Legacy

The enduring fruits of Vakhtang’s reign: the founder of Tbilisi, the defender of Georgian Christianity, and the head of the royal-sacred line that runs from his fifth-century Iberia down to David the Builder and Queen Tamar. This file gathers what Vakhtang left — in the city, in the Church, and in the national-royal tradition of Georgia.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Founder of the Capital

The most tangible legacy of Vakhtang is a city. Tbilisi, which he refounded as a fortified capital and whose transfer from Mtskheta his son Dachi completed, has been the capital of the Georgian lands from the sixth century to the present — through Sasanian marzpans, Arab emirs, Seljuk conquest, the Bagrationi restoration, the Mongol and Persian and Ottoman and Russian centuries, and the modern republic (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012, ch. 2; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; see The City and the Kingdom). Few founders leave a fruit so durable or so continuously inhabited. Every later chapter of Georgian history has been written in Vakhtang’s city, and the founder’s memory has been renewed with it — most visibly in the equestrian statue that keeps his watch above the Kura (see Vakhtang in Georgian Memory). To have founded the enduring capital of a nation is a legacy that outlasts every uncertainty about the founder’s own biography.

The Defender of the Faith

Vakhtang’s second legacy is the survival of Christian Iberia through the crisis of the fifth century. He inherited the faith St. Nina had planted and Mirian III had established, and he defended it — against the Zoroastrian pressure of the Sasanian great kings, in the anti-Persian revolt of 482–484, and to his death in a last Persian war (Thomson, The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, 1991; see The Defense of Christian Iberia). The Sasanian program he resisted would, within two generations, suppress the Iberian kingship and rule Kartli through a Persian viceroy (Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963); but the faith survived that subjection, and Georgian Christianity, kept through the marzpanate and the later conquests, traces part of its endurance to the fifth-century kings who would not let it be absorbed. Vakhtang stands among them as the greatest — the wolf-headed defender whom the tradition made the archetype of Christian resistance (see The King and the Epic).

Bound up with this is his legacy to the Georgian Church itself. Whatever the disputed particulars of the Catholicosate (see The Catholicosate Question), Vakhtang belongs to the fifth-century strengthening and ordering of the Church of Kartli, and the later, secure autocephalous Georgian Church remembered him as the founder of its independence — a foundation-figure at the head of its constitutional tradition (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003). His patronage of Svetitskhoveli, the mother-church where the tradition places his burial, ties his memory to the sacred heart of Georgian Christianity (see The Reorganization of the Georgian Church).

The Head of a Royal-Sacred Line

Vakhtang’s third legacy is his place at the head of the Georgian tradition of the holy warrior-king. He is the first of the great Georgian royal saints — the model, in a sense, for those who came after: a Christian sovereign who defended the faith and was venerated for it. Six centuries later, David IV the Builder would inherit a shattered kingdom, break the Seljuks at Didgori, retake Tbilisi — Vakhtang’s city — in 1122 and make it his capital again, reform the Church, and be venerated as a saint; and David’s great-granddaughter Tamar would rule the Golden Age of a united Georgia and likewise be canonized (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994; see St. David the Builder and St. Tamar of Georgia). The line from Vakhtang to David and Tamar is not a simple genealogy — the dynasties change, the Chosroids giving way to the Bagrationis — but it is a real tradition: the tradition of the Georgian holy king, the Christian sovereign whose defense of faith and nation the Church crowns with sanctity, and Vakhtang stands at its source (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976).

Between Vakhtang and David lie the other builders of Georgian Christianity whose work his defense made possible: the sixth-century Thirteen Assyrian Fathers who came a generation after him and founded Georgian monasticism, planting the monastic life in the land he had defended (see The Thirteen Assyrian Fathers); and the martyrs of his own city, above all St. Abo of Tbilisi, martyred there under Arab rule and venerated as its patron (see St. Abo of Tbilisi). Vakhtang’s defended Iberia is the ground on which the whole later flowering of Georgian sanctity grew.

An Enduring Legacy Beyond an Uncertain Life

The paradox of Vakhtang’s legacy is that it is far more secure than his biography. The precise events of his life, his dates, the historicity of his exploits — all remain uncertain, wrapped in a later epic and undated by any contemporary. But the fruits are not uncertain: Tbilisi stands; the Georgian Church endures and traces its independence to him; the tradition of the Georgian holy warrior-king runs from him to David and Tamar; and the nation keeps his memory as founder and his feast as saint (Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, 2012; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976). A king may be hard to reconstruct and yet unmistakable in his consequences; Vakhtang is such a king. What he left has outlasted, by fifteen centuries, every doubt about what he did — and it is by these fruits, more than by the epic or the fragmentary record, that his true stature is measured (see Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (Tbilisi through the ages; David the Builder’s recapture; the royal tradition.)
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The Church, the capital, and the Georgian royal-sacred tradition.)
  • Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1963. (The Chosroids, the marzpanate, the dynastic history.)
  • Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography. Louvain: Peeters, CSCO 601, 2003. (Vakhtang as foundation-figure of the Church.)
  • Thomson, Robert W., trans. The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. (The defense of the faith.)
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (The tradition of the Georgian holy kings.)