Crowned in Her Father’s Lifetime

Having no son, George III took the extraordinary step of crowning his daughter Tamar as co-ruler in his own lifetime, c. 1178, to secure a succession that a woman’s claim made vulnerable. When he died in 1184 Tamar was crowned a second time as sole monarch — and the Georgian sources styled her not queen but mepe, “king.” This file examines the coronation, the precedent, and the problem of a woman on the Georgian throne.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Problem of the Succession

George III’s dynastic position was, by the 1170s, both strong and precarious. He had eliminated the rival line descended from his elder brother — his nephew Demna had been blinded, castrated, and killed after a failed revolt (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; see The Bagrationi Inheritance) — but he had produced no son. His heir was his daughter Tamar, and in a kingdom whose great feudal families were quick to exploit any weakness in the crown, the accession of a woman was an obvious opening for challenge. A woman had never ruled Georgia in her own right; there was no settled precedent for it, and the nobility could be expected to test any such succession (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 3; Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on the novelty of a female sovereign).

George’s solution was to pre-empt the challenge by making the succession a fact while he still lived to enforce it.

The Coronation as Co-Ruler, c. 1178

George III had Tamar crowned as co-ruler, associating her with himself on the throne during his own reign, in an act usually dated to c. 1178 (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3; the Tamar of Georgia entry gives 1178 for the co-coronation). The purpose was transparent and is so described by the historians: by crowning his heir before his death, George bound the nobility to a fait accompli, so that at his death there would be no vacancy to contest but a reigning sovereign already installed and consecrated (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on coronation as legitimation).

[Disputed: the exact date of the co-coronation is not firmly fixed. It is most often given as c. 1178, but the sources allow a slightly wider window in the later 1170s; the year is a scholarly estimate, not a documented date (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; the reign-length figures in the near-contemporary “Histories” are panegyric and imprecise — see Methodology).]

The medieval Georgian tradition would later dramatize the logic of this succession in a famous line attributed to the poet Rustaveli, applied to Tamar’s accession: “A lion’s cub is of the same worth, whether female or male” — the idea that royal blood, not sex, made the sovereign (Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, trans. Wardrop, 1912; see Shota Rustaveli and the Panther’s Skin). Whether or not the line was written with Tamar in view, it captures exactly the claim George III’s coronation was meant to enforce.

Sole Rule from 1184 — and a Second Coronation

George III died in 1184, and Tamar succeeded as sole monarch. Significantly, she was crowned a second time — at the cathedral of Gelati near Kutaisi, the Bagrationi dynastic centre — a repeat consecration that underlined both the legitimacy of her rule and, implicitly, that the first coronation as co-ruler had not been felt to settle the matter beyond dispute (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the 1184 accession and second coronation; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3). The need for a second coronation, and the aristocratic pressures that surfaced immediately upon her sole accession, show that George’s precautions had reduced but not removed the vulnerability of a woman’s claim (see The Queen and the Nobles).

A Woman Styled “King”

The most telling sign of how Tamar’s sovereignty was understood is the title the Georgian sources give her. She is called not dedopali — “queen,” the ordinary word for a female sovereign or a king’s consort — but mepe, “king,” and in the fullest form mepeta mepe, “king of kings” (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on the mepe styling; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). Antony Eastmond, whose study of Tamar’s surviving portraits is the standard treatment, argues that the male royal title, and the visual conventions of male kingship in her images, were the means by which a culture with no template for a female sovereign made her rule intelligible and legitimate — investing her with the office of king while acknowledging, in her portraits’ idealized female features, that the king was a woman (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on the “unparalleled combination of Tamar’s sex and rank”; see The Cave City of Vardzia for the Vardzia portrait).

This is not a modern curiosity but a contemporary theological-political statement: kingship in the Bagrationi understanding was a divinely conferred office, and to call Tamar mepe was to say that the office had come to rest, fully and without diminution, on a woman. The styling would remain central to how she was remembered — and it is one of the points at which the honest reader must resist flattening a genuinely strange and specific medieval reality into a familiar modern one (see The Queen and the Legend).

References

Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The co-coronation c. 1178; the 1184 accession and second coronation at Gelati; the mepe styling.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (George III’s securing of the succession; the accession of 1184.)
Eastmond, Antony. Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. (The novelty of a female sovereign; the male royal title and imagery as legitimation; “the unparalleled combination of Tamar’s sex and rank.”)
Rustaveli, Shota. The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. Trans. Marjory Scott Wardrop. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1912. (The “lion’s cub” line applied to female succession.)
Tamar of Georgia, encyclopedic entry (used to locate the 1178 co-coronation date and the range around it).