The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  1 Thus Matilda of Boulogne and her husband Stephen were both first cousins to the Empress Maud (but not to each other); Matilda through Maud’s mother and Stephen through Maud’s father.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lion of the Caucasus

  A lion’s cubs are lions all, male and female alike.

  RUSTAVELI, The Knight in Panther’s Skin, c. 1200

  To pass from the Anarchy of mid-twelfth-century England to late-twelfth-century Georgia is to pass from mire to mountain. Under its great Queen Tamara (or Thamar), a character both wise and splendid, powerful and beloved, the Caucasian kingdom of Georgia flourished as never before – and indeed never since. Memories of its golden age dominate both Georgian history and myth, and these memories are intricately connected to the story of Tamara. Alone of all the Warrior Queens considered in this book, Queen Tamara succeeded lawfully to her father to the acclaim of her people, added to both the prestige and the dominions of her country, and died leaving a legally begotten male heir to succeed peacefully in his turn. In actual fact, her gender, so far from detracting from all this glory, seems to have added to it.

  Yet, even here, there has to be some canker on the rose. To the leading Georgian historian of today, Tamara is ‘the symbol of Georgia’s political might and cultural progress’; but in Georgian folklore and myth her reputation, in addition to this fame and as though provoked by it, is that of a woman of voracious sexual appetite. This Tamara was crystallized in Lermontov’s famous ballad The Demon, ‘with scant regard for history’, in the words of his biographer Laurence Kelly, as having the face of an angel but with a heart ‘like sprites from hell’.1

  She dwells in a tower on a gloomy crag, the sight of whose golden firelight ‘promising warmth and rest’ lures the unwary traveller out of his way. Within the tower, Tamara’s strange magnetic voice ‘brimming with passion o’er’, urges her suitors to enter. Then:

  Warm arms with arms wound eagerly,

  And lips to hot lips flew,

  And sounds of strange wild revelry

  Echoed the long night through …

  But in the morning, Tamara’s wild passion slaked, each suitor would be hurled to death over the precipice.

  Lo! A lifeless corpse is carried,

  Sounds of moaning voices swell,

  From the tower a white gleam shimmers,

  Comes a distant cry, ‘Farewell’.2

  Today in Georgia, part of the former Soviet Union, legends concerning Tamara abound. (And since the name was a common one in the Georgian royal family, the existence of other less famous and less austere Tamaras, such as the Queen’s granddaughter, contributes to the myth). There are also the familiar modern developments of a legend: there are statues to her, to say nothing of Tamara cigarettes, restaurants and comic-strips. The Lermontov tale of the man-destroying Princess loses nothing in the telling. Since the real Tamara was very different, a woman subsequently canonized by the Georgian Church, certainly more of a matriarch than an erotic heroine, her story provides peculiar evidence of the almost wilful connection of a Warrior Queen with sexuality in the (male) imagination.3 The two syndromes are ready to claim her: if holy chastity happens not to be the desired image, then extreme voracity replaces it. These are two sides after all of the same coin: as though the one thing that a Warrior Queen cannot be is a ‘normal’ woman; an oddity in political terms, she is also assumed to go to one sexual extreme or the other.

  The Georgian kingdom to which Tamara formally succeeded in 1184 has been compared to the Norman kingdom of Sicily in its cultural importance, as the royal house of Bagrationi, to which she belonged, has been compared to that of the Angevins; her great-grandfather David the Restorer in particular resembling in his vigour and intelligence a Norman king.4 Certainly both Bagrationis and Angevins had to deal with a troublesome warrior nobility. But there were obvious differences between the Norman world and that of the Caucasus. One of these differences is indeed indicated by the very different fate of Queen Tamara to that of the Empress Maud as heiress to her father: both being only surviving children at their royal father’s death and succeeding – or attempting to succeed – according to similar claims.

  ‘A lion’s cubs are lions all, male and female alike’: so ran a significant line in Rustaveli’s epic poem The Knight in Panther’s Skin, thought to allude to the accession of Tamara; with her father King Giorgi III as the lion.5 It was a sentiment to which Henry I of England, unlike his baronage, might well have acceded. This notion of the inherited might of the female via her father was not, however, such a bizarre one to the twelfth-century Georgian as it might be to the English or Norman baron.

  Queen Tamara’s royal position fitted into certain primitive conceptions supported by embedded memories, as it has been argued that Boadicea’s own regality derived from the richness of Celtic legend. But in England much of Celtic culture, including gods, goddesses and religious traditions, had been transmogrified into that of the Romans; Boadicea herself was preserved in Tacitus’ (Roman) narrative. When Rome itself fell and Roman history vanished, Boadicea vanished with it; England – and Europe – awoke to a Christian culture where a Warrior Queen must incarnate the ‘severe womanhood’ of Judith in the Bible.

  For all the tales of Geoffrey of Monmouth, with his optimistic interpretation of Lear’s story – the happy personal rule of Queen Cordelia – the English point of view in the twelfth century was better expressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury releasing the nobles from their oaths of fealty to Maud as having been taken under duress. Queen Tamara on the other hand was nourished in the popular imagination by lurking memories of those goddesses of ancient Georgia – Itrujani, Ainina and Danana – whose cult looked back to the Great Mother; and given Georgia’s geographical situation there were later influences of Eastern goddesses. Even with the Christianization of Georgia in the fourth century, these folk memories of the mother goddess did not entirely die away, as reverence continued to be given to mother saints (as opposed to virgin ones) while Lermontov himself may derive his pejorative if exciting picture of Tamara from the kind of orgiastic rites which celebrated the cult of the Eastern goddess Astarte.6

  The position of women in Georgian tradition and myth was then an honoured one: and as a matter of fact the coming of Christianity supplied yet another legend, honouring the female sex. Where England was proselytized by a man – St Augustine – the Georgian kingdom of Kartli, according to a variety of sources, owed its conversion to St Nino, a slave-woman from Cappadocia possessed of miraculous powers who healed its Queen Nana.

  In other ways than that of matriarchal folk memory, geography, both internal and external, is crucial to an understanding of the mediaeval kingdom of Georgia. The fertile trough in which the country lay was bounded by the Black Sea in the west, reaching towards the Caspian in the east; beyond the Caspian but accessible from its shores were Persia, India and Central Asia. To the north the great mountain range of the Caucasus acted as a barricade against southern Russia; to the south the mountainous plateau of Armenia exercised another kind of barricade against the empire of the Seljuk Turks.

  On the one hand therefore Georgia occupied a strategic position on the borders of Christianity and Islam from which, under favourable circumstances – if the kingdom itself was strong – it could aspire towards conquest and overlordship of many different empires. On the other hand the fact that the country was diagonally split by its own mountain range meant that the inhabitants of West Georgia (ancient Colchis, Lazica or Egrisi) were historically inclined to be in conflict with those of East Georgia, including part of Daghestan and Caucasian Albani (modern Azerbaijan). If the kingdom was weak, Georgia obviously lay in an exceptionally vulnerable position, accessible in its turn to numerous conquerors.

  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 asp
ect 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.)7 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.8 (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’.9 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’.10

  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 themf1 – 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.11 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.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.