Between Persia and Byzantium

The hard diplomacy of Vakhtang’s reign: a Christian king of a Sasanian-suzerain kingdom, forced to serve the Zoroastrian great king even while his faith and his kingdom’s survival drew him toward Christian Byzantium. This file follows the marriages and alliances the Life reports — the Persian royal marriage, the campaigning as the great king’s vassal, the Byzantine connection — as the means by which Vakhtang tried to hold Kartli’s precarious place between two empires.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Bind of a Client King

Vakhtang’s whole political life was lived inside a vise. Kartli was a Sasanian client-kingdom: it owed tribute, troops, and obedience to the Persian great king, and the great kings of the fifth century — Yazdegerd II, Peroz — pressed their Zoroastrian faith and their imperial administration on their Caucasian Christian subjects (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 24–25; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014). Against this stood Byzantium, the great Christian empire to the west, the natural protector of Caucasian Christianity and the only counterweight to Persia — but distant, unreliable, and often unwilling to risk a Persian war for the sake of a small mountain kingdom (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2). The art of a king of Kartli was to survive between the two: to render Persia enough obedience to avoid destruction, to keep enough of Byzantium’s favor to preserve the faith and a measure of independence, and to judge the moment when the balance had shifted enough to make resistance possible. Vakhtang’s reign is the fifth-century master-case of that art, ending — as such cases often did — in open revolt when the pressure became unbearable.

The Persian Marriage and Vassalage

The Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali does not hide the Persian side of Vakhtang’s career; on the contrary, it presents him for a long stretch as the great king’s son-in-law and campaigning vassal. According to the Life, Vakhtang married a Sasanian princess — named in the tradition Balendukht, said to be a daughter (or close kinswoman) of the Persian great king — and thereby entered the Iranian royal family and its obligations (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the Persian marriage and the Iranian framing of the narrative). As the great king’s kinsman and vassal, the Life has Vakhtang serve in the Sasanian armies, campaigning at Persia’s side — even, in the fuller tradition, on distant expeditions in the service of the empire before his eventual break with it (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996).

[Disputed: the details of Vakhtang’s Persian marriage and vassal-service. The Sasanian marriage (to a princess the tradition calls Balendukht) and Vakhtang’s campaigning as the great king’s vassal are narrated in the Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali, a later semi-epic source, and cannot be independently confirmed in their particulars (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014). That a Christian Iberian client-king would marry into or serve the Sasanian house is entirely consistent with the known position of Kartli as a Persian vassal, and the Life’s frankness about it is one reason scholars take the underlying situation seriously; but the names and episodes are tradition, not documented record.]

The historical value of this material is precisely in its embarrassment. A later hagiographic-national tradition, glorifying Vakhtang as the Christian champion against the fire-worshippers, had no motive to invent his marriage into the Zoroastrian royal house or his years of service to the great king; that the Life preserves these things anyway suggests they answer to a real memory of how a fifth-century Iberian king actually lived — as a vassal of Persia who was at the same time a Christian and a Georgian (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the Iranian embeddedness of the Georgian royal tradition). The very Persianness of Vakhtang — his Persian epithet, his Persian marriage, his Persian service — is the historical ground on which the tradition’s later portrait of the anti-Persian martyr is built.

The Byzantine Connection

The other pole of Vakhtang’s diplomacy was Constantinople. The Life and the Georgian tradition connect Vakhtang with the Christian Roman Empire — through a Byzantine marriage (the tradition gives him, alongside or after the Persian princess, a Byzantine wife, named Helena in some tellings, said to be of the imperial house) and through the alignment of his faith and his kingdom’s interest with the great Christian power (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, ch. 2). The Byzantine connection is bound up with the ecclesiastical dimension of his reign: the tradition that Vakhtang reordered the Georgian Church and secured its elevation involves the great sees of the Christian East — above all Antioch, under whose jurisdiction Kartli’s higher clergy stood — and thus the wider Christian world of which Byzantium was the head (see The Catholicosate Question).

[Disputed: the Byzantine marriage and alliance. As with the Persian side, the specific Byzantine marriage (the tradition’s “Helena”) and the details of the imperial alliance are given by the later Georgian tradition and are not independently documented (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996). The general orientation — a Christian king of Kartli looking to Byzantium as the protector of his faith and the counterweight to Persia — is historically secure for the period and the position (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994); the particular marriages and their timing are tradition.]

The Turn to Resistance

The two-empire diplomacy was not stable, and it was never meant to be an end in itself. The whole point of balancing Persia and Byzantium was the survival of Christian Kartli, and when Sasanian pressure on the faith became intolerable — as it did across the Caucasus in the second half of the fifth century, driving Armenia into the great revolt of 481–484 — the balancing gave way to resistance. Vakhtang’s reign turns, in the tradition and in the one securely attested external episode, from vassalage to rebellion: the wolf-headed vassal of the great king becomes the leader of an anti-Sasanian revolt, joining the Armenian rising under Vahan Mamikonian (Thomson, The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, 1991; see The Defense of Christian Iberia). The diplomacy of this file is the long prelude to that break; the wars of the next section are where it led.

What the reign shows, read as a whole, is not inconsistency but the tragic logic of a small Christian kingdom between two empires: obedience to Persia as long as obedience was survivable, marriage and service to buy time and protection, alignment with Byzantium and the Christian East for the sake of the faith, and, when the pressure on that faith grew unbearable, revolt — with all its risk, and, in Vakhtang’s case, its fatal end (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 25; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014).

References

Thomson, Robert W. Rewriting Caucasian History: The Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. (The Persian and Byzantine marriages; the vassal-service; the Life’s narrative.)
Thomson, Robert W., trans. The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. (The Iberian king in the anti-Sasanian revolt of 482–484.)
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 embeddedness of the Georgian royal tradition; the Persian marriage and service.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (Kartli between Persia and Byzantium; the pressures on the faith.)
Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (The two-empire diplomacy; the Byzantine connection.)