Iberia in the Fifth Century

The Kingdom of Kartli — Iberia to the classical world — in the fifth century: a Christian land a century and a half after St. Nina, ruled by the Chosroid dynasty but held within the Sasanian Persian sphere and pressed by a Zoroastrian great king who had just crushed Christian Armenia at Avarayr. This is the world Vakhtang inherited, and the pincer between Persia and Byzantium that would define his whole reign.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Kingdom of Kartli

The land the Greeks and Romans called Iberia, and which its own people called Kartli, occupied the eastern part of what is now Georgia, centered on the valley of the Kura (Mtkvari) river and the old royal city of Mtskheta at the confluence of the Kura and the Aragvi (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 3–24; Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 1). It was not the whole of the later Georgian nation: to the west lay the separate kingdom of Egrisi–Lazica along the Black Sea, oriented toward the Roman/Byzantine world, and Kartli itself was ringed by mountain peoples and by the great neighbors — the Roman Empire to the west and the Sasanian Empire of Persia to the south and east — between whom the small Caucasian kingdoms were perpetually caught (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963, 69–144; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, introduction).

By Vakhtang’s century Kartli had been Christian for roughly a hundred and fifty years. St. Nina, the captive woman whose preaching converted King Mirian III and his queen Nana in the fourth century, had brought the Iberians to Christ, and Mirian had made Christianity the religion of his kingdom — an event the Georgian tradition places in the 320s or 330s, and which the earliest sources set within the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976, on Nina; see St. Nina of Georgia). The conversion left Kartli a Christian kingdom institutionally tied, for its higher clergy, to the great see of Antioch, from which — the Georgian tradition holds — its bishops were consecrated (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 22–24). It is this Christian Kartli, Nina’s inheritance, that Vakhtang would spend his life defending.

The Chosroid Dynasty

Vakhtang belonged to the dynasty modern scholarship calls the Chosroid (or Khosroid) house — the line that Cyril Toumanoff traced from Mirian III, the king converted under St. Nina, and that ruled Kartli through the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries until the Sasanians finally suppressed the Iberian kingship around 580 (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963, 83–141, on the Chosroid line; Traditio 25, 1969, on the chronology). The dynasty was itself of ultimately Iranian, Mihranid-connected origin, a reminder that Kartli’s aristocratic culture was deeply Persianate even as its faith was Christian — a doubleness that runs through the whole Vakhtang story and that Stephen Rapp has made central to the reading of the early Georgian sources: the Georgian kings and nobles lived in a shared Iranian aristocratic world of names, titles, dress, and epic ideals, and were at the same time Christians resisting the Zoroastrian claims of their overlords (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, esp. chs. 1–2).

The king of Kartli in this period was not an autocrat on the Persian model but the first among a powerful nobility. Below him stood the great princes — the eristavis (dukes) who governed the provinces, and the aristocratic houses whose loyalty was conditional and whose revolts were a constant of Iberian politics (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 24–28; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, ch. 2). Much of what the Life of Vakhtang presents as the king’s achievement is precisely the mastering of this nobility, and the difficulty of that task is one of the few things about his reign that historians take as securely grounded in the political realities of the age (see Warrior and Statesman).

Under the Sasanian Shadow

The decisive fact of Vakhtang’s world was Iberia’s subjection to the Sasanian Empire. Since the treaty of 387, which partitioned Armenia between Rome and Persia, the Caucasian kingdoms had fallen increasingly under Persian control, and Kartli lay within the Sasanian sphere of influence, owing tribute and, increasingly, submitting to the presence of Persian officials (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 24–25; Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963). The Sasanian state was Zoroastrian, and under kings such as Yazdegerd II (r. 438–457) and Peroz I (r. 459–484) it pursued a policy of religious and administrative pressure on its Christian Caucasian subjects — a pressure that culminated, for Armenia, in the great rebellion of 450–451 and the battle of Avarayr, where the Armenian prince Vardan Mamikonian and his companions died resisting the imposition of Zoroastrianism (the events narrated by Ełishē and by Łazar Pʿarpecʿi; see Thomson, The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, 1991).

Avarayr is the shadow across Vakhtang’s Iberia. Christian Armenia had been forced to fight for its faith against the same power that overshadowed Kartli, and the Sasanian program did not stop at the Armenian border. The pressures were of several kinds: the demand for tribute and troops; the installation of Persian administrators; the promotion of Zoroastrian fire-worship; and the effort to bind the Caucasian aristocracies to the Iranian imperial order (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 25). Later in the sixth century this would harden into the marzpanate — direct rule of Kartli through a Persian viceroy (marzpan) seated at Tbilisi, the office attested by around 518–520 (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963; the Iranian viceroy at Tiflis is noted in the standard reconstructions of the period). Vakhtang’s reign stands just before that final subjection, and the Georgian tradition remembers him as the king who held it off for a generation.

Between Two Empires

If Persia was the overlord, Byzantium was the alternative. The Christian Roman Empire at Constantinople was the natural patron of the Caucasian Christians, and the small kingdoms survived by playing the two great powers against each other — leaning toward Byzantium for protection of their faith and their independence, submitting to Persia when the balance of force required it (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 25–28; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, ch. 2). This is the strategic bind of Vakhtang’s whole career: a Christian king whose faith drew him toward Constantinople, and whose geography and the hard facts of Sasanian power repeatedly forced him into the Persian camp — even, as the Life has it, into marriage with a Sasanian princess and into campaigning at the great king’s side, before he turned at last to open revolt (see Between Persia and Byzantium).

The fifth century was thus, for Kartli, a century of survival under pressure, in which the preservation of the Christian faith St. Nina had planted was the central political and spiritual problem. It is against this background — a Christian kingdom, an Iranian aristocratic culture, a Zoroastrian overlord fresh from crushing Christian Armenia, and a Byzantine alternative always just out of reach — that the figure of Vakhtang Gorgasali must be set. Everything the tradition praises in him, and everything the historian must treat with caution, grows from this soil.

References

Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The Chosroid dynasty; Iberia between Rome and Persia; the chronology of the early kings.)
Toumanoff, Cyril. “Chronology of the Early Kings of Iberia.” Traditio 25 (1969): 1–33.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Kartli/Iberia, the conversion, the Sasanian pressure, the two-empire bind.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes: Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (The Persianate aristocratic culture of Christian Kartli.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. Louvain: Peeters, CSCO 601, 2003.
Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012.
Thomson, Robert W., trans. The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. (Avarayr and the Armenian resistance, the background to the Caucasian Christian revolts.)
Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (St. Nina and the conversion of Kartli.)