Kartli and Armenia under Persia

The world of Shushanik’s passion: the Christian kingdoms of the fifth-century Caucasus inside the Sasanian sphere, the Persian promotion of Zoroastrianism under Yazdgird II and Peroz I, the Avarayr war of 451, and the pitiakhshate of Gugark — the Armeno-Georgian border-march whose lord’s apostasy made her a martyr. Apostasy to the fire-religion was not an eccentricity but a career: the file sets out what a Caucasian noble stood to gain by it, and what a Christian house stood to lose.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox (shared pre-division veneration with the Armenian Apostolic Church)

Two Christian Lands in the Persian Sphere

By the mid-fifth century, the two principal states of the central and eastern Caucasus — the Armenian lands and the east-Georgian kingdom of Kartli (Iberia to Greek and Latin writers) — had been Christian for over a century. Armenia’s conversion under King Trdat is traditionally placed at the beginning of the fourth century; Kartli’s followed in the 330s, under King Mirian III, through the mission of the captive woman whom Georgian tradition names Nino (Rufinus, Historia ecclesiastica 10.11, for the near-contemporary notice of the Iberian conversion; see St. Nina of Georgia). But both lands lay, for most of the fifth century, not in the Roman but in the Persian sphere. The partition of Armenia between Rome and Persia (conventionally dated c. 387) had left the greater, eastern part under Sasanian suzerainty, ruled after 428 not by its own Arsacid kings but by a Persian-appointed marzpan; Kartli kept its Chosroid kings, but as vassals of the shahanshah (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963, on the political structures of Christian Caucasia; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 1). The Christian Caucasus was thus a religious anomaly inside an empire whose kings ruled as devotees of Ohrmazd and patrons of the fire-cult.

The Sasanian state religion was Zoroastrianism — the worship of Ahura Mazda with fire as its cultic center, administered by a powerful Magian priesthood — and under energetic kings the religion functioned as an instrument of imperial cohesion. The reign of Yazdgird II (439–457) marked the aggressive phase: the king pressed the Armenian, Iberian, and Albanian nobility to accept the “religion of the Aryans,” summoning nobles to court, rewarding converts with honors and tenure, and dispatching Magi to plant fire-temples in the Christian provinces (Ełishē, History of Vardan and the Armenian War, trans. Thomson, 1982; Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, History, trans. Thomson, 1991). The logic was political as much as religious: a Christian nobility might look to Christian Rome, and a shared religion bound the border lords to Ctesiphon.

Avarayr, 451

The Armenian answer was the revolt of 449–451, led by the sparapet (hereditary commander-in-chief) Vardan Mamikonian — Shushanik’s father. Pressed to apostatize, the Armenian nobles first temporized, then rose; on 26 May 451, at the field of Avarayr, the Armenian army met the Persians and was defeated, Vardan falling in the battle with his companions (Ełishē, trans. Thomson, 1982; Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, trans. Thomson, 1991, pt. II). The defeat was military but not religious: the survivors’ resistance and the attrition of occupation eventually persuaded the Persian court that forced conversion of Armenia was not worth its price, and the Armenian Church came to venerate Vardan and his fallen as saints — the Vardanankʿ, whose feast remains among the most beloved of the Armenian calendar (Ełishē, trans. Thomson, 1982, introduction). For the world of this collection the essential point is genealogical and moral: Shushanik was raised in the house that had just given Armenia its proto-national martyrs, the daughter of the man who died rather than accept the fire-religion (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of Shushanik, identifying her as the daughter of Vardan the sparapet; trans. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; see Daughter of Vardan Mamikonian).

Yazdgird’s successor Peroz I (r. 459–484) inherited both the policy and its lesson. Peroz’s reign was consumed by war against the Hephthalites in the east — he would die on that front in 484 — and by chronic fiscal strain; in the Caucasus he preferred cooption to crusade, cultivating the loyalty of individual magnates rather than attempting another general conversion (Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, trans. Thomson, 1991, pt. III, for the reign; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the Iranian texture of fifth-century Caucasia). It is exactly this environment — apostasy solicited noble by noble, rewarded case by case — that frames Varsken’s journey to Ctesiphon.

Gugark and the Pitiakhshate

The stage of Shushanik’s passion was Gugark (Armenian Gugarkʿ; Greek Gogarene) — the march-land between Armenia and Kartli, straddling the upper Kura and its tributaries in what is now southern Georgia and northern Armenia. Gugark was governed by a hereditary pitiakhsh (Georgian pitiaxši; Armenian bdeašx; the “vitaxa” of classical sources) — a viceregal border-lord ranking just below the king, one of the great offices of the Caucasian world (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963, on the vitaxae of Gogarene, their Mihranid dynasty, and their quasi-royal standing). The pitiakhshes of Gugark sat at Tsurtavi (Cʿurtavi), in the Kvemo Kartli lowlands south of modern Tbilisi, and answered — in the shifting way of march-lords — now to the king of Kartli, now directly to the Persian court. The population of their march was mixed Armenian and Georgian, and so was its church life: the Martyrdom itself shows Armenian- and Georgian-speaking clergy side by side at Tsurtavi, and its author moves in both worlds (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of Shushanik; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on Tsurtavi’s bicultural milieu).

In Shushanik’s generation the pitiakhsh was Arshusha II (Ashusha), a Christian, remembered in the Armenian sources as a benefactor of the Mamikonian house: Łazar Pʿarpecʿi records that after the catastrophe of 451 Arshusha obtained from the Persian court the guardianship of the young sons of Hmayeak Mamikonian — Vardan’s brother, who had fallen in the same war — and raised them in Gugark (Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, History, trans. Thomson, 1991). The house of Gugark and the house of Mamikonian were thus bound by protection and gratitude a generation before they were bound by marriage; Shushanik’s wedding to Arshusha’s son Varsken sealed an existing alliance (Toumanoff, Studies, 1963; see Marriage into the House of Gugark). That the son of such a father became the persecutor is part of the Martyrdom’s tragedy.

The Political Economy of Apostasy

Why would a Caucasian magnate apostatize? The sources let the calculation be reconstructed with unusual clarity.

The rewards were concrete. For Varsken, on his accession to the pitiakhshate (Toumanoff dates his tenure 470–482: Studies, 1963), the journey to Ctesiphon and the adoption of Zoroastrianism purchased the favor of Peroz, confirmation and enlargement of office — the sources report he was given authority extending toward Caucasian Albania — and a marriage alliance with the royal house itself, a daughter of the shahanshah (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of Shushanik, on the journey, the apostasy, and the Persian marriage; Toumanoff, Studies, 1963; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014). For a border-lord whose office lived on the king’s confidence, apostasy was the ultimate pledge of loyalty: it cut the tie to Christian Rome’s religion, aligned the march with the court, and distinguished its holder from every rival who had refused. Nor was Varsken an isolated case — the Armenian histories of the period are structured around the division of the nobility into the faithful and the urac’ealkʿ, “apostates,” of whom Vasak of Siunik, the villain of Ełishē’s history, is the archetype (Ełishē, trans. Thomson, 1982; Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, trans. Thomson, 1991).

The costs were of another order, and the Martyrdom is our best evidence of how they were felt. Apostasy dishonored a house before the church and the Christian nobility; it imperiled the apostate’s soul in the eyes of his own family; and it obliged him — since the court expected converts to convert their households — to make war on the faith of his own wife and children (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of Shushanik, on Varsken’s declared intent to convert his family; trans. Lang, 1976). The passion of Shushanik is precisely the collision of these two economies: the husband’s political calculus and the wife’s refusal to price her faith at all. And the sequel proved that the political calculus could fail even on its own terms: Varsken’s apostasy and his murder of a Mamikonian princess so outraged the Christian Caucasus that the king of Kartli, Vakhtang Gorgasali, put him to death in 482 and raised the revolt that Łazar Pʿarpecʿi records (Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, trans. Thomson, 1991, pt. III; see Veneration and the Political Sequel, and the sibling collection St. Vakhtang Gorgasali).

A World Attested by Its Own Text

Finally, the historiographical point that governs this collection: nearly everything just narrated about the texture of this world — the lure of the court, the fire-religion as a career, the mixed Armeno-Georgian church of the march, the presence of a Persian party at a Caucasian court — is attested not only by the Armenian historians but by the Martyrdom of Shushanik itself, a text written at Tsurtavi within a decade of the events by a participant (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of Shushanik, c. 476–483; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42, on the text’s substantial fifth-century content). This is why the sibling Vakhtang collection uses the Martyrdom as its independent window on fifth-century Kartli (see the Vakhtang source-methodology): rare among hagiographies, it is itself a primary source for its age, and the world it presupposes is corroborated at every point where the Armenian histories can check it (Thomson, trans., Ełishē, 1982; Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, 1991).

References

Ełishē. History of Vardan and the Armenian War. Trans. Robert W. Thomson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. (Yazdgird II’s conversion policy; the 449–451 revolt; Avarayr, 26 May 451; the apostate party.)
Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. Trans. Robert W. Thomson. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. (The fifth-century Persian-Armenian crisis; Arshusha of Gugark and the Mamikonian wards; Peroz’s reign; Vakhtang’s killing of Varsken and the 482 revolt.)
Jakob Tsurtaveli. The Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik (c. 476–483). Condensed English trans. in D. M. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956; 2nd rev. ed. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (The Tsurtavi court; the apostasy and its rewards; the mixed Armeno-Georgian milieu.)
Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The vitaxae/pitiakhshes of Gogarene; the Mihranid house of Gugark; Varsken’s dates 470–482; the political structures of Christian Caucasia.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes: Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (The Iranian texture of fifth-century Kartli; Tsurtavi’s bicultural milieu.)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (P. 42 on the Martyrdom’s substantial fifth-century content.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Ch. 1: early Kartli between the empires.)
Rufinus of Aquileia. Historia ecclesiastica 10.11. (The near-contemporary notice of Iberia’s conversion.)