User:Kober/sandbox/Georgia in Late Antiquity

Intro
Late Antiquity was a formative period in the history of Georgia. From the era of Classical Antiquity, the peoples of Georgia—located in the Caucasus, between the Caspian and Black Sea—were exposed to influences from the civilizations of Iran on one hand and from the Hellenistic and then Romano-Byzantine world on the other.

The core polity in eastern Georgia was Kartli, known to the Classical world as Iberia, while western Georgia corresponded to the Colchis of the Greco-Roman authors. Divided by a formidable spur of the Greater Caucasus mountains, the two regions—and the Kartvelian-speaking groups located in them—had more or less divergent political and cultural history in Late Antiquity, although this geographic division did not pose an absolute barrier. Throughout this era, between the late 3rd and early 7th century, both regions were contested between the Roman and Sasanian Persian empires and local leaders had to maneuver between the great rivaling powers to preserve their precarious political autonomy and cultural individuality.

The landmark events of this period were the spread of Christianity in the early 4th century and the creation of Georgian alphabet and, consequently, appearance of native literature in Iberia in the 5th century as well as the final crystallization of ethnically oriented national church in that country by the early years of the 7th century. These developments rendered the communities of eastern Georgia more articulate and enabled them to ensure the historical continuity of the nation and preserve its historical memory. The peoples of western Georgia, and of its principal polity of Lazica—Egrisi of the Georgian sources—lacked written tradition; their history can only be reconstructed based on scattered data of the Georgian and foreign sources coupled with archaeology.

As a result of the last Roman–Sasanian war of 602–628, both Iberia and Lazica decisively fell under the hegemony of the Eastern Roman Empire, but the attendant downfall of the Sasanian state exposed the Caucasian Christendom to encroachments from a new imperial power, the Arab Caliphate, which, within two decades, brought the exclusive Roman dominance over the region to an end.

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The peace made at Nisibis in 299 between the Roman and Sassanian Persian empires lasted for nearly forty years. Under its provisions, the kings of Iberia were to receive their symbols of office from Rome. Henceforth, Iberia remained allied with Rome for nearly a century, but it never completely severed its links with a Sasanian Persia. By this time, a new dynasty, known in Georgian as Khosroviani and latinized in modern historiography as Chosroid, had acceded to the throne of Iberia. Its inaugural ruler, Mirian, is made by a local tradition, enshrined in the early 9th-century The Life of the Kings, a natural son of a Sasanian king. Many modern scholars follow Cyril Toumanoff's identification of this dynasty as a branch of the House of Mihran, one of the Seven Great Houses of Iran.

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<< Colchis / Rise of Lazica >>

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Adoption of Christianity implied a pro-Roman orientation of the Caucasian monarchies, but it did not guarantee stable Roman hegemony in the region. To what extent Iberia was immediately affected by the renewed Perso–Roman war, commenced in 337, is not known. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, the emperor Constantius II had to send costly gifts to Arsaces of Armenia and Meribanes of Iberia to ensure their allegiance in 361. Iberia was not mentioned in the peace treaty of 363, but Rome agreed not to help the Armenians against the Persians. The Sasanian king Shapur II understood this as having a free hand in both Armenia and Iberia. Shapur conquered Armenia in 364 and, in what Ammianus describes as an act of treachery, evicted King Sauromaces from Iberia and installed his own protégé Aspacures in his stead.

Emperor Valens felt compelled to intervene and sent in his general Terentius to reinstate Roman clients in Armenia and Iberia. In 370, Valens agreed to a deal between Sauromaces and Aspacures and Iberia was divided between the two along the Kura. Shapur was unhappy with this settlement and pressured Valens into either giving up Armenia or abandoning the division of Iberia. Distracted by the Gothic War in the Balkans, in 378, the emperor had to evacuate Iberia and called upon Shapur to permit Roman forces safe passage out of the country. Iberia once again lapsed under the Persian suzerainty. The medieval Georgian chronicles report that a Persian viceroy or vitaxa, named Kram Khuar Borzard in one source, was installed at the fortress of Tbilisi, just downstream on the Kura from the royal seat at Mtskheta, while the king Varaz-Bakur—the Aspacures of Ammianus—became a Sasanian tributary. The inhabitants of Klarjeti, a southwestern province, rebelled and went over to the Romans.

In 387, Rome and Persia partitioned Armenia; the larger eastern part became subject to Persia. With this, the vitaxate of Gogarene, an autonomous frontier region, which had long vacillated between Armenian and Iberian spheres of influence, passed under the suzerainty of a Sasanian-friendly Iberia. It, too, had come to be ruled by a Mihranid line, matrimonially related to the Iberian Chosroids.

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From this time on, Persian influence grew in the Caucasus. The Sasanians energetically promoted Zoroastrianism in their vassal states. In addition to a perennial rivalry between Rome and Persia, the political struggles in Iberia, like those in Armenia, had an internal dimension: while the crown looked upon the Byzantine autocracy as a preferred model of Christian monarchy, the great nobles hoped to preserve their dynastic rights with the help of the Sasanian empire.

This situation is also confirmed by the foundational inscription of the Bolnisi Sioni church in eastern Georgia, the oldest dated specimen of the Georgian writing. The inscription, curved in 478 or 479, states that the construction of the church began in the 20th year of the reign of the Sasanian king Peroz, but makes no mention of the Iberian king. This part of eastern Georgia was, at that time, part of the vitaxate of Gogarene, whose rulers were vassals to the king of Iberia, but enjoyed significant autonomy and, whenever politically expedient, allied themselves with Persia. Similarly, the Iberian king is conspicuously absent from the earliest pieces of Georgian hagiography, including the 5th-century Passion of Saint Shushanik by the priest Jacob, the oldest extant work of the Georgian literature, set in the realm of the vitaxate and describing the martyrdom of the Christian woman Shushanik at the hands of her apostate husband, the vitaxa Varsken.

In 428, the Sasanians, in collaboration with the local dynastic nobility, overthrew the Armenian kingship; the Albanian monarchy would fall around 461. In Iberia, the Persians appear to have been more cautious. Iberia stayed aside from the revolt in Armenia and Albania in 451 and the anti-Persian uprising occurred there three decades later, under the leadership of King Vakhtang I, surnamed Gorgasali ("wolf-head").

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Vakhtang is the subject of the early medieval epic biography in Georgian, the Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali, which fuses history and legend and helped establish the king's standing as a national hero in Georgia. The first of Vakhtang's efforts to curb the great nobility and break free from the Sasanian overlordship was his assassination, in 482, of the vitaxa in Gogarene, Varsken, who is vilified in the Passion of Saint Shushanik. Vakhtang then appealed to the Armenian leaders for cooperation and to the Huns north of the Caucasus for aid. The uprising was defeated, but the death of the Sasanian king Peroz in a battle with the Hephthalites in Central Asia in 484 resulted in a more relaxed Persian stance in the Caucasus and freedom of worship was allowed.

Vakhtang made use of this period of relative peace to cultivate closer ties with Rome; his refusal to join the Sasanian king Kavadh I's war efforts against the Romans occasioned a renewed conflict with Persia. Iberia offered a considerable resistance to the Sasanian encroachments, but, around 517, the Persian king succeeded in installing his viceroy at Tbilisi, a fortified settlement which—according to the Georgian tradition—had been designated by Vakhtang as his kingdom's future capital. The circumstances and date of Vakhtang's eventual demise are disputed. According to his eulogizing Georgian biography, Vakhtang was mortally wounded in battle with a Persian invasion force. If Toumanoff's identification of Vakhtang Gorgasali with the Iberian king Gourgenes—mentioned by Procopius as having resisted Kavad I's Zoroastrianising efforts—is correct, then he might have ended up as an exile to Lazica in or around 522.

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<< Lazica 456, 466/7, 468/70, 522 >>

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All these events [=rising tensions in the Caucasus, defection of Tzathius, flight of Gourgenes] led, in 526, to the resumption of Roman–Persian hostilities which terminated in the Perpetual Peace of 532. The status quo in the Caucasus was restored, with Iberia under Persian sway, Lazica in Roman hands, and Armenia divided between the two empires. With the consolidation of Sasanian control, the royal powers of the Iberian Chosroids were curtailed. The titular kings of Iberia were relegated from the political center at Mtskheta and Tbilisi to their demesne in Kakheti in the east of Iberia, with the principal town of Ujarma, while their Romanophile cadets, the Guaramids, established themselves in the southwestern Iberian provinces of Klarjeti and Javakheti. In the meantime, marzpans—viceroys for the Sasanian Great King—ruled, in conjunction with local nobility, at Tbilisi and in the hinterland. The ascendancy of Tbilisi and its chief citadel, Kala, and the concomitant decline of Mtskheta and the associated fortress of Armazi in that period is documented in the Georgian chronicle of Pseudo-Juansher. Theophanes the Confessor is the earliest Eastern Roman author to reference "Tiphilis" (Τίφιλις) as "the capital city (metropolis) of the Iberians" under the year 572.

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<< The Lazic war 541-561 >>

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[End of native kingdoms]=Procopius reports that, after Gourgenes's defeat in 522, the restive Iberians were not allowed by the Persians to have their own king. Many scholars in Georgia, notably Ivane Javakhishvili, regard Procopius's testimony, coupled with the virtual absence of the royal power in the early Georgian hagiographic literature, as evidence to the abrogation of native kingship around that time. Cyril Toumanoff and, after him, Stephen H. Rapp argue that the Iberian monarchy survived in the weakened form until c. 580, when, after the death of Bacurius III—the last reported Chosroid king in the Georgian chronicles—it was finally abolished by the Sasanians.

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<< End of the Lazic kingdom >>

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The Iberian dynastic aristocracy acquiesced to and benefited from suppression of the monarchy, but burdensome fiscal measures and Zoroastrian proselytizing pursued by the Sasanians turned the nobility against Persia. The Armenian revolt in 572 was joined by some Iberians led by the Guaramid prince Guaram—Gorgenes of Theophanes the Confessor—and only gradually did the Persian commander Golon Mihran restore Persian control to the region.

In 588, the Iberians appealed to the Roman emperor Maurice, then being at war with the Sasanians, and asked him for a ruler from the Iberian royal house; the emperor sent Guaram, of the Guaramids, who, however, was not crowned as king, but recognized as a presiding prince, erismtavari in Georgian, and bestowed with the Eastern Roman title of kouropalates. In return of Maurice's aid against the rebel Bahram Chobin, the Sasanian king Khosrow II recognized this new arrangement of things in Iberia in the peace of 591, but retained the eastern part of the country. Thus, the presiding principate of Iberia replaced the Chosroid kingship and would fill the interregnum until 888. The country became a Roman dependency, ruled by the local aristocracy presided over by a prince, based on the model of primus inter pares. Similar regimes existed also in neighboring Armenia and, later, in Albania. The appearance, in the 7th century, of two successive "patricians of Lazica" indicates the setting up of a similar institution in that country under the Roman hegemony.

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The overthrow of the Eastern Roman emperor Maurice in a coup and the outbreak of another, and final, Persian war, of 602–628, prompted Stephen I of Iberia, Guaram's son, to effect a reorientation towards the Sasanian empire, a move that enabled him to unify Iberia under his aegis. Persia's initial successes were reversed in a counteroffensive by the emperor Heraclius, whose war efforts in the Caucasus were joined by the Lazi, Abasgians, and some Iberians. Eventually, when offered a plan of invasion of Persia's interior, Lazi and Abasgians abandoned Heraclius. In 627, Heraclius crossed from Lazica into Iberia, but Stephen refused to defect his Sasanian suzerain and was killed during the siege of Tbilisi by the Roman army. Heraclius conferred the principate upon Adarnase of Kakheti, a Chosroid, and marched south, where he inflicted a decisive defeat on the Persians at the Battle of Nineveh. In the meantime, Heraclius's Göktürk allies—the "Khazars" of the medieval Georgian and Armenian sources—pressed the difficult siege of Tbilisi to a victorious conclusion and had the city's defending commanders flayed alive. By the early 630s, Heraclius had much of the Caucasus under his sway.

By the middle of the 7th century, the dramatic decline of the Sasanian power paved the way for a new force in the Caucasian politics, one sweeping northwards from Arabia and destined to remain one of the leading claimants to regional hegemony for the centuries to come—the Islamic caliphate.

Culture
Christianization of Iberia in the 4th century led to several social transformations and cultural innovations, such as the creation of a script for the Georgian language, which, in turn, was instrumental in consolidating and expanding Christianity in eastern Georgia. The earliest specimens of original Georgian writing are several church inscriptions—in majuscule asomt'avruli script—in Georgia as well as abroad, in Palestine, and at least one extant original narrative—the Passion of Shushanik by the priest Jacob of Tsurtavi, all from the 5th century. The concise Passion of the Children of Kolay is also among the earliest Georgian texts, but it is more difficult to date. Another early hagiography, the Vita of Evstati of Mtskheta, was written in the 6th or early 7th century. The Gospels were translated into Georgian in the 5th century, as evidenced indirectly by quotations and allusions occurring in early original hagiographical texts and directly by manuscript fragments of the Gospel texts themselves, such as the khanmeti palimpsest, which is paleographically dated to the 5th or 6th century.

Thus, the initial Georgian-language texts were religious and Christian in their origin and purpose; the earliest surviving Georgian historiographical works were not composed until the 7th and 8th centuries, but their now-lost source could have existed at the end of the 6th century as hinted by their typical fusion of epic imagery and historical facts, a trait that betrays the influence of Iranian literary tradition of the Sasanian era. Despite Christianization and political shifts, close social, cultural, and economical bonds maintained with Persia are attested in narrative, epigraphic, and numismatic sources.

Hundreds of Sasanian coins, displaying a variety of mint marks and dated from the 3rd century to the 6th, have been unearthed in eastern Georgia, especially along the Kura river basin. They are more numerous than the contemporaneous Eastern Roman numismatic material found in the country. A unique series of coins were produced locally in the name of the Iberian prince Guaram I and his successors in the late 6th and early 7th century. Modeled on the silver drachms of King Hormizd IV ((r. 579 – 590)), these "Iberian-Sasanian" coins feature a depiction of the Sasanian king, a Georgian monogram identifying the respective Iberian ruler, and the standard Sasanian image of a Zoroastrian fire-altar transformed in later Iberian emissions into an abstract design surmounted by a Christian cross.

Zoroastrianism coexisted with Christianity throughout the Sasanian period, but it went in steady decline and eventually became extinct. Archaeological material suggests that the Zoroastrian temples at Nekresi, Samadlo, Uplis-tsikhe, and other localities were active into the 4th century. There is also an evidence that the Georgian script was adopted and used by local Zoroastrian communities as suggested by 14 crude asomtavruli inscriptions from Nekresi and Rustavi. Persecution of Zoroastrians in Iberia under the emperor Heraclius is attested in the Georgian sources.

The Jews were another important community in Iberia, their presence testified by the medieval Georgian literary sources and remnants of material culture, such as the Hebrew tomb inscriptions in and around Mtskheta and at Urbnisi, dating from the 3rd to the 6th century. The Jews of Iberia played a role in spreading Christianity in eastern Georgia.

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Church affairs
The 5th and 6th centuries were a formative period for a national church in Iberia. The Iberian church was claimed by the Patriarchate of Antioch, but in practice the jurisdiction was only nominal. In the 480s, Vakhtang I of Iberia received permission from Constantinople to elevate Peter, the bishop of Mtskheta, to the rank of catholicos, who, together with 12 Iberian bishops traveled to Antioch for consecration. This move implied Iberia's acceptance of Emperor Zeno's Henoticon of 482, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the theological differences between the supporters of the Council of Chalcedon and the council's opponents. Similarly, the Henoticon was viewed by the Iberian crown as a means to ensure peaceful coexistence of various confessional identities in the country.

In the 6th century, the church of Iberia was in the non-Chalcedonian camp with the Armenians and Caucasian Albanians. The period saw expansion of the Christian church in eastern Georgia, which was gradually transforming from a cosmopolitan organization into a national institution, dominated by the ethnic Georgians. Monks from Iberia, such as the energetic anti-Chalcedonian leader Peter the Iberian, were active in Palestine, where some of the earliest Georgian inscriptions are found. Cenobitic monasticism was popularized in Iberia by a group of monks, known as the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers, in the 6th century. The greater self-assertiveness and self-sufficiency of the Iberian clergy were opposed by the Armenians, who envisaged themselves as the ultimate ecclesiastic authority in the Caucasus. An episode in which Catholicos Cyrion I of Iberia removed the Armenian bishop Moses from Tsurtavi in Gogarene and introduced Georgian as a parallel liturgical language in that town was followed by years of epistolary dispute in which the Armenian church leaders accused their Iberian counterparts of not dedicating enough energies to the struggle against Nestorianism and reneging on the provisions of joint church councils of the past. With the Iberians increasingly moving into the Roman Chalcedonian camp, the Armenian catholicos Abraham, at the council of Dvin in 608 or 609, excommunicated the Iberian clergy and proscribed all ties with the Iberians, save for trade, thereby consummating the split between the two churches. The final victory of the Chalcedonian position in Iberia was secured by Heraclius's campaign in 627. From that time on, the church of Iberia conformed to the orthodoxy of Constantinople, while that of Armenia, despite occasional lapses, maintained its non-Chalcedonian version of Christianity.