03 — The Martyrdom
The heart of the collection: the death of Queen Ketevan at Shiraz on 13 September 1624, when, after years of captivity and a final demand that she renounce Christ for Islam, she refused and was tortured to death — and the remarkable fact that this death is attested from three separate traditions, Georgian, European Catholic, and Armenian, within a generation of the events. This section gives the martyrdom pinned to the sources and then examines the attestation itself, its convergences and its divergences (§3.5).
Tradition: Georgian Orthodox
This is the pivot of St. Ketevan’s story and of this guide. The first file narrates the witness at Shiraz — the demand, the refusal, and the torture and death — reporting what the sources attest, naming the tortures the accounts describe, and pinning the whole to the earliest and best witnesses rather than to devotional embellishment. The second file steps back to examine those witnesses as an evidentiary problem and an evidentiary strength: the Augustinian missionaries who were present, Pietro Della Valle who reported it from Persia, her son Teimuraz’s verse martyrology composed within a year, and the Armenian historian Arakel of Tabriz — a convergence unusual among neo-martyrs — together with the points, above all the exact date, where the traditions differ. This is the collection’s §3.5 attestation section for the martyrdom.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-witness-at-shiraz-1624.md | The final demand to apostatize and Ketevan’s refusal; the torture and death at Shiraz on 13 September 1624 as the sources describe it; the confession of Christ that is the core of the event; pinned to the earliest attestations. |
| accounts-and-attestation.md | The §3.5 attestation: the Georgian, European (Augustinian, Della Valle), and Armenian (Arakel of Tabriz) sources; how a martyrdom in Safavid Persia came to be so well documented; the convergences that make the core secure and the divergences (the date, the details) reported both-sides. |
See Also
- The Diplomatic Hostage — the captivity that ended here
- The Dispersal of the Relics — what became of her body
- The Sources for Her Life — the fuller source-critical treatment
- The European Witnesses — Della Valle, the missionary reports, and the European reception
References
- Teimuraz I of Kakheti. The Book and Passion of Queen Ketevan (Georgian verse martyrology, 1625).
- Della Valle, Pietro. An Account of Georgia (1627) and the Lettere from Persia.
- Arakel of Tabriz (Davrizhetsi). Book of History (Armenian, completed 1662).
- Flannery, John M. The Mission of the Portuguese Augustinians to Persia and Beyond (1602–1747). Leiden: Brill, 2013.