The Bagrationi Inheritance

Tamar was the fourth-generation heir of St. David the Builder, born into the Bagrationi dynasty at the height of a Georgian Golden Age that her great-grandfather had begun and her father George III had carried on. This file sets out the dynasty, the united kingdom she inherited, and the reign of her father — the immediate source, the medieval historians say, of everything she accomplished.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Bagrationi Dynasty

Tamar belonged to the Bagrationi (Bagratid), the royal house that had ruled parts of the Georgian lands since the early Middle Ages and that would, in one branch or another, reign until the Russian annexation of 1801. The dynasty cultivated a sacred genealogy: the Bagrationi claimed descent from the biblical King David and, through him, a kinship with the house of Christ — a claim of divinely sanctioned kingship that the medieval Georgian historians took entirely seriously and that colours the way Tamar’s own sovereignty is described (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 2, on the Bagrationi and their Davidic ideology; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the dynasty’s self-presentation; Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963, on the Bagratid genealogies). The historical origins of the family lie in the Armeno-Georgian nobility of the early medieval Caucasus, and the Georgian Bagrationi rose to unify the kingdoms of the region under Bagrat III (r. c. 1008–1014), the first king of a substantially united Georgia (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 2; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003).

The relevant point for Tamar is that she was born a Bagrationi at the summit of the dynasty’s fortunes, heir to a kingship that understood itself as both ancient and God-given — a self-understanding that would matter greatly when the throne passed, for the first time, to a woman.

The Golden Age She Inherited: David the Builder

The kingdom Tamar would rule was, in its consolidated and ascendant form, largely the creation of her great-grandfather, St. David IV Aghmashenebeli — “the Builder” (r. 1089–1125). David inherited at sixteen a land shattered by the Seljuk Turks and left it the leading Christian power of the Caucasus: he rebuilt the state and the army, resettled the Qipchaqs to man a standing force, reformed the Georgian Church at the Council of Ruisi–Urbnisi (1103), broke the Seljuk coalition at the Battle of Didgori (1121), took Tbilisi in 1122, and founded the Monastery and Academy of Gelati (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on David’s reign; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3; see St. David the Builder). It is no exaggeration, and it is the explicit judgement of modern scholarship, that Tamar’s achievements rested most immediately on the reforms and the state David had built: the standing army, the reformed and loyal church, the administrative apparatus, and the ideology of a united, Christian, Bagrationi Georgia were all in place before she was born (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, on David as the foundation of the Golden Age).

David the Builder is Tamar’s great-grandfather in the direct male line: David IV → Demetrius I → George III → Tamar (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963, on the Bagrationi succession; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The two generations between them — Demetrius I (r. 1125–1156) and the disputed, violent successions that followed — are the immediate dynastic background to her father’s reign.

Her Father, George III

Tamar’s father was George III (Giorgi III, r. 1156–1184), son of Demetrius I. His reign is the crucial bridge between David’s foundation and Tamar’s zenith, and it was neither smooth nor gentle. George came to the throne amid the bitter succession struggles of the mid-twelfth century, and he secured it by hard measures. The central episode — decisive both for his reign and, indirectly, for Tamar’s later throne — was the revolt mounted on behalf of his nephew Demna (Demetrius), the son of George’s elder brother David V, whom a faction of the nobility regarded as the rightful king. George crushed the rising; Demna was captured, blinded, and castrated, and died of his injuries (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on George III and the Demna revolt; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3). This act — the mutilation of a rival claimant — is a fact worth holding onto, because it is sometimes loosely transferred to Tamar herself; it belongs to her father (see A Holy Queen for that correction).

George III’s reign was also one of expansion and of assertive royal power. He campaigned against the Seljuk emirates, took and briefly held cities such as Ani and Dvin, and worked to curb the great feudal families in favour of a service nobility loyal to the crown (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3). Having eliminated his rivals, he had no son, and the succession fell to his daughter — a prospect that made the ordinary Bagrationi anxieties about legitimacy far sharper.

Tamar’s Birth and Parentage

Tamar was the daughter of George III and his consort Burdukhan, a princess of the Alans (Ossetians) of the north Caucasus — so that Tamar was, on her mother’s side, half-Alan, a fact that would later shape her second marriage to the Alan prince David Soslan (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994). Her exact birth-year is not recorded and is given differently in the scholarship.

[Disputed: Tamar’s birth is dated only approximately. The devotional and older literature commonly gives c. 1160; modern reference works and historians more often give c. 1166, and the year cannot be fixed from any contemporary document (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, and the Tamar of Georgia entry surveying the estimates). This collection gives her dates as c. 1160/1166 – 1213 and treats the birth-year as unrecoverable rather than settled.]

What the sources make clear is the shape of her position at birth: the only surviving child and heir of a king who had killed off the rival line, born into a dynasty that claimed Davidic and divine kingship, at the height of a Golden Age two generations in the building. Everything in her reign begins from that inheritance — and from the unprecedented problem of a woman being asked to carry it.

See Also

• Crowned in Her Father’s Lifetime — how George III secured that inheritance for a daughter
• The Queen and the Nobles — the aristocratic challenge to the inheritance
• St. David the Builder — the great-grandfather and the Golden Age’s architect
• The Empire at Its Zenith — the height to which Tamar carried the inheritance

References

• Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The Bagrationi dynasty and Davidic ideology; David IV as the foundation; George III and the Demna revolt.)
• Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (George III’s reign, the mutilation of Demna, Tamar’s parentage and disputed birth-year.)
• Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The Bagrationi genealogies and the David IV → Demetrius I → George III → Tamar succession.)
• Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (The dynasty’s self-presentation and the sources.)
• Tamar of Georgia, encyclopedic entry surveying the birth-year estimates (c. 1160 / c. 1166) — used to locate the range, not as a terminal citation.