02 — The Making of a King
How the child of Section 01 became the king the tradition remembers: the consolidation of royal power over a fractious nobility, the near-legendary martial exploits the Life heaps upon him, and the hard diplomacy of a Christian sovereign caught between the Sasanian and Byzantine empires — the marriages and alliances by which he survived. These two files present the grown Vakhtang, always distinguishing the documentable political reality from the epic elaboration of the source.
Tradition: Georgian Orthodox
The making of Vakhtang, as the Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali tells it, has two faces. Inwardly it is the mastering of Kartli’s nobility and the building of a strong kingship; outwardly it is the perilous navigation between Persia and Byzantium, in which a Christian king of a Persian-suzerain kingdom had to be at once the great king’s vassal and the guardian of his people’s faith. The Life dresses both in the colors of epic — single combats, fabulous journeys, set-piece speeches — and this section is careful to mark where the epic ends and the plausible history begins (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014).
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Warrior and Statesman | The consolidation of royal power and the taming of the great nobles; the near-legendary martial exploits — the duels and campaigns as the Life presents them — read with §3.5 discipline as epic built on a plausible core of hard fifth-century statecraft. |
| Between Persia and Byzantium | The navigation between the Sasanian and Byzantine empires; the marriages and alliances — the Persian royal marriage and the Byzantine connection the Life reports — by which Vakhtang tried to hold Kartli’s precarious independence. |
See Also
- The Child King — the boy who became this king
- The Defense of Christian Iberia — where the diplomacy broke down into open revolt
- The King and the Epic — the epic hero and the historical sovereign
References
- Thomson, Robert W. Rewriting Caucasian History: The Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
- Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
- Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
- Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012.