The Golden Age of Georgian Culture

Tamar’s reign is remembered as the classic age of Georgian civilization: a flowering of literature, architecture, philosophy, and learning, financed by the wealth of an ascendant state and gathered under the name of the sovereign who presided over it. This file surveys that cultural summit — the poetry, the building, the philosophical schools, the fusion of Christian and courtly ideals — and reflects soberly on why the “Golden Age” is fixed forever under Tamar’s name.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Classic Age

The reign of Tamar, together with those of her father George III and her son George IV Lasha, marks the summit of medieval Georgian culture — the age to which later Georgians looked back as their classical period, the moment when Georgian civilization reached a height of confidence, wealth, and creative achievement it would not see again. The material foundation was the ascendancy described elsewhere in this collection: the victories, the tributary empire, the trade and tribute that filled the royal treasury and financed patronage on a grand scale (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 3; see The Empire at Its Zenith). On that foundation rose a culture that fused Christian devotion, Byzantine and Persian courtly refinement, and a distinctively Georgian synthesis of the two.

Literature and the Courtly Ideal

The literary summit of the age — and its most famous product — is the epic of Shota Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin (Vepkhistqaosani), composed in Tamar’s reign and dedicated to the queen. It is the masterpiece of medieval Georgian literature and one of the great secular poems of the Christian East, a chivalric romance whose ideals of love, loyalty, friendship, and heroic virtue express the courtly culture of Tamar’s Georgia at its most refined (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd ed., 2010, on Rustaveli and the Golden-Age literature; treated in full in Shota Rustaveli and the Panther’s Skin). Around Rustaveli the age produced a rich court literature — panegyric, historical, and poetic — including the very “Histories” of Tamar that are our chief narrative sources for the reign, themselves accomplished works of rhetorical and literary art (on which see Methodology).

The literature of the Golden Age is notable for the confidence with which it holds together Christian faith and worldly, courtly, even chivalric-romantic ideals. Rustaveli’s epic is set in a nominally Muslim, cosmopolitan world and celebrates human love and heroism; yet it is the product of a deeply Christian civilization, and the synthesis — the marriage of Orthodox devotion and a humane, courtly, almost Renaissance-anticipating culture — is one of the marks of the age and one reason it is remembered as “golden” (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994).

Architecture and the Arts

The age was a great age of building. Beyond Vardzia (see The Cave City of Vardzia), the reign and its immediate context produced or adorned a series of churches and monasteries — Betania, Pitareti, Kvabtakhevi, Kintsvisi, Bertubani — whose architecture and frescoes represent the maturity of the Georgian medieval style: the elegant cross-in-square and domed churches, the refined stone-carving, and the wall-painting programmes that carry, among their saints and feasts, the royal portraits of Tamar and her house (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on the churches and their frescoes; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). Georgian metalwork, manuscript-illumination, and enamel of the period likewise reached a high refinement, drawing on Byzantine models and transforming them into a native idiom. The surviving fabric of these buildings and their images is, as noted throughout this collection, the firmest evidence we have of the reign — physical, datable, and interpretable where the written sources are panegyric.

Learning, Philosophy, and the Schools

The Golden Age was also an age of learning. The intellectual foundation had been laid by David the Builder with the founding of the Academy of Gelati (from 1106), which David’s contemporaries hailed as a “second Jerusalem” and “new Athens” — a center of theology, philosophy, and the translation of Greek learning into Georgian (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Gelati; see St. David the Builder). This tradition of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophy, patristic theology, and translation from Greek flourished into Tamar’s era; the age is associated with philosophers and translators — the tradition names figures such as Ioane Petritsi, the Georgian Neoplatonist and translator of Proclus, in the intellectual milieu of the Golden Age (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the philosophical and translation culture). The Georgian monasteries abroad — on Athos, at Sinai, in the Holy Land — were part of this intellectual network, centers of translation and scholarship that connected Georgian learning to the wider Orthodox and Byzantine world (see The Patron of the Church).

[Disputed: the precise chronology and personnel of the Golden-Age intellectual culture — which philosophers and translators worked under Tamar specifically, as against under David the Builder or in the intervening reigns — is not always securely fixed, and the tradition tends to concentrate the whole flowering under Tamar’s name. Ioane Petritsi, for example, is variously dated and his exact relation to Tamar’s reign is debated (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010). The safe statement is that Tamar’s reign stands at the summit of a broader Golden-Age intellectual flowering that spans the David-to-Lasha era, not that every named achievement is datable to her rule.]

Why the Golden Age Bears Tamar’s Name

The cultural summit spans more than Tamar’s reign alone; it begins with David the Builder and extends into the reign of her son. Yet it is Tamar’s name, above all, that the memory of the Golden Age carries — and the reasons are worth stating soberly. Her reign is the political and military zenith, and the cultural flowering is naturally gathered around the moment of greatest power. Rustaveli’s epic, dedicated to her, made her the muse and emblem of the age’s supreme literary achievement, fixing her at its imaginative center (see Tamar in Poetry and Legend). And the catastrophe that followed — the Mongol devastations that broke Georgian power within a generation of her death — made her reign, in retrospect, the last height before the fall, and so the natural name for the whole lost summit. The Golden Age is “Tamar’s” partly by historical fact and partly by the alchemy of memory that turns a real sovereign into the symbol of an age (Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; see Tamar in Georgian Memory).

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The Golden Age as the classic period; the wealth and patronage; Gelati and the intellectual culture; the Mongol collapse that followed.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (Rustaveli and the Golden-Age literature; the philosophical and translation culture; Ioane Petritsi.)
  • Eastmond, Antony. Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. (The churches and frescoes of the age; the royal portraits.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The cultural summit and its material foundation; Tamar as the name of the age.)