The Patron of the Church

Tamar was a patron of the Church on the grand scale: she built and endowed churches and monasteries across Georgia — Vardzia, Betania, Pitareti, Kvabtakhevi — and extended her patronage to the holy places of the wider Orthodox world, from Palestine and Sinai to Athos and Constantinople. She governed with the Church through councils, continuing the reforming alliance of crown and episcopate begun at Ruisi–Urbnisi. This file surveys her ecclesiastical patronage and its place in her sanctified kingship.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Crown and the Church

In the Bagrationi understanding of kingship, the sovereign was the patron and protector of the Church, and the Church the sanction and support of the crown. Tamar inherited this alliance in its reformed and strengthened form: her great-grandfather David the Builder had bound the Georgian Church to the crown and purged its abuses at the Council of Ruisi–Urbnisi (1103), deposing unworthy bishops and uniting the offices of court and church in loyal hands (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; see St. David the Builder). Tamar continued in this spirit. The near-contemporary tradition presents her convening a church council at her accession and charging the bishops to reform and to “judge according to righteousness, affirming good and condemning evil” — the crown acting as the guardian of ecclesiastical order and the ally of a reforming episcopate (Orthodox Church in America, Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia, synaxarion; on the accession council see The Queen and the Nobles).

This church-alliance was, as the section on her consolidation of power shows, not only piety but politics: the reforming, crown-loyal episcopate was one of Tamar’s chief supports against an over-mighty aristocracy. The two dimensions — genuine religious patronage and political calculation — are not in competition; they are two aspects of the single institution of sanctified Bagrationi kingship (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 3; Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on the sacralized monarchy).

Building and Endowment at Home

Tamar’s patronage is written into the Georgian landscape. The reign is associated with a great wave of church and monastery building and endowment, some of it begun under her father George III and carried forward under her. The signal monument is the cave-monastery of Vardzia, in southern Georgia (Meskheti/Javakheti), begun under George III and developed as a monastic city and royal foundation under Tamar, its main church of the Dormition frescoed in her reign and bearing her portrait (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on Vardzia and its Tamar portrait; see The Cave City of Vardzia). Beyond Vardzia, the reign is connected with churches and monasteries at Betania (which preserves an early-thirteenth-century portrait of Tamar and George III), Pitareti, Kvabtakhevi, and others — foundations that the tradition and the surviving fabric associate with her patronage (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on Betania and the surviving portraits; OCA synaxarion, listing Vardzia, Pitareti, Kvabtakhevi, and Betania among the works of her reign).

[Disputed: the precise extent of Tamar’s personal patronage of individual churches is not always separable from the general building-activity of the era and of her nobles; some foundations traditionally ascribed to her were begun earlier or built by magnates, and the hagiographic tradition tends to gather the age’s building under the queen’s name. The surviving fabric and portraits (Vardzia, Betania) securely attest her association with those sites; the fuller lists in the devotional tradition are read as the memory of a great age of patronage rather than as a documented building-ledger (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998).]

Patronage Abroad: The Holy Places of Orthodoxy

Tamar’s church-patronage reached far beyond Georgia. The wealth of the Golden Age (see The Empire at Its Zenith) allowed her to endow and protect Georgian and Orthodox foundations across the Christian East. The synaxarion tradition records that she “generously endowed the churches and monasteries not only on Georgian territory but also outside her borders: in Palestine, Cyprus, Mt. Sinai, Mt. Athos, and Constantinople” (OCA, Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia, synaxarion). This corresponds to a real and well-documented phenomenon of the age: medieval Georgia maintained monasteries and pilgrim-endowments at the great centers of Orthodox monasticism — the Georgian monastic presence on Mount Athos (the Iviron monastery), in the Holy Land (Georgian houses in and around Jerusalem, including the Monastery of the Cross), and at Sinai — and the patronage of these overseas foundations was a mark of the reach and the piety of the Georgian crown (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Georgian overseas monasticism; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1956, on the Georgian holy places abroad).

This overseas patronage matters for two reasons. It shows Tamar’s kingship understood as service to the whole Orthodox oikoumene, not merely to Georgia — an extension of Christian rule that placed her among the benefactors of the universal Church. And it connects, poignantly, to the mystery of her burial: one of the traditions of her lost grave holds that her body was carried toward Jerusalem for burial near the holy places she had endowed (see Repose and Canonization).

The Councils and the Ordering of the Church

Tamar governed the Church as well as endowed it. The councils of her reign — assemblies of bishops and nobles — were instruments both of church-reform and of royal legitimation, and the tradition remembers her as an active patron of ecclesiastical order who worked to raise the standard of the clergy and to defend the faith (OCA synaxarion; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1956). The continuity with Ruisi–Urbnisi is the key: what David the Builder had done in the crisis of the early twelfth century — reforming the Church through a great council in alliance with the crown — Tamar sustained as the settled practice of a mature Golden-Age monarchy. Her patronage of the Church was therefore not only material but institutional: she was remembered as a sovereign under whom the Georgian Church flourished, was ordered, and reached the summit of its influence — the ecclesiastical dimension of the same zenith the armies and the poets marked in their own spheres.

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The crown–church alliance; Georgian overseas monasticism at Athos, Jerusalem, and Sinai; the wealth of the reign.)
  • Eastmond, Antony. Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. (Vardzia and Betania and their surviving portraits of Tamar; the sacralized monarchy.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The crown–church alliance in the consolidation of power.)
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956. (The Georgian holy places abroad; the tradition of Tamar’s churchmanship.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia. Synaxarion / Lives of the Saints (1 May). oca.org. (The accession council; the list of foundations at home and the overseas endowments in Palestine, Cyprus, Sinai, Athos, and Constantinople.)