03 — The Golden Age

The military and territorial zenith of medieval Georgia under Tamar: the great victories over the Seljuk powers — Shamkor (1195) and Basiani (c. 1203) — and the empire they built, a realm of tributary states stretching, in the phrase of the tradition, “from the Black Sea to the Caspian,” with the Empire of Trebizond founded on the Black Sea in 1204 by Tamar’s Komnenoi kinsmen.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

This section covers the reason Tamar’s reign is remembered as the summit of the Georgian Golden Age: under her — and under the generalship of her consort David Soslan and the Mkhargrdzeli brothers — Georgia reached the greatest extent of power and influence it would ever hold. The section reports the campaigns and the extent of the realm soberly, giving contested dates and troop-figures as ranges per the repository methodology (§3.5), and distinguishing documented conquest from the hyperbole of the panegyric “Histories.”

Files in This Section

File Description
the-military-triumphs.md The defense against the Seljuks; the victory at Shamkor (1195); the great victory at Basiani (c. 1203) over the Sultanate of Rûm, with dates and figures given as ranges.
the-empire-at-its-zenith.md The tributary states and the extent of the realm; the founding of the Empire of Trebizond (1204) under the Komnenoi; Georgia “from the Black Sea to the Caspian.”

See Also