Varsken’s Apostasy at Ctesiphon

The Martyrdom opens with the act that sets everything in motion: Varsken, pitiakhsh of Gugark, went up to the court of the shahanshah Peroz and exchanged Christianity for Zoroastrianism — receiving in return the king’s favor, a Persian royal bride, and enlarged authority, and undertaking to convert his own wife and children. This file reports the apostasy as the source narrates it, weighs its attested rewards, and sets out the chronological problem: the text’s own “eighth year of Peroz” (466/467) against Toumanoff’s c. 470.

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

The Journey and the Conversion

Jakob Tsurtaveli begins his narrative with a date and a departure: in the eighth year of the Persian king, Varsken the pitiakhsh went up to the royal court at Ctesiphon (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik, opening; trans. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976). He went as the heir and successor of a Christian house — his father Arshusha II had been a pillar of Caucasian Christianity (Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, trans. Thomson, 1991; see Marriage into the House of Gugark) — and he returned an apostate. Before Peroz, the Martyrdom recounts, Varsken renounced Christ and professed the religion of the Magi; the Armenian recension phrases it with the bluntness of the tradition: he “forsook Christ in order to please the king of Persia” (The Passion of Saint Shushanik, Armenian version, trans. Maksoudian, 1997, at attalus.org). Both recensions agree on the essential structure: the apostasy was voluntary, calculated, and aimed at royal favor — not extracted by torture, as in the martyr-acts of the persecutions, but offered as the price of advancement (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; on the type, Ełishē’s apostate lords, trans. Thomson, 1982).

The rewards were delivered. The scholarship, following the sources, itemizes them: confirmation in the pitiakhshate he had inherited (Toumanoff dates his tenure 470–482: Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963); the hand of a daughter of Peroz in marriage — a Sasanian royal bride, the most spectacular honor available to a Caucasian dynast — and, with her, viceregal authority extending toward Caucasian Albania (Toumanoff, Studies, 1963; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the Iranian-imperial framework of these grants; the Martyrdom itself attests the Persian marriage and the king’s favor). The apostasy, in other words, worked — as policy. The pitiakhsh returned to Tsurtavi as the shahanshah’s son-in-law, the most conspicuously rewarded convert of his generation, bound to the court by religion and marriage at once (see Kartli and Armenia under Persia on the general economy of such conversions).

The Undertaking Against His Household

The Martyrdom attests one further element of the bargain, and it is the hinge of the whole story: Varsken undertook to convert his household — his wife and his children — to the religion of the Magi (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; Armenian version, trans. Maksoudian, 1997: he “forced Saint Shushan to convert” — i.e., set himself to force her). The undertaking was structurally necessary, not gratuitous cruelty: a convert whose own palace remained Christian was no convert at all in the court’s eyes, and the conversion of Vardan Mamikonian’s daughter would have been a trophy of imperial religious policy worth more than a province (on the symbolic stakes, see Daughter of Vardan Mamikonian; Rapp, Sasanian World, 2014). Jakob presents the resolve as formed at Ctesiphon and announced in advance: word of the apostasy and of the intent behind it reached Tsurtavi before the pitiakhsh did — the narrative device on which the drama of Shushanik’s preemptive refusal turns (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; see The Refusal and the First Violence).

The Dating Problem

When did this happen? The evidence divides, and per §4.2 the positions are reported without adjudication.

[Disputed: the date of Varsken’s apostasy. (a) The text’s own chronology: the Martyrdom opens in “the eighth year” of the Persian king — Peroz acceded in 459, so the eighth regnal year is 466/467; Maksoudian’s introduction to the Armenian version states the computation plainly: “Vazgen’s apostasy took place in the eighth regnal year of the Iranian King of Kings Peroz, which corresponds to AD 466” (Maksoudian, trans., Passion of Saint Shushanik, introduction, 1997). On this reckoning the whole ordeal (seven years to her death; see The Passion) runs c. 466/467–474. (b) The prosopographic chronology: Toumanoff, reconstructing the succession of the vitaxae, dates Varsken’s tenure of the pitiakhshate 470–482 and places the journey to Ctesiphon at his accession, c. 470 (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963); on this reckoning the ordeal runs c. 469/470–475/476, and the conventional death-year 475 follows. The two schemes cannot both be exact; the discrepancy — roughly three years — is the direct cause of the 474–476 range for Shushanik’s death found across the scholarship, and this collection reports both anchors wherever a date depends on them.] The disagreement should not be overread: both schemes agree on the reign (Peroz), the sequence (apostasy → refusal → seven-year ordeal → death on 17 October), and the political sequel (Varsken’s execution in 482, externally fixed by Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, trans. Thomson, 1991). It is the absolute calibration, not the story, that floats.

The Apostate as the Text Draws Him

Jakob’s Varsken is one of the most closely observed villains in early hagiography, and the observation is worth attention because the author knew him personally — Jakob was a priest of the Tsurtavi court (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44, on the author’s position and the portrait’s vividness). The Varsken of the Martyrdom is not a monster of the persecutions’ type but a recognizably political man: concerned above all with how his wife’s defiance looks — to the court, to his Persian father-in-law, to his own nobility; alternately violent and conciliatory; sending intermediaries, offering restorations, willing to tolerate her obstinacy in private if she will only keep up appearances (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976). The savagery, when it comes, is the savagery of humiliated calculation. Per §3.5 this is the source’s characterization, by an author who was the victim’s confessor and partisan — the reader should assume the portrait is hostile, and may still judge it credible precisely because its villain is so unlike the stock tyrant of legend (on this argument, see What an Eyewitness Account Gives; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003, on the text’s early realism).

One more feature of the account bears on its credibility: the Martyrdom does not claim the apostasy was insincere or coerced, nor does it grant Varsken a deathbed remorse — the standard consolations of later hagiography are absent. He apostatizes for advantage, persecutes to protect his position, and passes out of the text unrepentant; his punishment belongs to history, not to the narrative (Vakhtang Gorgasali’s execution of him in 482 — Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, trans. Thomson, 1991 — lies beyond the text’s horizon, which is part of the argument for its early date; see The Martyrdom of Shushanik).

The Orthodox Reading, Soberly

From within the Church (§4.1), Varsken’s act is what the tradition calls it: apostasy — the deliberate exchange of Christ for advantage — and Shushanik’s refusal is its exact confessional counterpart, the preference of Christ over every advantage, every bond, and finally over life. But the collection registers the historical nuance alongside the dogmatic clarity: the fifth-century Caucasus put this choice to its nobility structurally, generation after generation, and the same house could produce an Arshusha who sheltered the confessors, a Varsken who apostatized, and a Jojik who kept the faith quietly and interceded for the martyr (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976; Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, trans. Thomson, 1991). The Martyrdom is the story of the one refusal that answered the era’s whole economy of apostasy — which is why, within a decade, it was already literature.

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 opening: the journey, the apostasy, the Persian marriage, the undertaking against the household; the portrait of Varsken.)
The Passion of Saint Shushanik (Armenian version), trans. Krikor Maksoudian, preliminary version in Sion (1997); online at attalus.org/armenian, with introduction. (The apostasy “to please the king of Persia”; the eighth-year-of-Peroz computation = AD 466.)
Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (Varsken’s tenure 470–482; the rewards of conversion: the royal bride, the Albanian authority.)
Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. Trans. Robert W. Thomson. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. (Arshusha II; Varsken’s execution by Vakhtang, 482.)
Ełishē. History of Vardan and the Armenian War. Trans. Robert W. Thomson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. (The type of the apostate lord under Persian pressure.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (The Iranian-imperial framework of Varsken’s rewards; the text’s realism.) — and Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography. Louvain: Peeters, 2003.
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (42–44: the author’s position at court; the characterization.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, §4.1–4.2, this repository.