The Refusal and the First Violence

When word of Varsken’s apostasy reached Tsurtavi ahead of him, Shushanik tore off her ornaments, quit the palace, and took refuge in a small house by the church — a public repudiation delivered before her husband was home to prevent it. This file follows the Martyrdom‘s narrative of the confrontation that followed: the summons back to the palace, the banquet scene, the first savage beating, and the chaining — reported throughout as the near-contemporary source’s account, per §3.5, with its most famous details identified as such.

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

The News and the Withdrawal

Jakob Tsurtaveli, who tells us he was present in these days, narrates the arrival of the news as the story’s first dramatic beat: messengers preceded the pitiakhsh, and Tsurtavi learned — the queen learned — that its lord was returning a Zoroastrian, resolved to make Zoroastrians of his family (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik, trans. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976). Shushanik’s response was immediate, physical, and public. The Martyrdom describes her casting herself down in grief, tearing her garments in ritual mourning — mourning, pointedly, for a husband now dead to her in his baptism — and abandoning the palace with her children, taking refuge in a humble house near the church (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; the Armenian recension carries the same sequence, Passion, trans. Maksoudian, 1997). The received tradition preserves her declaration in the form: “As you have renounced your Creator, so I am renouncing you” (Machitadze, The Lives of the Georgian Saints, 2006, translating the received Georgian Life; the fifth-century text conveys the same repudiation in narrative and speech — per §3.5 the lapidary sentence should be cited as the tradition’s crystallization of the source’s scene rather than as a verbatim fifth-century quotation).

The historian should pause on what this withdrawal was. It was not flight — she moved a few hundred paces, to a building in her husband’s own seat — but a formal, visible severance: the pitiakhsh’s wife refusing his roof, his table, and his bed, in advance, on the sole ground of his apostasy. In the honor-culture of the Caucasian nobility this was the most damaging answer available to her, converting his triumphant homecoming into a public humiliation before his court, his clergy, and — since everything at Tsurtavi was reported — before the Persian court as well (on the political texture, Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014; Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963). Jakob understands this perfectly; his narrative of the ensuing violence is a study in the rage of a calculating man whose calculation has been spoiled (see Varsken’s Apostasy at Ctesiphon).

The Summons and the Banquet

Varsken’s first instruments were emissaries, not blows. The Martyrdom records a sequence of embassies to the queen’s refuge — court notables, then his brother Jojik and Jojik’s wife — pressing her to return to the palace, dine with her husband, and resume at least the appearances of the marriage (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976). The text’s rendering of these negotiations is among its most vivid strata: Shushanik answers with a mixture of grief and mordant irony, yielding at last — on the intercessors’ insistence and against her own foreboding — to appear at a palace banquet, while refusing the substance of what her presence was meant to signal (ibid.; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44, on the dialogue’s vividness).

The banquet is the Martyrdom‘s first scene of violence, and its details entered Georgian memory permanently. Pressed at table to eat and drink with the company — to perform, publicly, the restored wife — Shushanik refused; and Varsken, his humiliation now complete before witnesses, exploded. The text describes him seizing her, beating her savagely about the face and body, dragging her by the hair, kicking her, and leaving her bloodied and half-dead; she was then fettered and confined (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; the Armenian recension preserves the assault with an implement — a club or rod — and her being left “half dead,” Passion, trans. Maksoudian, 1997) [Disputed: the instrument and particulars of the first assault vary between the recensions and the retellings — the Georgian text’s banquet scene and the Armenian version’s club, with modern summaries adding circumstantial specifics (fractured ribs, an iron poker) that go beyond the early texts; this collection reports the assault’s fact, setting, and severity, which the recensions agree on, and leaves the instrument unspecified]. Jojik’s intervention — wresting his brother off the queen — is part of the scene in the tradition, and consistent with his mediating role throughout the text (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976).

Per §3.5, a word on evidentiary standing. This scene is not a documented court record; it is the account of the victim’s confessor, writing within a decade for a community that included eyewitnesses. That is both its strength — proximity, named author, checkable audience — and its character: the scene is constructed, like all passion-narratives, to display confession and cruelty. The collection reports it as the source’s account, and notes that its realism (the negotiations, the family’s divided loyalties, the drunken banquet, the political shame driving the rage) is precisely what distinguishes it from the stylized tribunal scenes of later legend (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003; see What an Eyewitness Account Gives).

From Palace to Prison

The aftermath of the banquet, in the Martyrdom‘s telling, is a tightening spiral. Shushanik, beaten and chained, was held first within the palace precincts; the text describes the fetters, the sealed doors, and the queen’s refusal of medical care and of every mitigation offered on condition of compliance (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976). Varsken’s fury extended to the sacred persons and objects around her: the narrative records his violence toward the clergy who sheltered and supported her — the author himself moves through these scenes at real risk — and his seizure of her Gospel-book, details that make the text, among other things, a rare picture of a fifth-century domestic church under persecution (ibid.; Rayfield, Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44). After a further period — the text marks the rhythm of the church year through these passages, one of the features that lends its chronology credibility — she was transferred to the fortress of Tsurtavi, to the cell where the six attested years of her imprisonment were spent (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; see The Six Years in the Fortress).

Two details of this transition are worth fixing, because the later tradition elaborated both. First, the Martyrdom attests that Varsken alternated coercion with offers of full restoration — rank, wealth, the palace — throughout, so that the imprisonment was, at every point, escapable at the price of conformity; the queen’s continued presence in the cell was a continuously renewed refusal, which is the text’s theology of martyrdom in a single image (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976). Second, the children: the text records their removal from her and their upbringing in their father’s new religion, and her grief over it — the persecution’s one uncontested victory (ibid.; see Marriage into the House of Gugark).

The Shape of the Refusal

Read as the tradition reads it — and as this repository, from within the Church, reads it (§4.1) — Shushanik’s refusal has a precise dogmatic shape. She was not asked to deny Christ under a persecutor’s tribunal; she was asked to accommodate an apostate’s convenience: to keep her faith privately, if she liked, while restoring the public forms of the marriage. Her refusal of exactly that bargain — appearances without substance — is what the Martyrdom holds up: the confession that faith is not an interior preference but a public fidelity, unpurchasable by any domestic peace (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976). It is the same refusal the Church honors in the neo-martyrs under Islam and in St. Ketevan of Georgia under the Safavids — the long Georgian line of which Shushanik is the first recorded instance (see Women Martyrs and Assessment).

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 mourning and withdrawal; the embassies and Jojik; the banquet beating; the fetters; the offers of restoration; the children; the church-year rhythm.)
The Passion of Saint Shushanik (Armenian version), trans. Krikor Maksoudian, preliminary version in Sion (1997); online at attalus.org/armenian. (The parallel recension: the assault, “half dead”; Jojik’s role.)
Machitadze, Archpriest Zakaria. The Lives of the Georgian Saints. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006. (The received Life; the crystallized declaration “As you have renounced your Creator, so I am renouncing you.”)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (42–44: the dialogue, the banquet scene, the Gospel-book.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (The honor-political texture of the withdrawal.) — and Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (The early realism against later stylization.)
Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The court world of the pitiakhshate.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, this repository. (Attestation-pinning; the handling of the received quotation.)