The Queen and the Legend

What survives of the historical Tamar once the panegyric and the folklore are peeled back? This file draws the line deliberately: it sets out what can be documented of the sovereign — the hard, external, physical evidence — against what belongs to the idealizing tradition and the folk legend, and defends the value of both without confusing them.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Why the Line Must Be Drawn

The preceding sections have shown two Tamars growing together from the start: the historical sovereign, and the idealized “Tamar” of court panegyric, epic poetry, and mountain folklore (see Tamar in Poetry and Legend). The two are so intertwined — even the earliest sources praise rather than report — that recovering the historical queen requires a deliberate act of separation, following the rules set out in this collection’s Methodology. This file performs that separation, not to diminish Tamar but to know her truly: to say what we actually have, and on what evidence.

The Documented Sovereign

Stripped to what the hard evidence supports, the historical Tamar is a figure of the first rank, and none the smaller for being real. The following are well documented, resting on contemporary coins, near-contemporary portraits, external notices, surviving buildings, and the checkable core of the “Histories”:

  • She reigned as sovereign of Georgia, co-ruler from c. 1178 and sole monarch from 1184 until her death in 1213, styled mepe, “king” — the titulature attested on her own coinage, not merely in the laudatory texts (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998, on the coins and titulature; see Crowned in Her Father’s Lifetime).
  • Her reign was the military and territorial zenith of medieval Georgia. The victories of Shamkor (1195) and Basiani (c. 1203) and the tributary hegemony are attested in Georgian and external (Armenian, Persian, Arabic) sources alike, and the founding of the Empire of Trebizond in 1204 with Georgian backing is independently documented (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; see The Empire at Its Zenith).
  • She was a great patron of the Church and of building. Vardzia and Betania survive, with her portrait, as physical evidence of her association with them; the overseas endowments correspond to the documented Georgian monastic presence at Athos, Sinai, and Jerusalem (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998; see The Patron of the Church).
  • Her reign presided over the classic age of Georgian culture, of which Rustaveli’s dedication of the Vepkhistqaosani to her is a hard textual fact (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; see The Golden Age of Georgian Culture).
  • She married twice — Yuri Bogolyubsky (expelled) and David Soslan (her consort and general) — and bore two children, George IV Lasha and Rusudan, who succeeded her (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; see The Two Marriages).

This is a documented sovereign of genuine greatness: the mepe of Georgia’s summit, patron of its greatest monuments, muse of its greatest poem. The historical Tamar does not need the legend.

The Idealized and the Folkloric Tamar

Set against this is the large body of material that belongs to the idealizing tradition and the folk legend, and that this collection treats as such rather than as biography:

  • The superlatives of the “Histories” — the perfect beauty, wisdom, invincibility, and unblemished virtue — are the idiom of panegyric, not neutral report; they tell us the ideal of sanctified sovereignty the age projected onto Tamar (see Methodology).
  • The details of her inner devotion — the stone bed, the bare feet, the tearful nightly prayer, the embroidery for the poor — reach us through hagiography and are reported as its testimony, not as documented events (see Piety and Charity).
  • The legend of Rustaveli’s hopeless love is a romantic elaboration of the poem’s dedication, undocumented in any contemporary source (see Shota Rustaveli and the Panther’s Skin).
  • The folk Tamar — the builder of countless “Tamar’s castles,” the sword-wielding warrior-queen at the head of her armies, the near-goddess of the mountains — is folklore, in which older mythological material was gathered under her name; the historical Tamar did not personally command in battle, and the castles are the folk memory of a golden age, not a building-record (see Tamar in Poetry and Legend).
  • The unknown grave has itself become a legend-motif (“her grave is in the heart of the Georgian”), a cultural transfiguration of a hard historical gap (see Repose and Canonization).

A Correction, Not Only a Separation

Drawing the line also means correcting where the legend has actively distorted the record. The clearest case is the transfer to Tamar of her father’s brutality. The famous blinding-and-castration of a rival claimant belongs to George III and his nephew Demna, not to Tamar; Tamar’s own tradition, by contrast, remembers her for clemency and the abolition of capital punishment (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; see The Bagrationi Inheritance and A Holy Queen). Popular retellings sometimes blur the two reigns; the sober account keeps them distinct. Conversely, the clemency tradition itself must not be over-believed: it reaches us through the same laudatory sources, and it sits beside the hard fact that Tamar’s was an expansionist, war-making state whose wars had the ordinary brutalities of the age (see A Holy Queen). The correction runs both ways: neither the father’s cruelty nor a saccharine perfection is the historical Tamar.

The Value of Both

To separate the historical from the legendary Tamar is not to declare the legend worthless. The idealized and folkloric Tamar is one of the great imaginative achievements of Georgian culture — the personification of a nation’s golden age, the muse of its epic, the beloved queen of its songs and stories — and it is a real and important object of study in its own right, as the culture’s relation to its own past and to the ideal of holy sovereignty (see Tamar in Georgian Memory). The point of the separation is only that the two are different kinds of thing: the one is history, to be checked against evidence; the other is a nation’s poetry about itself, to be understood as such. The honest reader honours both, and confuses neither — and finds, at the end of the separation, that the historical Tamar, soberly documented, is impressive enough to have deserved the legend she received.

See Also

References

  • Eastmond, Antony. Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. (The coins and titulature; the surviving portraits as hard evidence; the idealizing sources.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The documented reign; the marriages and children; the correction on George III and Demna versus Tamar’s clemency; the expansionist state.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (Rustaveli’s dedication as a hard fact; the panegyric and folk traditions.)
  • The Georgian Chronicles (Kartlis Tskhovreba), the “Histories” of Tamar — the earliest layer of idealization, read source-critically per Methodology.