The King and the Epic

Separating the historical sovereign from the folk-epic “Gorgasali.” This file draws together the collection’s source-criticism into a portrait: what a sober fifth-century Vakhtang looks like when the epic is discounted, how and why the Juansher Life magnified him into the legendary wolf-headed hero of Georgian tradition, and why both figures — the man and the legend — matter for reading the tradition rightly.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Two Vakhtangs

There are, in effect, two Vakhtangs, and the whole difficulty of the subject is that they reach us fused in a single source. There is the historical sovereign — a real fifth-century Chosroid king of Kartli, glimpsed at one point through the external evidence of the Armenian Łazar Pʿarpecʿi and set in a world the Martyrdom of Shushanik independently attests. And there is the folk-epic “Gorgasali” — the wolf-headed giant of the Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali, who fights single combats, campaigns to the ends of the earth, and towers over the tradition as the archetype of the Georgian warrior-king (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014). The methodology file set out the rules for telling them apart (see Methodology); this file draws the resulting portrait, and asks what each Vakhtang is worth.

The Historical Sovereign

Stripped of the epic, a sober and coherent fifth-century king remains. He was a Chosroid, of the dynasty St. Nina’s convert Mirian III had founded, ruling a Christian Kartli held within the Sasanian sphere and pressed by a Zoroastrian great king (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963; see Iberia in the Fifth Century). He mastered a fractious nobility and built the military strength of the realm — the perennial task of an Iberian king, and the credible ground of the Life’s martial praise (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, 24–28). He defended the northern frontier against nomadic incursion through the Caucasian passes. He lived, for a time, as a Persian vassal — very possibly married into the Sasanian house, certainly bound to its obligations — and then, when Sasanian pressure on the faith became intolerable, he turned to open revolt, leading the Iberians in the anti-Sasanian rising of 482–484 alongside the Armenian Vahan Mamikonian; this is the one deed of his that external, near-contemporary evidence confirms (Thomson, The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, 1991; see The Defense of Christian Iberia).

He refounded Tbilisi as a fortified capital, beginning the shift of the royal seat from Mtskheta that his son Dachi completed — a rational act of a defense-minded king, confirmed indirectly by Tbilisi’s emergence as the seat of the Persian marzpan within a generation of his death (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012; Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963; see The Founding of the Capital). He reordered and strengthened the Church of Kartli and patronized its mother-see at Mtskheta, in what the later tradition would remember — with disputed accuracy as to date and degree — as the founding of the Georgian Church’s autocephaly (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003; see The Catholicosate Question). And he died of a wound in a last war against Persia, at a date that cannot be fixed between c. 502 and c. 522 (Toumanoff, Traditio 25, 1969; see The Last Battle). This is a substantial and credible king — not a shadow, but a fifth-century sovereign whose broad career can be reconstructed, even where its details and dates remain uncertain.

The Folk-Epic “Gorgasali”

Over this historical king the Life built a hero. The epic Vakhtang is a giant of prodigious strength; he meets enemy champions in single combat before the armies and prevails; he leads campaigns across the whole Caucasus and toward the ends of the world; he is the wolf-headed terror at whom the Persians cry out in battle; he dies, like an epic hero, by a hidden shot at his one vulnerable point, loosed by a traitor who knew the secret (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014). This magnification is not random invention; it follows the pattern of the Iranian epic tradition in which Kartli’s aristocratic culture was steeped — a tradition of heroic kings and world-spanning deeds — and it casts the fifth-century defender of Kartli in that heroic mold (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the Life’s debt to Iranian epic; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003).

Why did the epic grow? Because the tradition needed it to. The Life was composed centuries after Vakhtang’s death, in a Georgia for which he had become the archetype of the Christian warrior-king — the founder of the capital, the defender of the faith, the head of the line that would run to David the Builder and Tamar (see Legacy). National memory magnifies its founders, and a Christian nation under later pressures needed a heroic image of the king who had held off the Zoroastrian empire in the fifth century. The epic “Gorgasali” is that image: a claim about Vakhtang’s stature, expressed in the idiom of epic geography and single combat. To read the far campaigns as history is to mistake the idiom; to dismiss them as mere fiction is to miss what they truly record — the tradition’s own estimate of its greatest king (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014).

Why Both Matter

The temptation is to choose between the two Vakhtangs — to keep the sober historical king and discard the epic hero as so much legend. The collection resists this, because both are real objects of knowledge, of different kinds. The historical sovereign is the object of history: a fifth-century king whose career, checked against the external evidence, can be soberly reconstructed and whose sanctity rests on a real defense of the faith. The epic “Gorgasali” is the object of a different inquiry: he is what the Georgian tradition made of that king, and as such he is a primary datum for the history of Georgian national and religious memory — evidence not of the fifth century but of how the fifth century was remembered and needed (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014).

This is also the right frame for the collection’s veneration of Vakhtang as a saint. The Church does not venerate the epic prodigies; it venerates a Christian king who defended the faith and died in its cause — the historical core, received and interpreted by the tradition (see A Warrior King as Saint). The epic is the tradition’s way of praising him; the sanctity rests on the core. To honor the saint while reading the epic as epic is not a diminishment but a clarification: it lets the real Vakhtang — the fifth-century defender of Christian Kartli, the founder of Tbilisi, the martyr-king — stand in his own right, neither buried under the legend nor stripped of the honor the legend expresses.

The Portrait the Collection Keeps

The Vakhtang this collection presents is therefore double by design: a credible fifth-century sovereign, reconstructed soberly and dated only in ranges, around whom the Georgian tradition wove an epic of world-conquering heroism — and a saint whose veneration rests on the historical core of a life given to the defense of the faith. Holding the man and the legend together, each labeled for what it is, is the discipline the whole collection has tried to keep. The result is not the flat, debunked Vakhtang of pure skepticism, nor the uncritical epic hero of the popular tradition, but a truer figure than either: the wolf-headed king of Kartli as history can recover him and as his people have remembered him, in their proper relation (see Assessment).

References

Thomson, Robert W. Rewriting Caucasian History: The Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. (The Life as epic; the received Vakhtang.)
Thomson, Robert W., trans. The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. (The external anchor for the historical king.)
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-epic magnification; the historical core.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. Louvain: Peeters, CSCO 601, 2003. (The Life as national memory.)
Toumanoff, Cyril. “Chronology of the Early Kings of Iberia.” Traditio 25 (1969): 1–33; and Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The chronology and the Chosroid dynasty.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The sober fifth-century king.)
Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (The reconstructed career.)