The Empire at Its Zenith

The victories of Shamkor and Basiani made Tamar’s Georgia the paramount power of the Christian Caucasus, ringed by tributary emirates and reaching, in the phrase of the tradition, “from the Black Sea to the Caspian.” Its most enduring extension was the founding, in 1204, of the Empire of Trebizond on the Black Sea by the Komnenoi princes remembered as Tamar’s kinsmen. This file surveys the realm at its greatest extent, sober about the difference between hegemony and hyperbole.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Extent of the Realm

By the first decade of the thirteenth century, Georgia under Tamar had reached the summit of its medieval power. It was not an empire in the sense of a single administered territory but a hegemony: a core kingdom of the Georgian lands surrounded by a belt of tributary and client states — Muslim emirates and Armenian principalities brought under Georgian suzerainty by the victories of David Soslan and the Mkhargrdzeli. In the years after Shamkor (1195) and Basiani (c. 1203), Tamar’s authority extended over or drew tribute from Arran and much of eastern Transcaucasia, the reconquered Armenian lands administered by the Mkhargrdzeli, and the frontier emirates toward Anatolia — Kars, Erzurum, Erzincan, the Shah-Armens (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 3; on the campaigns see The Military Triumphs).

The tradition summed up this reach in the formula that Tamar’s realm stretched “from the Black Sea to the Caspian” — from the shores of Pontus in the west to the Caspian littoral in the east — and, at its most expansive, from the Caucasus mountains toward the plains of Anatolia and Persia. The formula is broadly true of the sphere of Georgian influence at its height, but it is the language of a golden-age memory, and the honest reader distinguishes the core kingdom (securely governed) from the tributary periphery (held by force and subject to loss) from the sphere of raids and expeditions that reached, at moments, much further — including the celebrated campaign of Tamar’s later years toward northern Persia (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; on the panegyric idiom see Methodology).

The Founding of the Empire of Trebizond (1204)

The most consequential and best-documented extension of Georgian power under Tamar was the founding of the Empire of Trebizond on the southeastern Black Sea coast in 1204 — the very year the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and shattered the Byzantine Empire. Trebizond was established by two brothers of the imperial Komnenos house, Alexios I Megas Komnenos (r. 1204–1222) and David Komnenos, grandsons of the Byzantine emperor Andronikos I Komnenos, who had grown up as refugee princes at the Georgian court. In the spring of 1204, with Georgian military support furnished by Tamar, they seized Trebizond and the surrounding Pontic coast, founding the state that would outlast Byzantium itself, surviving until 1461 (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the founding of Trebizond and the Komnenoi at Tamar’s court; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994).

The Komnenoi princes are remembered in the tradition as Tamar’s kinsmen — the sources describe them as “Tamar’s nephews,” raised at her court — reflecting a family connection between the Georgian Bagrationi and the Byzantine Komnenoi.

[Disputed: the precise kinship between Tamar and the founders of Trebizond is given differently in the sources and is not firmly established. They are commonly called Tamar’s “nephews,” and the connection is traditionally traced through a Georgian–Komnenos marriage in the previous generation (Andronikos I Komnenos had ties to the Georgian court); the exact genealogical link cannot be fixed with certainty. What is well attested is that the Komnenoi brothers were refugee Byzantine princes raised at Tamar’s court and that she supplied the military backing for their seizure of Trebizond in 1204 (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; the Tamar of Georgia entry: “Tamar’s nephews … fugitive Byzantine princes raised at the Georgian court”).]

The founding of Trebizond served Georgian interests as much as Komnenoi ambition: it created, on Georgia’s western flank, a friendly Orthodox buffer-state controlling the Pontic coast and its trade, at the moment when the Byzantine center had collapsed. It is the most tangible monument of Tamar’s reach into the wider Orthodox world — a Christian empire on the Black Sea, brought into being with Georgian arms.

Wealth, Trade, and the Marks of a Golden Age

The zenith was economic and cultural as well as military. Georgia under Tamar controlled or taxed the trade routes of the central and southern Caucasus; the tribute of client states and the plunder of successful campaigns flowed into the royal treasury and financed the building and patronage that mark her reign — the churches and monasteries, the cave-city of Vardzia, the flowering of letters and learning (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, on the wealth and patronage of the reign; see The Golden Age of Georgian Culture). The material prosperity of the realm is the substrate of everything the later tradition remembers as the Golden Age: the poetry, the architecture, the church-patronage extending even to the holy places of Palestine, Sinai, Athos, and Constantinople, were paid for by the wealth of an ascendant state (on the overseas endowments see The Patron of the Church).

The Fragility Behind the Zenith

A sober assessment must note that the empire at its zenith was also, structurally, at its most extended and therefore its most fragile. The tributary hegemony depended on continued military success and on the person and prestige of the sovereign; it was a construction of conquest, not of deep administrative integration, and much of it would be swept away within a generation of Tamar’s death by the Mongol invasions that broke Georgian power in the 1220s–1240s. The Golden Age was real, but it was also brief and, in its imperial reach, precarious — a height from which the only movement, after Tamar, was down (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the Mongol collapse of Georgian power under her successors; see Repose and Canonization). That the Golden Age is fixed forever under Tamar’s name owes something to the fact that it did not long outlive her: she became the memory of a summit precisely because what followed was catastrophe.

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The tributary hegemony and its extent; the founding of Trebizond in 1204 by the Komnenoi raised at Tamar’s court; the wealth of the reign; the Mongol collapse under her successors.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The extent of Georgian power at its height; the economic basis of the Golden Age.)
  • Tamar of Georgia, encyclopedic entry (used to locate the “Tamar’s nephews … fugitive Byzantine princes raised at the Georgian court” description of the Komnenoi and the 1204 founding).
  • The Georgian Chronicles (Kartlis Tskhovreba), the “Histories” of Tamar — the panegyric source of the “Black Sea to the Caspian” idiom, read source-critically per Methodology.