The Queen and the Nobles

Tamar’s sole accession in 1184 opened the crown to aristocratic pressure: a movement to constrain royal power, led by the treasury official Qutlu Arslan, and the general leverage of great feudal families over a young female sovereign. This file examines the early challenges to her rule, the Qutlu Arslan affair, the councils, and the churchmen and officials whose backing let Tamar convert an inherited throne into a governed kingdom.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Vulnerability of a New and Female Reign

When George III died in 1184 and Tamar became sole monarch, the aristocracy that his hard hand had held in check saw its opportunity. A young woman newly on the throne, ruling a kingdom whose great families commanded lands and armies of their own, was in a structurally weak position, and the early years of her reign are, in the accounts of both the near-contemporary “Histories” and modern scholarship, a period in which Tamar had to negotiate, concede, and eventually reassert royal authority against noble pressure (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 3). One early sign of the pressure was the removal of the Catholicos-patriarch Michael, who had accumulated great political power, and the reshuffling of high offices as competing factions maneuvered around the new sovereign (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the early-reign politics).

It is important to read this period without either of two distortions. The panegyric “Histories” present Tamar’s every act as wise and providential, smoothing the real conflicts into a story of serene triumph; a cynical reading, conversely, would make her a figurehead managed by her nobles. The soberer scholarly picture is of a genuine and difficult political struggle in which Tamar, over the first years of her reign, established that she — and not a magnate faction — would rule (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

The Qutlu Arslan Affair

The sharpest early test, and the one most discussed, was the movement associated with Qutlu Arslan, a high treasury official who led a faction of nobles and officials seeking to institutionalize limits on the crown. According to the account that reaches us, Qutlu Arslan’s party proposed the creation of a council (sometimes described as a karavi, a separate deliberative body or “tent”) that would take to itself the power to decide state affairs — to grant and to withhold — leaving the sovereign to ratify rather than to rule. Modern historians have described the proposal, with some anachronism, as a bid for a kind of “feudal constitutionalism,” an attempt to convert the royal autocracy into something closer to an aristocratic oligarchy with the crown as its executive (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3, using the “feudal constitutionalism” framing; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the Qutlu Arslan movement).

Tamar’s response, as the sources describe it, was firm but restrained. She had Qutlu Arslan arrested; when his supporters rallied and threatened to take up arms for his release, she did not answer force with force but sent respected intermediaries to negotiate, and the movement was defused — its members brought back into submission without a bloodbath, and the attempt to constrain the crown abandoned (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, on the arrest and the negotiated resolution; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The episode is significant in two ways: it shows Tamar decisively refusing to let the crown be captured, and it shows her doing so — at least as the tradition presents it — by arrest and negotiation rather than by the mutilations and executions that had marked her father’s securing of power (contrast the Demna affair, The Bagrationi Inheritance; on the clemency tradition and its limits, see A Holy Queen).

[Disputed: the exact character and aims of the Qutlu Arslan movement are known only through the pro-Tamar “Histories” and are variously interpreted. The “feudal constitutionalism” reading (Soviet and later historians) treats it as a genuine constitutional-institutional demand; other scholars are more cautious, seeing a factional bid for office and influence rather than a program of principled limitation of the crown. The sources are panegyric and hostile to the movement; its own case does not survive in its own words (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).]

The Councils and the Backing of the Church

Tamar governed with, and was legitimated by, councils — assemblies of the higher nobility and the senior clergy — and her relationship with the church hierarchy was central to her consolidation of power. The near-contemporary tradition presents her convening a church council at her accession and charging the assembled bishops to reform abuses and to “judge according to righteousness, affirming good and condemning evil” — a scene that, whatever its precise historicity, expresses the alliance between the crown and a reforming episcopate that was one of Tamar’s chief supports (OCA, Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia, synaxarion; on the reforming councils in the David-to-Tamar era, see The Patron of the Church). The Georgian Church, reformed and bound to the crown since David the Builder’s Council of Ruisi–Urbnisi in 1103, was a natural ally of royal authority against an over-mighty aristocracy, and the churchmen who backed Tamar gave her rule a sanction the nobles could not easily override (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994).

Two figures illustrate the human supports of her reign. The chronicles name loyal officials and commanders — above all the brothers Zakaria and Ivane Mkhargrdzeli (Zakarian), Armenian-Georgian nobles who rose to the highest military and administrative offices and led Tamar’s armies to their greatest victories — as the men through whom Tamar’s authority was exercised in the field and the provinces (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the Mkhargrdzeli; see The Military Triumphs). The consolidation of Tamar’s power was thus not a solitary act of will but the building of a coalition — crown, reforming church, and a loyal service nobility — against the centrifugal power of the great houses.

From Inherited Throne to Governed Kingdom

By the end of her first decade, Tamar had converted the throne George III had secured for her into a kingdom she genuinely governed. The Qutlu Arslan movement had failed; the church stood with her; a circle of loyal and capable commanders and officials was in place; and the second marriage — to David Soslan — had given her both an heir and a general (see The Two Marriages). The foundation was laid for the military and territorial zenith that would make her reign the summit of the Georgian Golden Age. That the “Histories” tell this story as an unbroken providential ascent should not obscure that it was, in fact, a hard-won political achievement — the more so for being the achievement of a woman ruling where no woman had ruled before.

See Also

References

  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The early-reign aristocratic pressure; the Qutlu Arslan affair and the “feudal constitutionalism” framing; the crown–church alliance.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The removal of Catholicos Michael; the Qutlu Arslan movement; the Mkhargrdzeli brothers; the politics of consolidation.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia. Synaxarion / Lives of the Saints (1 May). oca.org. (The tradition of the accession church-council and her charge to the bishops.)
  • The Georgian Chronicles (Kartlis Tskhovreba), the “Histories” of Tamar — the panegyric near-contemporary source underlying the accounts above, read source-critically per Methodology.