Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  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.12

  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.13 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.14 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.15

  Of course the actual conduct of a campaign always presented problems for a Warrior Queen unless she literally took part in it all the grim way: control in time of war (as Queen Elizabeth I was to be gloomily aware) tending to pass from the woman on the throne to the man on the spot. Each successful Warrior Queen had to find her own solution to this dilemma. There were two possible approaches. One was to inspire from on high as if in the guise of a goddess – or as a Holy (Armed) Figurehead.
The other artifice – rather more physically testing – was to provide from time to time, as Zenobia had done, the spectacle of a fragile female sharing the military rigours: such a display of courage in the notoriously timorous sex being equally calculated to inspire.

  Queen Tamara practised both arts, presenting herself now as the presiding goddess or figurehead, now as the Queen-general by the side of her men. At home she made plans and plotted battles, displaying a flair for military strategy. On the field she made speeches: before the battle of Cambetch in 1196 she spurred on her men with a rousing address, ending ‘God be with you’. ‘To our king Tamara!’ her men shouted in reply.16

  At the famous battle of Basiani in 1205 in which Tamara’s troops routed the Turkish army under the Seljuk Sultan of Rum, the Queen began in one incarnation and ended as the other. On the eve of the conflict Tamara (who was now in her forties) marched with the vanguard of her army to the encampment – traditionally, the Queen went barefoot. She then harangued her men, receiving once again the loud huzza: ‘To our king!’

  The following day it was the Queen – or should one say the King? – who gave the command to mount. But at this point the Queen, the goddess and the ikon, became too precious to trust to the clash of battle: Tamara the referee took up a presiding position from which she could watch the event. In no way, however, should the hardihood which Tamara showed in following her men, if not actually fighting, be underestimated: as her chronicler commented on the course of her last illness (when she was in her late fifties), a woman’s constitution was bound to suffer from the hardships of continual campaigning.17

  The conquests for which this exhaustion was the price were extensive indeed: on the map the breadth and depth of the early-thirteenth-century Georgian territory astound, as does the dimension of Zenobia’s enormous if short-lived empire a thousand years before. After the capture of Byzantium in 1204 by the promulgators of the so-called Fourth Crusade, Tamara sent troops to Trebizond and Kerasund, as a result of which her relative Alexios Comnenos was established as emperor. But this new empire was in effect a Georgian Christian protectorate. There were to be other Muslim semi-protectorates, over which Tamara exerted a loose sway; while beyond the great range of the Caucasus to the north, some of the south Russian peoples paid her tribute.

  Where a protectoral relationship did not follow, there could still be substantial rewards for military raids. The Emir of Ardabil, crossing the Arak mountains, indulged in a colossal slaughter of the Georgians in 1209 – twelve thousand killed and others taken into slavery. The next year Queen Tamara ordered Ardabil to be taken by surprise: in revenge an equivalent number of its inhabitants were killed including the Emir himself; and this time the Christians captured the slaves. Daring raids on Marand in Azerbaijan, Tabriz and Kazvin took the Georgian troops deep into north Persia; on their return they brought a good proportion of its treasure back with them. The victory of Basiani had resulted in the surrender of Kars by the Sultan, to which Tamara’s son Giorgi was eventually appointed governor.

  With Tiflis, the capital, a city of some hundred thousand people, with Georgia trading not only with its neighbours but far afield, with Russians, Armenians, Persians and Turks among others bowing to her command, Queen Tamara had by the time of her death fulfilled the wildest dreams of her great-grandfather David the Restorer. ‘One knows a lion by its claws and Tamara by her actions’: so ran a contemporary saying.18

  Queen Tamara’s mercy towards her first husband has been mentioned; it is further to the credit of this Warrior Queen that her administration was generally marked by benevolence. The appalling punishments inflicted by her father found no place in her scheme of government.19 This in itself contradicts the suggestion that Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus legitimately founded the character of the Queen of the Goths – ‘that heinous tiger Tamora’ whose life was ‘beast-like and devoid of pity’ – upon that of the Georgian Queen. According to this theory, the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus I, who reigned from 1184 to 1185, would have supplied some of the inspiration. One may remark in passing that the dreadful vengeance on Titus Andronicus’ daughter Lavinia for which Gothic Tamora is remembered with a shudder was set off, rather like Boadicea’s bloody rampage, by the cold-blooded murder of her own two sons ‘for valiant doings in their country’s cause’. But in any case it is generally thought that the sources of the play lie quite elsewhere and Georgian Tamara is acquitted.20

  She has her own literary monument. For it is finally in the great Georgian renaissance of letters and arts that Tamara’s glory lies, as much as in her conquests, and above all in the inspiration given by her – and her court and culture – to Georgia’s national poet Shota Rustaveli. (Georgian brides still regard his poetry as an essential part of their trousseau, so as to teach it to their children.)21

  Rustaveli’s exact date of birth is unknown although his birthplace is presumed to be, from his name, the town of Rustavi, south of Tiflis, founded by David the Restorer.22 Tradition declares that he was educated in Athens and travelled in Asia – hence the Eastern influences in his work; most importantly tradition declares that he loved Queen Tamara. As a result, he was said to have retreated to the Monastery of the Cross at Jerusalem where he became a monk (there is no suggestion that the love was requited). Whatever the truth of this romantic legend, Rustaveli’s passion for the Queen would not have been that of a languishing poet for some unseen princesse lointaine. He was a court official, possibly the Royal Treasurer and even perhaps the Queen’s chronicler who thus described her ‘sevenfold brilliance’: God ‘who in six days brought forth out of nothingness all that is, rested the seventh day in the sweet and gentle spirit of Tamara’.23

  The Knight in Panther’s Skin, Rustaveli’s great epic poem (of about sixteen hundred quatrains) concerns the long and various adventures of Avtandil and his brother-in-arms Tariel (he of the panther’s skin), in the style of an Eastern romance. It has been described as ‘a hymn to friendship, loyalty and high endeavour’ as well as giving an allegorical portrait of Georgia’s golden age.24 If Rustaveli’s poem is also ‘the Odyssey of Georgia’, it is unfortunate that because of the closed nature of the Georgian language to most foreigners (unlike classical Greek taught for so long in English-speaking schools) The Knight in Panther’s Skin has never enjoyed the same lyrical appreciation outside its country of origin. An eloquent tribute paid to it by Sir Maurice Bowra in Inspiration and Poetry (1955) gives however some indication of the riches in store even in translation: ‘It is notoriously dangerous to write about the poetry of a language which one does not know … Yet sometimes [i.e. in the case of Rustaveli] the temptation is too strong.’25

  The poem* is dedicated to Queen Tamara, ‘the jet-haired and ruby-cheeked’, and it is believed that the description of the Princess Tinatin, beloved of the knight Avtandil, stands as Rustaveli’s tribute to his queen. As in a fairy story, Tinatin is ‘radiant as the rising sun, born to illuminate the world around her, so fair that the very sight of her would make a man lose his wits. It would need ten thousand leagues and the wisdom of the sages to utter the praise of the king’s daughter.’

  Beautiful as Tinatin may be, the story has to begin with the decision whether she – the only child of the King, but female – may reign after him. The verdict of the viziers, leading to Tinatin’s coronation, is a deliberate echo of the circumstances of Tamara’s own accession: ‘Woman though she is, God had created her to be a sovereign. We may say without flattery that she knows how to rule, as indeed we have often remarked among ourselves.’ In short: ‘A lion’s cubs are lions all, male and female alike.’

  In spite of this, one notes that Tinatin’s father is still sad at his lack of a son, which means that he has no knight who is his equal. Yet Avtandil, sent out into the world by Tinatin, describes her to strangers in formidable terms: she is ‘the sovereign of Arabia whom her hosts of strong-armed vassals regard as king’. Nor is Tinatin the only powerful female character in the story. Quite apart from Avtandil’s own v
alorous travels, The Knight in Panther’s Skin gives a fascinating picture of a world where men and women mix as equals. There is no hint here, in what the author himself described as ‘a Persian tale’ found in Georgia, of the restrictions of the Islamic world; women receive men freely in their chambers, for example, clearly knowing nothing of the harem or purdah.

  Dularkukht is another princess who succeeds to the rule of a kingdom, in this case on the death of her brother: moreover she is described as a Warrior Queen: ‘though she is a woman, [she] is hard as rock – even her fighting men cannot excel her in feats of arms’. Another princess, Asmat, is made ruler of a seventh part of India, and instructed to ‘take the man of your choice for consort’. It is indeed with marriage that the poem ends: Avtandil marries Tinatin and ascends the throne as ‘lord and sovereign of Arabia’.

  Queen Tamara died on 18 January 1212, having reigned for twenty-four years, and was buried at Gelati, the tomb of her ancestors. Her son Giorgi, then eighteen, succeeded her. But with her death the golden age of Georgia was fast fading away, even as the adventures of the knight Avtandil had drawn to a close. Giorgi gave himself over to base favourites and died leaving only an illegitimate child. His sister Rusudani was then proclaimed ‘King of Kartli’; her lusts too were in stark contrast to the pious austerity of her mother. On the horizon the drumming hordes of Genghis Khan promised a threat to Georgia in the future far greater than these unfortunate dissipations on the part of her royal family.

  In 1236, little more than fifty years after Queen Tamara’s accession, her daughter Rusudani fled Tiflis from the Mongolian invasion, leaving her lands, once the great empire of Tamara, to be ravished. The golden age of Georgia had become a memory. In the words of the Epilogue to The Knight in Panther’s Skin:26 ‘Their tale is ended like a dream of the night. They are passed away, gone beyond the world. Behold the treachery of time; to him who thinks it long, even for him it is a moment …’.