A Holy Queen

Tamar is venerated as a saint and was a war-making sovereign of a hard medieval state. This file holds the two together honestly, as the repository methodology requires: the wars and the statecraft, the punishment of plotters and the divorce of a consort, the misattributed brutality of her father, and the tradition of her clemency — set beside her veneration and the styling of a woman as “king,” without whitewash and without debunking.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Problem Stated Honestly

The Church venerates Tamar as the Holy Righteous King (Queen) Tamar. She was also the sovereign of an expansionist medieval state that made war on its neighbours, subdued and taxed tributary emirates, expelled a husband and defeated his armed attempts to return, and put down a movement of her own nobles. There is a real tension here — the same tension the repository confronts with her great-grandfather David the Builder and with every warrior-saint — and the methodology (§4) requires that it be presented even-handedly, naming the hard facts beside the sanctity and adjudicating neither into the other (see St. David the Builder, whose collection holds the same tension). This file is that presentation.

The Wars and the Statecraft

Tamar’s reign was the military zenith of medieval Georgia, and its wars were real wars. The victories of Shamkor and Basiani, the tributary hegemony “from the Black Sea to the Caspian,” and the expeditions that reached toward Persia were the achievements of a hard, successful, expansionist monarchy, and they involved the ordinary violence of medieval conquest — the sack of cities, the plunder of campaigns, the subjection of populations — however much the “Histories” clothe them in the idiom of holy war and Christian defense (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; see The Military Triumphs). It is honest to say that Tamar’s sanctity is not the sanctity of a pacifist or a withdrawn ascetic but of a sovereign who ruled, taxed, and made war — the sanctity, if it is that, of holy rule rather than of renunciation.

Her statecraft had its hard edges at home as well. She defeated the Qutlu Arslan movement by arresting its leader; she obtained the divorce and expulsion of her first husband Yuri Bogolyubsky, and her forces twice defeated his armed attempts to seize the throne. These were the acts of a sovereign securing her power, and while the tradition presents them as accomplished with unusual restraint (arrest and negotiation rather than slaughter), they were exercises of hard political will, not of gentle passivity (see The Queen and the Nobles and The Two Marriages).

The Blinding: Her Father’s Act, Not Hers

A specific correction belongs here, because it is the point at which the “hard statecraft” is most often exaggerated against Tamar. The famous act of dynastic brutality in this family’s history — the blinding and castration of a rival claimant — was committed by Tamar’s father George III against his nephew Demna (Demetrius), the rival for the throne, after Demna’s revolt was crushed; Demna died of the mutilation (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; see The Bagrationi Inheritance). This act secured the throne that would pass to Tamar, and it is sometimes loosely transferred to her in popular retellings. It was not her act. The sober record attributes the mutilation to George III, in the previous reign, and keeps it distinct from Tamar’s own rule (see The Queen and the Legend for this correction).

The Tradition of Clemency — and Its Limits

Tamar’s own reign is remembered, by contrast, for clemency. The synaxarion tradition credits her with abolishing capital punishment and torture, and the “Histories” present her as merciful even toward those who plotted against her, refusing to answer treason with blood (Orthodox Church in America, Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia, synaxarion: “She abolished capital punishment and torture”; the Qutlu Arslan affair resolved by arrest and negotiation). This is a genuine and striking element of her cult, and it draws a real contrast with the brutality of her father’s generation.

But two honest qualifications are required. First, the clemency tradition reaches us through the same laudatory sources that idealize everything about Tamar, and “abolished capital punishment” may be as much a hagiographic ideal of the merciful sovereign as a documented legal enactment; it is reported here as the tradition’s testimony (see Piety and Charity; Methodology). Second, mercy toward domestic plotters is not the same as gentleness in war: the same reign that spared its internal enemies made hard war on its external ones. The truthful picture is of a sovereign notably restrained in the exercise of domestic justice — genuinely so, if the tradition holds — and fully engaged in the violence of medieval statecraft and conquest abroad. Both are true; neither cancels the other.

[Disputed: whether Tamar’s “abolition of capital punishment and torture” was an actual legal-administrative act of her reign or a hagiographic idealization of her clemency cannot be settled; it is attested in the devotional tradition and is consistent with the sources’ consistent portrait of her mercy, but no documented statute survives (OCA synaxarion; read per METHODOLOGY §3.5). The contrast with her father’s brutality is real and is drawn by the tradition itself; the fullness of the clemency is the laudatory tradition’s claim.]

A Woman Styled “King”

Part of what makes Tamar’s holy kingship distinctive is that it was a woman’s. She held and exercised the office of mepe, “king” — the full royal sovereignty, war-making and law-giving included — in a culture that had no precedent for a female ruler and that made her rule intelligible precisely by investing her with the male royal office and imaging her as king (Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia, 1998; see Crowned in Her Father’s Lifetime). This is theologically as well as politically significant: the Church venerates as a holy sovereign a woman who wielded, without diminution, an office normally reserved to men, and whose sanctity is the sanctity of that full exercise of rule — not of a queen-consort’s gentleness or a nun’s withdrawal, but of a reigning king who happened to be a woman. Her sanctity and her kingship are not in tension on the point of her sex; the tradition simply and remarkably holds that the holy office of Christian kingship rested fully on a woman.

Holding It Together

The union of holy queenship and hard statecraft is not a contradiction the tradition failed to notice; it is the very thing it venerates — a sovereign who ruled a hard state with (as the tradition has it) unusual mercy and deep personal piety, who made her wars in the name of the faith and endowed the Church with their fruits, and who was held, by the Church that knew her, to have been holy in and through the exercise of rule. The honest reader neither sanitizes the wars and the statecraft out of the picture nor uses them to debunk the sanctity. Tamar is a saint of holy rule, warts and wars included; and that is a harder, and truer, thing to venerate than a queen with the difficulties airbrushed away (see Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The expansionist wars; George III’s blinding and castration of Demna; the hard statecraft of Tamar’s reign.)
  • Eastmond, Antony. Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. (Tamar’s exercise of the male royal office of “king”; the imaging of a female sovereign.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. Right-believing Tamara, Queen of Georgia. Synaxarion / Lives of the Saints (1 May). oca.org. (The tradition of her clemency and the abolition of capital punishment and torture.)
  • The Georgian Chronicles (Kartlis Tskhovreba), the “Histories” of Tamar — the laudatory source of the clemency tradition, read source-critically per Methodology.