Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (30 page)

The people who inhabited this debatable land shared many of the striking qualities of the Celts to which attention has been drawn in Chapter Four; although possessed since ancient times of their own written and spoken language, they did not share that aspect of Celtic civilization – its lack of written record – which makes it so elusive. Unlike that of the Celts, the Georgian love of the arts could be attested, other than orally and visually. But in other ways the feasting, the splendour of personal adornment and above all the fighting recall those singing, drinking, gold-bedecked Celts, ancestors of the Iceni, who migrated across the English Channel to East Anglia. When the Patriarch of Jerusalem wanted to describe the Georgians in 1225, he called them ‘very warlike and valiant in battle … much dreaded by the Saracens with their long hair, beards and hats’: words which recall those of Strabo concerning the Celts, a whole race high-spirited and war-mad. Here too were chieftains and aristocrats, and by the twelfth century a society which could be described as feudal in Norman terms, that is with a strong tradition of kingship balanced by a strong tradition of warrior independence. (It has been said that in Georgia every peasant is a prince, or behaves like one.)
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Above all the Georgians enjoyed their roistering if feudacious lives – as, given the slightest opportunity, they have continued to do ever since.

The ancient history of Georgia stretches back to that fabulous time when the Argonauts, some fifteen centuries before Christ, set out for Colchis to recover the golden fleece.
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(Medea, tragic prototype of the woman scorned, was the daughter of the Colchian King.) But the whole legend may reflect the actual journeys of the Greek adventurers from Miletus to benefit from the mineral wealth of the Caucasus. The kingdom of Colchis was certainly flourishing about the sixth century
BC
and the powerful
kingdom of Kartli at the beginning of the Christian era, itself falling under the sway of the miracle-making St Nino in about
AD
330. The partial Arab conquest of the seventh century brought Georgia into the oriental world: at the same time it was subject to the territorial ambitions of other aggressive neighbours, the Byzantine Empire to the west and the Armenian monarchy to the south. It was not until the late tenth century that the unification of East and West Georgia into an independent feudal monarchy was made possible by the collapse of Muslim power in the Caucasus, and the waning imperialism of both Byzantium and Armenia.

The ruling family of Bagrationi were the beneficiaries. Originally hailing from the marchlands of Georgia and Armenia, the Bagrationis had travelled northwards and, by a mixture of dynastic luck and political energy, garnered to themselves a number of princely patrimonies including Kartli. Bagrat Bagrationi was crowned in
AD
975. It was a taste of things to come – as well as underlining the honour paid to women – that a woman regent in the shape of the intelligent Queen Dowager Mariam Artsruni should rule most successfully in the early part of the eleventh century. It was however the Bagrationi King David II, known for his achievements in raising his country from its state of collapse as the Restorer (or Builder), who was responsible for the most memorable epoch of Georgian history before the age of Tamara.

David the Restorer was crowned at the age of sixteen in 1089, that is, some twenty years before Henry I ascended the throne of England, and died ten years before the English King, in 1125. In his celebrated will, David the Restorer bequeathed to his royal heir a state ‘from Nikopsia [on the Black Sea] to Derbend [on the Caspian] and from Ossetia to Arragat’.
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It was not an idle boast. As his ancestors had benefited from the collapse of Muslim power and the decline of the Byzantine empire, David the Restorer in his turn benefited from the effects of the First Crusade of 1096, and the Norman–French campaigns against the Seljuk Turks. The Turkish victory of Manzikert in 1071 had
brought their menacing presence close to the very borders of Georgia; in the 1080s hordes of Turkish nomads began to roam the Georgian heartlands of Kartli. After years of campaigning, it was the achievement of David the Restorer to push them back successfully: after the victory of Didgori in 1121, in which some Crusaders participated, Georgia was increasingly seen as a Christian bulwark.

Finally, in the climax of his reign, David the Restorer recovered Tiflis (Tbilisi), the ancient Georgian capital, which from the Georgian point of view had languished as an Islamic city for nearly four hundred years. The fortress of Rustavi built to the south of Tiflis signified a new security. And in his last years David the Restorer, as a Christian, was even able to exert overlordship over Muslim Shirvan. It was a hegemony made easier to endure by the essentially constructive nature of David’s sovereignty (as his sobriquet indicates): his newly acquired Muslim subjects within Tiflis, for example, were granted an amnesty. ‘He soothed their hearts’, wrote a Muslim contemporary of this act of grace, ‘and left them alone in all goodness’.
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With such a progenitor (who also patronized scholarship and building) it might seem that the reign of Tamara, great-granddaughter to David the Restorer, was assured of glory: not so. In the intervening years – nearly sixty of them
^f1
– before Tamara’s assumption of sole rulership, Georgia, that bold ship surrounded by so many troubled and troubling seas, ran into rough weather once more.

The twenty-five-year reign of David’s successor, Dimitri, has probably been treated too curiously by the annalists writing in the reign of his younger son (and Tamara’s father) Giorgi III.
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This was because Giorgi III succeeded (somewhat as did Richard III of England) in place of his own great-nephew Demna, heir to
Dimitri’s elder son, David III, who reigned a mere six months. Propagandists wisely did not care to emphasize the virtues of the father at the expense of those of the son. Nevertheless it is undubitable that King Dimitri failed to hold on to the signal conquests of David the Restorer, as the Muslims began to recover strength and the Crusader kingdoms of Syria and Palestine in turn began to fail.

If one overlooks the coarseness and cruelty of Giorgi III, it has to be admitted that he kept the thrusting nobles in check: on the other hand he indulged freely in favourites. Nor is the cruelty easy to overlook. When Demna attempted to regain his rightful throne in 1174, with much support from the princely houses of the kingdom, he was defeated in battle at Hereti. After that, cornered at Lori, in a scene which once again needs Shakespeare’s pen, Demna, the rightful heir, was first blinded and then castrated.

Thus it was that Tamara, last of the direct line of the Bagrationis, thanks to the careful atrocities of her father, came to inherit.

The accession of Queen Tamara had not been without careful preparation on the part of the previous monarch. Where King Henry I of England attempted to bond his nobles to his heiress with oaths of fealty (but did not associate her with his rule) King Giorgi had his daughter actually crowned as co-ruler in 1178, six years before his own death. Declaring Tamara to be the ‘bright light of his eyes’, he hailed her as queen with the assent of the patriarchs, bishops, nobles, viziers and generals. The new Queen sat on her father’s right dressed in purple ornamented with gold and silver fringes. Giorgi gave her the official title of ‘Mountain of God’ and placed on her head a crown richly encrusted with rubies and diamonds.
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At the death of Giorgi in 1184, Tamara became sole ruler, and was consecrated queen once more by the Archbishop of Kutaisi. She was also proclaimed ‘King of Kartli’, by that interesting expedient by which the royal title magically transforms the sex of
its bearer rather than the other way round. (The Georgian word was
Mepe
, there being at this date no word for queen in the language.)

Queen Tamara was in her late twenties at the time of her accession.
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Even so, she was put under the official guardianship of her father’s sister Rusudani. It is suggested that she felt some impatience at the ‘domination of women’, but as an unmarried queen regnant there was of course another domination to which she must sooner or later subject herself – that of a husband who would, if nothing else, generate those heirs of which the house of Bagrationi stood in urgent need. The first husband chosen on the insistence of her aunt was George Bogolyubski, son of the Grand Prince Andrew of Suzdal from the adjacent south Russian kingdom of Kiev, who had been exiled as a child. They were married in 1187.

It proved to be an ill-fated union, not least because it was the union of an ill-matched pair. Tamara’s natural austerity of temperament, even puritanism, has already been mentioned. No such restraints troubled Prince George Bogolyubski. A series of military expeditions against the Muslims in the south brought him some popularity among a fighting people; the man of war did not easily adapt to the manners of Tamara’s court. The couple’s rare moments of happiness together were experienced out hunting: Tamara, like many another Warrior Queen, enjoyed the mimic battle charge of the chase. Otherwise it was a disaster. The Queen might have dealt with his overbearing and truculent demeanour or even his drunkenness, as indeed for two years she endured the excesses of his debauchery with numerous slaves and concubines. But the fact that Tamara remained childless – something for which her husband reproached her personally in public, a notable affront – meant that there was no practical motive for shoring up the marriage. She had no real need to overlook his gross sexual misconduct further.

The Queen however refused to have her husband punished, a sentence which in that age and in that country might have been harshly carried out (witness Giorgi III’s handling of his great-nephew). She allowed him simply to go into exile; furthermore
she sweetened his dismissal with opulent gifts. There is no evidence that Tamara regretted her leniency, despite the subsequent attempts of her first husband to raise the standard of revolt against her in her own country: the ghost of her father might have pointed out that dead (or imprisoned and blinded) husbands were in no position to foment rebellion.

All this lay ahead. In the meantime Tamara was married – with renewed celebrations to signify renewed hope – to David Sosland. This Ossetian prince came from an especially suitable background in that he was descended from the half-brother of a former Bagrationi monarch: he was also an excellent horseman, something to appeal to the Georgians (as it would have appealed to the horse-mad Iceni). In other ways he proved suitable: a son Giorgi was born in 1194 and a daughter Rusudani the following year. The succession was secure. This second marriage freed Tamara to pursue those policies of military expansion which, if they did nothing else, would engage her nobles in their favourite pursuit of war, thus taking them away from their other favourite pursuit, jockeying for power and position.

Certainly from the start Queen Tamara, with the assistance of her aunt Rusudani, showed in dealing with the various factions in her nobility a delicate appreciation of the need for tact which the Empress Maud, for example, signally lacked. The possible unrest at the prospect of female rule was assuaged by giving a noted general command of the province of Lori; other commands were given to sons of prominent nobles to bind them to her side. The promotion of upstart favourites of her father’s reign had aroused indignation then and was liable to arouse something more than mere indignation now that Giorgi was no longer there to support them. But Tamara, by honouring former supporters of her wretched royal cousin Demna on the one hand and drawing in Sargis Mkhargrdzeli, one of Giorgi’s Kurdish minions, on the other, managed to tread the tightrope. A move to limit the powers of the sovereign by setting up what has been described as ‘a kind of House of Lords’ – to be compared with the trial of strength between the baronage and King John in England at
roughly the same date – did not succeed.
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There was to be no Georgian Magna Carta.

Instead there were to be Georgian military triumphs. But before Tamara could seek to bring these about wholesale, she had to deal with the problem of the dispossessed – in every sense – George Bogolyubski. In 1191 with the probable assistance of the Seljuk Sultan of Erzerum, the Russian Prince attempted to seize the kingdom, aiming at the support of those disaffected nobles still resentful of the power of the central monarchy at the expense of their own. Although the rebellion failed – following two pitched battles won by the Queen – such a failure was by no means a foregone conclusion since originally only the eastern sector of Georgia remained solidly loyal to the Queen.

The errant Prince was finally captured and brought before the Queen. Once more she treated him with a clemency which it might seem appropriate at this point (since it was done twice) to describe as characteristic: George Bogolyubski was permitted to withdraw to Byzantium.

This was not the last internal revolt which faced Tamara, nor the last attempt by George Bogolyubski to recover by force that position which his own violence had sacrificed in the first place. The mountain lords of Samtzkhe rebelled against the Queen a few years later and in 1200 George Bogolyubski, at the head of Turkish troops, had to be driven off once more. Indeed, the fact that for twenty years after the first revolt of 1191 Tamara pursued policies of extreme military aggression – virtually until her death in 1212 – must in part be seen as an eloquent commentary on the internal problems which faced her.

War, for Queen Tamara, was what compulsory court attendance was to Louis XIV: a method of keeping control over those not naturally prone to be controlled by their sovereign. As a matter of fact, when campaigning was in abeyance Queen Tamara employed Louis XIV’s plan of insisting on personal court attendance as well. Sport – the hunting which enabled her too to ‘ride to battle’ – was another method of ensuring that Satan did not find conspiratorial work for these idle hands.
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