the collection follows the most consistent account while flagging the divergences. The common thread is that she went — or was sent — to the Persian side in connection with Teimuraz’s attempts to make peace with, or to appease, Shah Abbas after the disasters of the mid-1610s. The standard account is that around 1614 she was sent by Teimuraz as a negotiator to Abbas and in effect surrendered herself as an honoured hostage, in a bid to spare Kakheti further attack (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Ketevan’s mission to Abbas; the framing as “negotiator” and “honorary hostage” is standard in the reference literature). [Disputed: the sources differ on the timing and manner of her passing into Persian hands — some accounts date her embassy and surrender to c. 1614, at the height of the crisis; others speak of her being sent to or transferred to Shiraz later, c. 1620; and the whole is complicated by the movement of the royal family during the campaigns of 1614–1617. The collection reports that she went as Teimuraz’s envoy and pledge in the second decade of the century and was held at Shiraz thereafter, without pretending to a precision the sources do not supply.]

Whatever the exact chronology, the logic is clear and tragic. Teimuraz, unable to defeat Abbas outright and desperate to protect his kingdom and his surviving family, used the accepted currency of diplomacy — a royal hostage of the highest rank, his own mother, a Bagrationi dowager queen of proven standing — to buy time and terms. And Abbas, once he held her, kept her: as leverage against Teimuraz’s continued resistance and, in the end, as the object on which that resistance would be punished.

Captivity at Shiraz

Ketevan was held not at Isfahan, the Safavid capital, but at Shiraz, the great city of Fars in southern Persia, under the authority of its powerful governor Imam-Quli Khan Undiladze — himself of Georgian ghulam origin, one of the most eminent of Abbas’s Caucasian officers (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Imam-Quli Khan; Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 2012, on the Undiladze family and the governorship of Fars). Her captivity there lasted years — the tradition speaks of roughly a decade of detention before her death, from the mid-1610s to 1624 (Orthodox Church in America, “Greatmartyr Ketevan,” on the long years of her captivity and the repeated attempts to convert her).

It was, by the accounts, an honoured captivity in its outward form: she was a queen, treated with a certain state, and — importantly for the later history of her relics — permitted the company and ministry of the Christian clergy who were present in Shiraz, including the European Augustinian missionaries whose house was in the city (see Accounts and Attestation and The Dispersal of the Relics). But it was captivity nonetheless, and it was conditional. The condition, pressed on her over the years, was apostasy: the shah, the sources agree, sought to have her renounce Christ and accept Islam — by persuasion and inducement first, then by threat, and finally by torture (OCA, “Greatmartyr Ketevan,” on the progression from persuasion to torture; the same progression is reported in the European accounts).

From Pledge to Victim

The turning of Ketevan from diplomatic pledge to religious victim followed the collapse of the political relationship it had been meant to secure. As Teimuraz persisted in resistance and alliance-seeking, the value of Ketevan as a bargaining chip decayed into her value as an instrument of revenge and of humiliation — the public breaking of the Christian Bagrationi matriarch. The demand that she convert served both a religious purpose (the winning of a royal soul, and a propaganda triumph for Islam over the Christian Georgian house) and a political one (the final subjugation and shaming of the dynasty that had defied the shah). The two motives cannot be cleanly separated, and their fusion is exactly what makes the framing of her death a genuine and lasting question (see Confessing Christ Under Islam).

What the sources agree on, across the Georgian, European, and Armenian traditions, is the outcome: that when the demand to apostatize was pressed to its extremity, Ketevan refused, and that her refusal was met not with release but with a death of deliberate and prolonged cruelty. The diplomatic hostage became the martyr. That death, and the remarkable convergence of the witnesses who reported it, is the subject of the next section.

See Also

• Shah Abbas and the Devastation of Kakheti — the catastrophe of which her captivity was a part
• The Witness at Shiraz, 1624 — the martyrdom that ended the captivity
• Accounts and Attestation — the clergy at Shiraz who witnessed and reported it
• The Dispersal of the Relics — the Augustinians who had access to her in captivity

References

• Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Ketevan’s mission to Abbas and her surrender as hostage; Teimuraz’s youth at the Persian court; Imam-Quli Khan and the governorship of Fars.)
• Matthee, Rudi. Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. (Hostage-giving in Safavid–Georgian relations; the Undiladze family; Shiraz and Fars.)
• Orthodox Church in America. “Greatmartyr Ketevan, Queen of Georgia.” oca.org, commemoration of 13 September. (The years of captivity; captivity under Imam-Quli Khan; the progression from persuasion to torture; used to locate the tradition and followed to the underlying history where possible.)