Christianity as State Religion: Iberia Among the First Christian Kingdoms

The political fruit of Mirian’s conversion: the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the kingdom of Kartli (Iberia), the embassy King Mirian sent to the Emperor Constantine for clergy to organize the new church, and Iberia’s place among the earliest realms to adopt Christianity as a state religion — after Armenia, and within the reign of Constantine. This file pins the embassy and the establishment to Rufinus’s early report and the Georgian elaboration, and treats with care the question of “which kingdom was first.”

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox / Pan-Orthodox

From Personal Conversion to State Religion

The conversion of King Mirian III (see The Darkness and the Prayer) was not a private act but a public, royal one, and in both source layers it issues immediately in the conversion of the realm. Rufinus reports that the king, once converted, summoned the whole people, announced the faith, and built a church before the institutional Church had even arrived (Rufinus, HE 10.11). The Georgian Life makes the same point with the full apparatus of a royal conversion: idols cast down, a kingdom baptized, churches founded. Christianity became, in the language later applied, the state religion of Kartli — one of the defining facts of Georgian history and identity (see Nino and the Georgian Nation).

The Embassy to Constantine

The single most important institutional event in the earliest account is the embassy to the Emperor Constantine. On the captive’s counsel — in the Georgian Life, on Nino’s — the king sent envoys to Constantine asking that priests and clergy be sent to complete the evangelization of the people and to consecrate the church; Constantine, Rufinus says, received the request joyfully and sent clergy (Rufinus, HE 10.11). The Georgian tradition elaborates the embassy and adds the sending of relics and of builders, and connects it to the wider Constantinian establishment of Christianity in the East.

The embassy is doubly significant. Devotionally, it shows the new kingdom seeking incorporation into the one Church through the Christian emperor. Historically, it is the firmest dating anchor in the whole tradition: because Constantine died in 337, the embassy — and so the conversion — must fall within his reign, which is why the older scholarship favored a date close to 337 (see the dating note in The Darkness and the Prayer). It is worth noting that the clergy who first organized the Iberian church came, in the earliest narrative, from the imperial Church under Constantine; the longer-term jurisdictional tie of the Iberian church was to Antioch, whose patriarch consecrated its early bishops — a point developed in the file on the church Nino founded (see Georgian Christianity After Nino).

Among the Earliest Christian Kingdoms

Iberia’s adoption of Christianity as the religion of the realm places it among the very first Christian states. The conventional reckoning is that Armenia was first — traditionally c. 301, under King Tiridates and St. Gregory the Illuminator — and that Iberia (Kartli) followed within a generation, in Constantine’s reign. The two conversions are linked in the Georgian Life itself through the Rhipsime-martyr synchronism (see Miracles and the Mission), and the Caucasus thus became, very early, a region of Christian kingdoms on the frontier between Rome and Sasanian Persia.

The “which was first” question should be handled with care. The dates of both the Armenian (c. 301, itself debated, with some scholars preferring c. 314) and the Iberian conversion are uncertain, and “state religion” is a modern category applied to fourth-century realities. What can be said firmly is that Iberia was Christianized as a kingdom within the Constantinian period, very early in the history of Christian states, and through the agency of the captive/Nino rather than by imperial conquest or fiat — a distinctive feature of the Georgian conversion that the tradition has always emphasized.

[Disputed: The relative priority of the Caucasian conversions is uncertain. Armenia is conventionally reckoned the first Christian state (traditionally c. 301 under Tiridates and Gregory the Illuminator; some scholars prefer c. 314), with Iberia following within Constantine’s reign. Both dates are debated (see the conversion-dating note in The Darkness and the Prayer), and “state religion” is a category applied retrospectively. The firm point is that Iberia was Christianized as a kingdom early in the fourth century, within Constantine’s reign.]

The Frontier Setting

The conversion of Iberia is best understood against its geopolitical setting, which modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized. Kartli lay on the contested frontier between the Roman (Byzantine) and Sasanian Persian empires, and its religious orientation was a matter of high political consequence: to adopt Christianity in the Constantinian period was, among other things, to lean toward Rome and away from Zoroastrian Persia. The pre-Christian cult that Nino’s mission displaced — the idols Armazi and Zaden — was itself heavily Iranian in character, reflecting the deep Persian formation of pre-Christian Kartli that Stephen Rapp’s work has documented (S. H. Rapp Jr., The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, Ashgate, 2014; see Miracles and the Mission). Mirian’s adoption of Christianity, and his embassy to Constantine rather than to the Persian court, thus set the long-term civilizational alignment of Georgia — toward the Christian and eventually the Byzantine world — even as Georgia continued for centuries to live within the gravitational field of Iran. The conversion was a religious event with lasting political and cultural reach, and the tradition’s memory of it as a founding national event is, in this sense, historically just.

The Character of the Establishment

What the sources describe is the conversion of a kingdom from the top — king and queen first, the people following — but driven from below and from outside: by a captive Christian woman with no rank, no army, and no office. This is the paradox the Georgian tradition treasures and the repository’s treatment underlines: the state religion of Kartli was established not by a bishop sent from the empire, nor by a conquering Christian power, but by the prayer and preaching of one foreign laywoman, with the imperial Church arriving only afterward, on the king’s own request, to organize what her holiness had already won. The institutional church that grew from this beginning — its Antiochene ties, its catholicosate, its long road to autocephaly — is the subject of section 07 (see Georgian Christianity After Nino).

The Consequences for Georgian History

The establishment of Christianity under Mirian set the course of Georgian history for the next seventeen centuries. It bound Georgia to the Christian world at the moment that world was itself being reshaped under Constantine, and it placed the kingdom — small, exposed, and perpetually contested between greater powers — on the Christian side of the great divide between Rome and Persia, and later between Christendom and Islam. Through all the subsequent vicissitudes — the Sasanian pressure, the Arab conquest, the Mongol and Timurid devastations, the long Ottoman and Safavid contest for the Caucasus, and finally the Russian absorption — Georgia remained, with rare and partial exceptions, a Christian nation, and its Church the carrier of its identity (see Nino and the Georgian Nation). That continuity traces, in the Georgian self-understanding, to the conversion under Nino and Mirian; the fourth-century establishment was the hinge on which the whole subsequent history turned. The repository reports this as the well-grounded historical judgment it is, distinct from the developed legend of how the conversion came about, which belongs to the later layer (see Origins and the Sources).

References

Rufinus of Aquileia. Historia Ecclesiastica 10.11. Trans. Amidon, Oxford 1997. (The embassy to Constantine.)
The Life of St. Nino, in Constantine B. Lerner, The Wellspring of Georgian Historiography. London: Bennett & Bloom, 2004.
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography. CSCO 601, Subsidia 113. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (On the early Iberian church and its Antiochene ties.)
Mgaloblishvili, Tamila, ed. Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus. Caucasus World / Iberica-Caucasica 1. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998. (On the Caucasian conversions.)
On the Armenian conversion date: standard works on the Christianization of Armenia (used for the comparative dating).