The Child King

The beginnings of Vakhtang’s reign as the Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali presents them: accession as a child amid the Sasanian pressure, a regency, and the great epithet Gorgasali — “Wolf’s Head” — said to derive from the wolf-head device on his helmet at which the Persians cried out in battle. Because the Life is later and semi-epic, this file reports the accession and the name as tradition, pinned to their source, and flags what the historian cannot confirm.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

An Accession Shrouded in the Life

Almost everything we are told about Vakhtang’s childhood and accession comes from a single narrative source — the Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali ascribed to Juansher Juansheriani, preserved in the Kartlis Tskhovreba and composed well after the events, somewhere between the eighth and the eleventh century (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996, introduction to the Vakhtang text; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003). The Life opens Vakhtang’s story with a kingdom in danger: a Christian Kartli harassed on its borders and pressed by Persia, into which the young prince is born to the Chosroid king and — in the Life‘s telling — to a mother of Persian royal connection (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996). Because the source is late and openly epic in manner, the birth-narrative and the childhood scenes are handled here as literary tradition rather than as documented biography, in keeping with the collection’s method (see Methodology).

The Georgian tradition, following the Life, holds that Vakhtang came to the throne as a child — a boy of about seven — with the government carried on during his minority by a regency (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2; the Life, in Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996). [Disputed: the year of Vakhtang’s accession cannot be fixed. Cyril Toumanoff placed his reign c. 447–522, which would set the accession around 447; Ivane Javakhishvili and others preferred c. 449–502 (Toumanoff, “Chronology of the Early Kings of Iberia,” Traditio 25, 1969: 1–33; the alternatives are summarized in the standard reference literature). No contemporary document records the date, and the whole chronology of the reign is an inference from the later sources.] A boy-king under a regency, in a kingdom under Sasanian shadow, is at least historically plausible for fifth-century Kartli; the Life dramatizes it, but the underlying situation — a vulnerable minority in a threatened Christian kingdom — fits the age.

The Regency and the Danger

In the Life‘s account, the young king’s minority is a time of peril: the enemies of Kartli — nomadic raiders from the north through the Caucasian passes, and the pressure of Persia from the south — threaten a realm without an adult warrior at its head, and the boy is shaped by tutors and by the example of the endangered kingdom he will have to save (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, ch. 2). The narrative is built to explain the man: the child who watches his people carried off by raiders becomes the king whose whole life is war for the land and the faith. Modern historians read this as the Life‘s epic architecture — a hero’s formation — rather than as a reportable sequence of events, while granting that the strategic threats it names (the northern nomads, the Persian overlord) are the genuine dangers of the period (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the epic shaping of the Vakhtang narrative; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, on the real threats).

What can be said soberly is this: the historical Vakhtang, whatever the details, inherited a kingdom in the classic Iberian bind — a Christian realm, a powerful and fractious nobility, and a Zoroastrian imperial overlord — and the tradition unanimously remembers him as the king who rose to that inheritance. The Life‘s childhood is best read not as archive but as the tradition’s own account of how a defender of the faith was made.

“Gorgasali”: The Wolf’s Head

The name by which history knows him is not a personal name but an epithet: Gorgasali (გორგასალი). The tradition, followed by the modern scholarship, derives it from Persian — gorg meaning “wolf” and sar meaning “head” — so that Gorgasali means “wolf-head” or “wolf’s head” (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the Iranian etymology; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, ch. 2). The Life attaches to the name a battle-story: Vakhtang wore a helmet crested or fronted with the image of a wolf’s head (and, in the fuller tellings, a lion on the other side), and the Persians in battle, seeing the terrible device bearing down on them, would cry out to one another to beware “the wolf’s head” — dar az gorg-a-sar, “look out for the wolf-head!” — and so the name stuck to him (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, ch. 2).

The etymology is sound and the epithet is genuine — Vakhtang really is remembered by this Persian-derived name across the whole tradition — but the battle-anecdote that explains it is exactly the kind of etiological story the Life delights in, and it should be received as such. [Disputed: the origin of the epithet “Gorgasali.” The derivation from Persian gorg-sar, “wolf-head,” is philologically secure and generally accepted (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014; Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015, s.v. Vakhtang). Whether it arose from an actual wolf-head helmet-device and a Persian battle-cry, as the Life narrates, or is a later explanation attached to an already-current name, cannot be determined; the story is part of the epic tradition, not of contemporary record.] The name is deeply telling in another way: that a Christian Georgian national hero is remembered by a Persian epithet, complete with a Persian battle-cry, captures precisely the Iranian aristocratic world in which Christian Kartli lived (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014). Vakhtang is a wolf-headed Iranian warrior-lord and the sainted defender of the Georgian Church at once — and both are true to the fifth century.

What the Foundations Establish

The child-king and the wolf’s head give the collection its first two lessons in method. The accession as a boy under a regency is plausible and traditional but undated and unverifiable in its particulars; the epithet is genuine and its etymology sound, but the vivid story that explains it is epic etiology. From the very start, then, the Vakhtang material asks to be read on two levels at once — the sober outline of a fifth-century Chosroid king in the Sasanian shadow, and the epic hero the Life built on that outline. Holding the two apart, without either debunking the tradition or mistaking it for archive, is the discipline the rest of this collection tries to keep (see The King and the Epic).

References

Thomson, Robert W. Rewriting Caucasian History: The Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles. The Original Georgian Texts and the Armenian Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. (The Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali; the accession and childhood as narrated; the wolf-head epithet.)
Toumanoff, Cyril. “Chronology of the Early Kings of Iberia.” Traditio 25 (1969): 1–33. (The c. 447–522 reconstruction of the reign.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes: Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (The Iranian etymology of Gorgasali; the epic shaping of the Vakhtang narrative.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. Louvain: Peeters, CSCO 601, 2003. (The dating of the Juansher Life.)
Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (The accession as a child; the wolf-head helmet and battle-cry.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The real threats of the period.)
Mikaberidze, Alexander. Historical Dictionary of Georgia. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Vakhtang; the epithet.)