The City and the Kingdom

Tbilisi as the new center of the kingdom: why the site mattered, the building works the tradition credits to Vakhtang, the completion of the transfer under his son Dachi, and the city’s swift emergence as the seat first of Kartlian and then of Persian power. This file follows Tbilisi from Vakhtang’s founding into its role as the enduring capital of Georgia, keeping tradition and documentable history distinct.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Why the Site Mattered

The choice of Tbilisi was a choice about the shape of the kingdom. Where Mtskheta sat at the sacred confluence of the Kura and Aragvi — the religious heart of Kartli since St. Nina, but a site more venerable than defensible — Tbilisi lay a short way downstream at a natural stronghold: a narrows of the Kura commanded by a fortress hill (the later Narikala), astride the river route and the road-crossings of eastern Georgia, and endowed with the sulfurous hot springs that would give the city its name and its baths (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 25). For a king whose reign was one long defense of Kartli against Persia and the northern nomads, the strategic advantages of such a site were decisive: it was a place that could be held, that controlled the movement of armies and trade through the Kura valley, and that looked toward the frontiers a defensive capital needed to watch (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The move to Tbilisi was, in this sense, of a piece with everything else the tradition credits to Vakhtang — the reorganization of the realm for survival (see Warrior and Statesman).

The Building Works of the Tradition

The Georgian tradition credits Vakhtang not only with the decision to found the capital but with the beginning of its building: the fortification of the site and the laying-out of the royal city, the construction of the fortress and the first churches, and the works that turned a strategic strongpoint into a seat of kingship (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2; the building-works tradition is standard in the chronicle accounts of the founding). Among the churches whose origin the tradition associates with the early city is the church on the rock above the Kura at Metekhi — later rebuilt many times, and the site above which the great equestrian statue of Gorgasali now stands — though the surviving structures there are of far later date and the fifth-century works cannot be recovered archaeologically in any detail (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

[Disputed: the extent of Vakhtang’s building works at Tbilisi. The tradition credits Vakhtang with fortifying and building up the new capital — the fortress, the first churches, the royal city; but the fifth-century fabric is not recoverable, the site was already inhabited and fortified before him, and the surviving monuments (Narikala’s walls, the Metekhi church, the bath district) are all of much later construction (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994). The historical core — that Vakhtang refounded and fortified Tbilisi as the royal capital — is credible and traditional; the specific fifth-century buildings are not archaeologically attested and are reported here as tradition.]

The honest position is the one the collection keeps throughout: the fact of the refounding-as-capital is credible and well-anchored in tradition and in the city’s subsequent history; the particulars of Vakhtang’s construction are tradition, not documented archaeology. What can be said is that Vakhtang began, and his successors continued, the making of Tbilisi into the fortified seat of the Kartlian kingship.

The Completion Under Dachi

The sources are candid that the work outlived its founder. Vakhtang, the tradition holds, chose the site and began the building, but died before the transfer of the capital was complete; the actual removal of the royal seat from Mtskheta to Tbilisi was carried through by his son and successor, Dachi (Darchil), who made Tbilisi his residence and, in the chronicle tradition, fulfilled his father’s dying instruction to complete the city and finish the walls (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2; the tradition of Dachi’s completion of Tbilisi is standard in the Georgian chronicles). This two-reign founding — begun by Vakhtang, completed by Dachi — is one of the more historically credible elements of the whole tradition, precisely because it complicates the simple story of a single royal founder; it reads like real institutional memory rather than legend.

From Christian Capital to Persian Seat

The swift rise of Tbilisi is confirmed, ironically, by the very power Vakhtang had resisted. Within a generation of his death, Tbilisi (Tiflis) had become the seat of the Persian marzpan — the Sasanian viceroy through whom Persia ruled Kartli after the suppression of an effective independent kingship — attested by around 518–520 (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963; the installation of the Iranian viceroy at Tiflis by c. 518 is standard in the chronology of the period). That the Persians chose Tbilisi as their administrative center is strong indirect evidence that it had already become, by the early sixth century, the effective capital of the country — exactly what the tradition of Vakhtang’s foundation would predict. The city built as the seat of Christian Iberian kingship became the seat of the Zoroastrian overlordship, and then, as Sasanian and later Arab power waned and Georgian kingship revived, the capital of a Christian Georgia once more (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

The Enduring Capital

The measure of Vakhtang’s foundation is its endurance. Tbilisi has been the capital of the Georgian lands, through every conquest and revival, from the sixth century to the present — the seat of the medieval Bagrationi kings, of David the Builder who retook it from its Muslim emirs in 1122 and made it his capital (see St. David the Builder), of Queen Tamar’s Golden Age (see St. Tamar of Georgia), and of the modern Georgian nation and state (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994). It has also been the city of martyrs — most famously St. Abo, the eighth-century convert from Islam martyred there under Arab rule and venerated as the city’s heavenly patron (see St. Abo of Tbilisi). Through all of it, Georgian memory has traced the city’s origin to Vakhtang, and the founder-of-the-capital is central to why the Church and the nation hold him a hero and a saint (see Vakhtang in Georgian Memory). Of all his deeds, this is the one whose fruit is still visible: a city, fifteen centuries old, that has never ceased to be Georgia’s heart.

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (Tbilisi’s site and founding; the building works; the completion under Dachi; David the Builder’s recapture.)
  • Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The chronology; the Persian marzpan at Tiflis by c. 518.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The strategic setting; Tbilisi as capital through the ages.)
  • Mikaberidze, Alexander. Historical Dictionary of Georgia. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Tbilisi.)