The Founding of the Capital

The founding of Tbilisi and the shift of the royal seat from ancient Mtskheta — the deed for which Vakhtang is most remembered by his nation. This file sets the famous foundation legend (the king’s hunt, the falcon and the pheasant, and the hot springs that give the city its name) beside what history can say, treating the tradition as tradition and pinning the documentable core under the collection’s §3.5 discipline.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Legend of the Hunt

The founding of Tbilisi comes to us wrapped in one of the most beloved legends of Georgian tradition. As the Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali and the later Georgian chronicles tell it, King Vakhtang was hunting in the wooded, thickly forested country of the Kura valley below Mtskheta when his hawk (a falcon, in the common telling) brought down a pheasant — and the bird fell into a hot spring, where it was found scalded (or, in other versions, cooked, or healed). Struck by the warm springs of the place, Vakhtang ordered a city to be built there; and the city took its name from the springs, for tbili in Georgian means “warm,” so that Tbilisi is, in effect, “the place of the warm springs” (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2; the legend is standard in the Georgian chronicle tradition and the popular hagiography; the etymology from Georgian tbili, “warm,” is secure, Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015, s.v. Tbilisi).

The legend is charming and durable, and it carries a genuine kernel: Tbilisi’s sulfurous hot springs are real — the district of the bathhouses (Abanotubani) has drawn on them for the whole life of the city — and the name really does derive from the Georgian word for “warm” (Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015, s.v. Tbilisi; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). What the legend supplies is an etiology: a story to explain a name and a founding that were, by the time the chronicles were written, already ancient. As with the wolf-head epithet, the etymology is sound and the founding-connection to Vakhtang is traditional, but the hunt-and-hawk anecdote is exactly the kind of etiological tale that gathers around a famous foundation (see The Child King for the parallel with the epithet).

[Disputed: the foundation legend of Tbilisi. The hunting-and-hot-springs story (the falcon, the pheasant, and the warm springs) is a traditional foundation legend preserved in the Georgian chronicles and popular tradition, not a documented event; the derivation of the name from Georgian tbili, “warm,” is philologically secure (Mikaberidze, Historical Dictionary of Georgia, 2015; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). The site was, moreover, already inhabited before Vakhtang; archaeology and the settlement history show occupation of the Tbilisi area well before the fifth century, so that Vakhtang’s role is better understood as the founding of the royal city — its establishment or refoundation as a fortified capital — than as the creation of a settlement on empty ground (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). This collection reports the hunt-legend as tradition and the refounding-as-capital as the historical core.]

Founding, or Refounding?

The sober historical picture behind the legend is one of foundation in the sense of elevation to a capital, not creation from nothing. The site of Tbilisi — a defensible narrows on the Kura, commanding the river route and the roads, with its hot springs and its fortress hill — had been settled and fortified before Vakhtang’s day; the area was not empty when he came to it (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994). What the tradition credits to Vakhtang, and what history can plausibly grant him, is the decision to make this strategically superior site the seat of the kingdom — to build it up as a fortified royal city and to begin the transfer of the capital there from the old and venerable, but less defensible, religious center of Mtskheta a little upriver (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963).

The strategic logic is clear and gives the tradition its credibility. Mtskheta, at the confluence of the Kura and Aragvi, was the ancient royal and spiritual heart of Kartli — the seat of St. Nina’s mission and of the cathedral of Svetitskhoveli (see The Reorganization of the Georgian Church) — but its position was exposed. Tbilisi, downstream, offered a stronger defensive site commanding the river and the crossroads of Kartli, better suited to a kingdom that had to hold itself against Persia and the northern nomads (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, ch. 2; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 25). The move from Mtskheta to Tbilisi is, in this light, a rational act of a defense-minded king — and it fits the whole tradition of Vakhtang as the reorganizer and strengthener of the realm (see Warrior and Statesman).

The Transfer Completed Under His Son

One important qualification the sources themselves supply: the transfer of the capital was not finished in Vakhtang’s lifetime. The Georgian tradition holds that Vakhtang began the work — chose the site, ordered the building — but that the completion of the shift of the capital from Mtskheta to Tbilisi fell to his son and successor, Dachi (Darchil), who moved the royal residence there in fulfillment of his father’s design (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2; the tradition of Dachi’s completion is standard in the chronicle accounts). This is a telling detail: it is the kind of qualification a purely legendary tradition might have omitted for the sake of a cleaner story, and its survival suggests a real memory of a founding begun by one reign and completed by the next.

The external evidence is consistent with an early-sixth-century emergence of Tbilisi as a place of the first importance: by around 518–520 Tbilisi (Tiflis) was the seat of a Persian marzpan, the viceroy through whom the Sasanians ruled Kartli — which shows the city was, within a generation of Vakhtang’s death, the effective center of the kingdom, exactly as the tradition of its foundation as capital would lead one to expect (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963; the installation of the Iranian viceroy at Tiflis by c. 518 is noted in the standard chronologies). The city Vakhtang founded as the seat of Christian Iberian kingship became, with grim irony, the seat of the Persian overlordship his life had resisted — and remained, through every later age, the capital of Georgia.

The Founder of the City

Whatever the precise division of labor between legend and history, one thing is beyond dispute: Georgian tradition, and the Georgian nation to this day, remember Vakhtang as the founder of Tbilisi, and the city itself enshrines the memory — in the great equestrian statue of Gorgasali above the Metekhi church, overlooking the river and the old town, and in the whole civic identity of a capital that traces its origin to the wolf-headed king (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012; see Vakhtang in Georgian Memory). The historian may qualify — a refounding rather than a creation, a work completed by his son, a legend for the name — but the core survives every qualification: Vakhtang made Tbilisi the capital of the Georgians, and it has been so, through fifteen centuries, ever since.

References

Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (The foundation of Tbilisi; the shift from Mtskheta; the completion under Dachi.)
Mikaberidze, Alexander. Historical Dictionary of Georgia. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Tbilisi; the etymology from tbili, “warm.”)
Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The chronology; the Persian viceroy at Tiflis by c. 518.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The strategic setting; the pre-existing settlement.)
Thomson, Robert W. Rewriting Caucasian History: The Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. (The Life’s account of the founding.)