Marriage into the House of Gugark

Shushanik’s marriage to Varsken, heir of the Mihranid pitiakhshes of Gugark, sealed an existing bond between his house and hers: his father Arshusha II had taken the orphaned Mamikonian boys under his protection after Avarayr. This file treats the marriage, the court at Tsurtavi, her children — whose conversion to Zoroastrianism the Martyrdom records as her sharpest grief — her title of “queen” (dedopali), and the portrait of her piety that her confessor drew.

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

An Alliance Before a Marriage

The house Shushanik married into was, by the standards of the Caucasus, nearly royal. The pitiakhshes (vitaxae) of Gugark, of the Iranian-descended Mihranid line, ruled the great march between Armenia and Kartli from their seat at Tsurtavi, ranking immediately below the kings and intermarrying with the highest nobility of both lands (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963, on the vitaxae of Gogarene and their dynasty). Varsken’s father, the pitiakhsh Arshusha II, was a Christian and a friend of the Mamikonians in their worst hour: Łazar Pʿarpecʿi records that after the defeat of 451, Arshusha secured from the Persian court the custody of the young sons of Hmayeak Mamikonian — Vardan’s brother, killed in the same war — and brought them up in his own domain; among those wards was Vahan Mamikonian, the future leader of the 482–484 revolt (Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, History, trans. Thomson, 1991). Shushanik’s marriage to Arshusha’s heir thus joined two houses already bound by protection and gratitude: the martyr’s daughter came to a court where her own cousins had been raised (Toumanoff, Studies, 1963; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the Gugark–Mamikonian nexus).

No source dates the wedding. It must fall in the 450s or early 460s — her children were old enough by the ordeal’s outbreak (466–469; see below) to be objects of conversion, and one daughter was near marriageable age by its end — but the year, the place, and the circumstances are unrecorded [Disputed: all reconstructions of the marriage date are back-computations from the children’s apparent ages in the Martyrdom; no source gives a date]. What the Martyrdom does attest is the marriage’s initial normality: Shushanik was the pitiakhsh’s lady, mistress of the palace at Tsurtavi, mother of his children, and — in the text’s constant designation — dedopali, “queen” (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik, trans. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976).

“Queen” — the Title and Its Sense

Varsken was not a king, and the title “queen” in the work’s very name has sometimes puzzled readers. The usage is the text’s own: Georgian dedopali served for the consorts of kings and of the greatest viceregal lords alike, and the pitiakhshate of Gugark was precisely such a quasi-royal march (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the court terminology of the Martyrdom and its Iranian resonances; Toumanoff, Studies, 1963, on the vitaxae’s standing “below the king, above the princes”). The Church’s liturgical memory follows the text: she is “the holy queen Shushanik” (Georgian tradition; Machitadze, The Lives of the Georgian Saints, 2006) — and the title, once the passion begins, becomes deliberately ironic in Jakob’s hands: the queen in rags and fetters is the Martyrdom’s central image, a Christian inversion of rank that the author fully intends (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976).

One correction to the received Life must be entered here. The modern synaxarial account translated in Machitadze calls Varsken “ruler of Hereti,” the province of far southeastern Georgia [Corrected: the fifth-century sources and the scholarship place Varsken as pitiakhsh of Gugark, seated at Tsurtavi in Kvemo Kartli — not Hereti. The Martyrdom is set at Tsurtavi; Toumanoff (Studies, 1963) and the standard histories (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, ch. 2) give Gugark. The “Hereti” of the received Life appears to be a later geographic slip or a loose extension from Varsken’s Persian-granted authority toward Albania (on which see Varsken’s Apostasy at Ctesiphon); this collection follows the primary source and the scholarship].

The Children

The Martyrdom attests children of the marriage without giving a full census; the received Georgian Life counts four (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, 2006), and the scholarship generally speaks of three sons and a daughter [Disputed: the number and names of the children — the fifth-century text mentions her sons and her daughter in the course of the narrative without enumerating them; “four children” is the received Life’s figure; the names are not preserved in the early text]. Their role in the story is, however, among its most painful attested elements: Varsken, true to his undertaking at Ctesiphon, had the children brought up as Zoroastrians, and Jakob records Shushanik’s grief over their apostasy as a wound sharper than her own sufferings — in her cell she mourned them as lost, and refused the consolation that they might return (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; the scene is among those carried in both recensions, cf. Passion, Armenian version, trans. Maksoudian, 1997). The detail is precious to the historian precisely because it resists hagiographic smoothing: a tidier legend would have saved the children for the faith. The Martyrdom leaves them converted, and the martyr’s family divided — the apostasy demanded of her accomplished, instead, in her children (per §3.5, reported as the source’s account; on the source’s honesty as an index of proximity, see What an Eyewitness Account Gives).

The household the text draws around her also includes her husband’s brother Jojik and his wife — figures of conflicted loyalty who intercede for her, visit her against Varsken’s will, and receive her final blessings and farewells (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; the Armenian version likewise gives Jojik a mediating role, trans. Maksoudian, 1997). Jojik’s fidelity, set against his brother’s apostasy, gives the narrative its moral spectrum: the same house, the same pressures, two answers.

Her Piety, as the Martyrdom Depicts It

Everything we know of Shushanik’s religious life comes from her confessor, and per the repository’s rule (§3.5) it is reported here as his portrait — an eyewitness’s portrait, but a portrait with a martyrology’s purpose. Jakob depicts a piety that was already ascetic before the persecution gave it a theater: constancy in prayer and fasting, devotion to the Psalter, attachment to the church and its clergy, generosity to the poor (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; Machitadze, Lives, 2006, transmitting the same portrait). The Gospel-book she kept with her, and the church at hand to which she first fled, are fixtures of the narrative’s staging. Once the ordeal begins, these traits intensify into the confessor’s regimen the passion describes — unbroken fasts, night-prayer, the refusal of every comfort sent from the palace (see The Six Years in the Fortress).

Two features of the portrait deserve the historian’s notice. First, its specificity: Jakob writes of a woman he heard in confession and attended in prison, and the texture — her sharp answers, her irony with her tormentor’s messengers, her exhaustion — exceeds the generic martyr-heroine of later hagiography (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44, on the text’s vivid characterization; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003, on the work’s early realism against the later Lives). Second, its restraint about miracles: the living Shushanik of the text works no wonders; the sick are healed at her prayer in the prison years, as the text attests, but the narrative’s center is endurance, not thaumaturgy (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976). Both features bear on the source-critical judgment of Section 08: this is what near-contemporary hagiography looks like, and the contrast with the semi-epic later Lives of the Georgian corpus is instructive (see Methodology).

The Marriage as the Story’s Engine

The Martyrdom is, formally, the story of a marriage destroyed by apostasy. Its author understands — and makes his readers understand — that Varsken’s conversion transformed the legal and personal architecture of Shushanik’s life: her husband became her persecutor with the state’s blessing; her children became instruments against her; her palace became the anteroom of her prison. Her recorded declaration at the news of his apostasy — in the received rendering, “As you have renounced your Creator, so I am renouncing you” (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, 2006, translating the tradition’s form of her words; the fifth-century text has her quit the palace in mourning at the news — Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976) — states the theology the whole text enacts: the marriage bond, for her, was nested inside the baptismal bond, and could not survive its repudiation. The next section follows that rupture step by step.

References

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; dedopali; the children’s conversion and her grief; Jojik; the portrait of her piety.)
The Passion of Saint Shushanik (Armenian version), trans. Krikor Maksoudian, preliminary version in Sion (1997); online at attalus.org/armenian. (The parallel recension: Jojik, the family scenes.)
Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. Trans. Robert W. Thomson. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. (Arshusha II’s guardianship of the Mamikonian children; the Gugark–Mamikonian bond.)
Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The Mihranid pitiakhshes of Gugark; their rank and marriages; Varsken’s dates.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (Court terminology and Iranian texture of the Martyrdom; Tsurtavi.) — and Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (The early realism of the text.)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (42–44: characterization and milieu.) — and Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (Ch. 2: Varsken, Gugark, and the crisis.)
Machitadze, Archpriest Zakaria. The Lives of the Georgian Saints. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006. (The received Life: four children; “As you have renounced your Creator…”; the “Hereti” designation corrected above.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, this repository. (Attestation-pinning of the confessor’s portrait.)