The Military Triumphs

Under Tamar, and under the generalship of her consort David Soslan and the Mkhargrdzeli brothers, Georgia won the greatest victories of its medieval history: the defeat of the Eldiguzid atabeg at Shamkor (1195) and the decisive rout of the Sultanate of Rûm at Basiani (c. 1203). This file sets out the campaigns and battles soberly, giving the contested dates and the wildly divergent troop-figures as ranges per the repository methodology.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Strategic Situation

Tamar inherited a Georgia already the leading Christian power of the Caucasus, but ringed by Muslim states — the Seljuk successor-emirates and atabegates to the south and east, and the Sultanate of Rûm (the Seljuk state of Anatolia) to the southwest. The fragmentation of the Great Seljuk empire and the disorder of the wider region (the Byzantine collapse culminating in the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople in 1204) gave an ascendant Georgia room to expand. The wars of Tamar’s reign were fought by her commanders — she did not take the field herself — above all by her consort David Soslan and by the brothers Zakaria and Ivane Mkhargrdzeli (Zakarian), who held the highest military offices (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 3; on David Soslan see The Two Marriages).

The near-contemporary “Histories” of Tamar present these campaigns in the idiom of holy war and providential victory, and their numbers are panegyric; the sober account keeps the shape of the triumphs while discounting the arithmetic (see Methodology).

The Battle of Shamkor (1195)

The first of the great victories came against Abu Bakr, the Eldiguzid atabeg of Azerbaijan and Arran (the dominant Muslim power on Georgia’s southeastern flank). In 1195, at Shamkor (Shamkhor, in present-day Azerbaijan), a Georgian army under David Soslan defeated Abu Bakr and took his capital, installing a Georgian protégé; though Abu Bakr recovered his position within a year or so, the Eldiguzid power was broken as a serious check on Georgian expansion (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Shamkor and Abu Bakr; the Tamar of Georgia entry: Abu Bakr “lost his capital to a Georgian protégé in 1195”). Shamkor established Georgian military dominance to the east and southeast and opened the way to the tributary arrangements that would extend Tamar’s authority over the region (see The Empire at Its Zenith).

The Battle of Basiani (c. 1203)

The greatest and most celebrated victory of the reign was Basiani (Basian), fought against the Sultanate of Rûm under Süleyman (Suleiman) II (Rukn al-Din), who had assembled a large coalition and moved against Georgia after taking Erzurum. The Georgian army, commanded by David Soslan with the Mkhargrdzeli, met and routed the sultan’s forces at Basiani, in the highlands toward Erzurum; the sultan was driven back and the victory secured Georgian supremacy over the frontier emirates (Erzurum, Kars, Erzincan, the Shah-Armens) (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 3, on Basiani and its consequences).

Both the date and the numbers of Basiani are genuinely uncertain, and are given here as ranges.

[Disputed: the date of the Battle of Basiani is not securely fixed. Modern scholars date it variously between 1202 and 1206, with c. 1203 (or “1202–1204”) the most commonly preferred; the contemporary Muslim chronicler Ibn Bibi places it in AH 598 (October 1201 – September 1202), i.e. 1201/1202. This collection gives the battle as c. 1203 and flags the range (survey of the datings in the scholarship on the Battle of Basiani; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).]

[Disputed: the troop-figures for Basiani are irreconcilable across the sources and cannot be taken as documentary. Estimates for the Georgian army run in the tens of thousands (figures on the order of 65,000–90,000 are cited, with a center of perhaps 40,000 under the Akhaltsikheli commanders), while the Muslim sources credit the Sultanate of Rûm with wildly larger hosts of 150,000–400,000 — numbers of the conventional, hyperbolic kind that medieval battle-narratives on both sides routinely inflate. No reliable count survives; the figures are reported here as the ranges the sources give, not as established fact (survey of the figures in the scholarship on the Battle of Basiani).]

The near-contemporary Georgian tradition frames Basiani in explicitly religious terms — Tamar is said to have prepared for the battle in prayer and fasting and to have addressed the troops before the campaign — and the victory became one of the emblems of her sanctified kingship (see Piety and Charity; the tradition that “the queen addressed the troops from the balcony of the church” is preserved in the chronicle account). Whatever the exact size of the armies, Basiani was in its consequences the decisive battle of the reign: it confirmed Georgia as the paramount power of the Christian Caucasus and eastern Anatolia and made possible the further extension of Tamar’s tributary hegemony.

The Character of the Wars

Two sober qualifications belong here. First, Tamar’s wars were wars of a hard, expansionist medieval state; they were fought for territory, tribute, and dominance, and they involved the ordinary brutalities of medieval campaigning, even as the “Histories” clothe them in the language of holy war and Christian defense (see A Holy Queen for the honest holding-together of the sanctity and the statecraft). Second, the victories were won by her commanders, not by Tamar in person; her role was that of the sovereign in whose name and under whose authority the armies fought — the mepe who commissioned and legitimated the war, prayed for its success, and reaped its territorial fruits. That distinction matters for reading both the military history and the later legend, which tends to place Tamar herself, sword in hand, at the head of her armies in a way the sources do not support (see Tamar in Poetry and Legend).

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Shamkor 1195 and Abu Bakr; David Soslan and the Mkhargrdzeli as commanders; Basiani and its consequences.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The strategic situation; Basiani and the frontier emirates.)
  • Battle of Basiani, encyclopedic survey of the scholarly datings (1202–1206; Ibn Bibi’s AH 598) and of the divergent troop-figures (Georgian tens of thousands; Muslim sources 150,000–400,000) — used to locate the ranges, not as a terminal citation.
  • Tamar of Georgia, encyclopedic entry (used to locate the Shamkor 1195 detail and the Basiani frontier-emirate consequences).
  • The Georgian Chronicles (Kartlis Tskhovreba), the “Histories” of Tamar — the panegyric source of the religious framing and the inflated numbers, read source-critically per Methodology.