09 Sep “Famous Among the Monarchs:” Queen Tamar and the Rhetoric of Female Success. Part I
Sandro Nikolaishvili follows the panther’s footsteps into the storyworld of the medieval Georgia’s most celebrated woman.
In the last decades, scholars have taken considerable interest in studying medieval queenship and the ways women of high standing exercised power and established authority in medieval Latin Europe and the Byzantine Empire. Regardless of the proliferation of scholarship on this subject, the rule and political career of the Georgian Queen Tamar (r. 1184–1210) remains largely unknown to the English-speaking world. Tamar reigned in her own right for more than two decades, and throughout her long reign, the Georgian Kingdom reached the height of its military and political power. Consequently, Tamar became among the most eulogized and celebrated Georgian rulers. Soon after her death, the Georgian Kingdom started to decline and disintegrate, never achieving the same success and prominence as during her rule. Tamar’s reign and her personality became the subject of legends and myths.
In 1178, King Giorgi III (r.1156–84) coronated his daughter Tamar as a co-ruler. With this bold move, Giorgi III signaled to his subjects that he intended not only to pass power to his daughter, but he also wanted her to become a ruler in her own right after his death. To safeguard Tamar’s position, during the six years of co-rulership (1178–84), Giorgi neither arranged a marriage for Tamar nor betrothed her to a suitable candidate. Giorgi was aware that the male consort could threaten Tamar’s authority and limit her power. In the context of a male-centered medieval society where Christian ideology emphasized men’s domination over women, Tamar could have been marginalized by her husband and excluded from the governance of the kingdom. In the neighboring Byzantine Empire, which considerably impacted Georgian political culture throughout the centuries, several ambitious empresses’ power and authority were eroded and curtailed by their male consorts.
Giorgi III minted a new type of copper coin to further propagate Tamar’s authority as an heir to the royal throne and celebrate the joint rulership. Abbreviated text on the coin hailed Giorgi III as “king of kings” and Tamar as “king and queen.” For the first time, a woman’s name was placed on the coin issued by a Georgian ruler. Giorgi III referred to his daughter with a male title in order to emphasize that after his death, Tamar would take the place of the king and rule in her capacity as a regnal queen.
The Kingdom of Georgia was a stratified and decentralized polity without a developed bureaucratic apparatus, dominated by the nucleus of powerful aristocratic houses. In the absence of political institutions, the kingdom’s integrity and survival in the fragile and hostile geopolitical environment depended on the king’s military charisma and his governmental skills. Georgian kings’ authority and legitimacy rested on their ability to lead the army in the battles and secure military victories. In the twelfth century, the Georgian Kingdom, under the leadership of martial kings, became a leading political and military power in the Caucasus. Thus, in light of this context, leaving a woman in charge of the Georgian Kingdom for the first time in its history was a far more challenging endeavor than in neighboring Byzantium, where, throughout the centuries, empresses and imperial women participated in the governance of the empire.
The event of 1178, a turning point in the history of Georgian kingship that paved the way for woman’s accession to the throne, captured the imagination of Šota Rustaveli and found its reflection in his epic poem, The Knight in the Panther Skin. A learned man and court poet, Rustaveli composed his literary masterpiece towards the end of the twelfth century, on Tamar’s order and under her patronage. The Knight in the Panther Skin was not a ceremonial and panegyric poem directly concerned with the idea of rulership. Rustaveli’s poem’s plot revolves around the imagined world of the Near East, and actions occur in the kingdoms of Arabia, India, and China. Nevertheless, the thirty-ninth stanza of his epic poem elaborates on the question that bothered many of Rustaveli’s contemporaries – the legitimacy of transferring the royal power to a woman.
The background story of the thirty-ninth stanza is the following. In the imagined Kingdom of Arabia, king Rost‘evan is having a royal banquet in his palace. The high-ranking courtiers, viziers, realize that Rost‘evan is gloomy and bothered by some thoughts. They approach the king and try to cheer him up. Failing to improve Rost‘evan’s mood, viziers reveal that they are perfectly aware of what bothers him. As it turns out, Rost‘evan plans to designate his daughter and only child, Tinatin, as his successor and considers coronating her as a co-king. Viziers state that they fully support the idea of elevating female Tinatin to the throne and told Rost‘evan the following words to encourage him.
Although a woman, she is a sovereign, ordained by God’s decree.
We are not flattering you, but even in your absence agree.
Like her radiance, her deeds are as bright as the sunshine to see.
Lion’s whelps are equally lions, though female or male they be.
(Šota Rustaveli (Lyn Coffin trans.), The Knight in the Panther Skin, 17. )
Rost‘evan is a literary prototype of king Giorgi III, while Tinatin is queen Tamar. Apparently, decades after Tamar’s coronation, the fact that a woman assumed power for the first time could not be passed without comment by court poet Rustaveli. Tamar desperately needed to prove that despite her gender, she was a suitable candidate for the throne. Rustaveli portrays an idealistic picture that is far from reality. In fact, the question of female rulership would not be as widely accepted and approved as Georgian court rhetoric would have us believe. King Giorgi III would have to spend the lion’s share of energy and resources to persuade his inner circle and certain members of powerful aristocratic houses to accept Tamar’s sole rule.
Giorgi’s plan to secure his daughter’s sole rulership, however, collapsed after his death. In 1184, not everybody welcomed Tamar’s reign. The powerful aristocrats refused to support her unless she complied with their demands. One of the demands was for Tamar to find a suitable husband and marry as soon as possible so the kingdom would have a male ruler to perform the military duties. Because of her sex, Tamar was not fit to lead the army in the battles and command the troops. The powerful courtiers and military aristocrats feared that the kingdom was exposed to external threats without a male and martial ruler. The Georgian Kingdom’s foes could perceive a woman’s ascension to the throne as a sign of weakness. The rulers of the Muslim states surrounding Georgia would be more tempted to tilt the balance of power in their favor. Like Christianity, Islam also considered women and rulership incompatible. There is a famous hadith attributed to the prophet Muhammad that questions and opposes the reign of a woman: “Never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler.” Tamar had to prove not only to her Christian subjects that she was a worthy heir of her father, but she had to demonstrate to the Islamic world that although a woman, she could be a powerful and respected ruler.
Tamar was not naïve to believe that the power transition would be smooth after Giorgi III’s death. Six years of co-rulership with her father had taught her the peculiarities of Georgian power politics. She probably expected the challenges and had plans for how to overcome the obstacles. Tamar found a way out of political and military crises and upheavals that ensued in the first years of her reign. She made some concessions to her opposition and agreed to marry, against her wish, Iurii Bogolubskoi, a prince in exile from the Rus principality of Vladimir-Suzdal. However, when Tamar realized that her husband wanted to allocate to her the role of a queen consort and limit her power, she did everything to take him down and get rid of him.
Tamar was not the type of woman to become a pawn in the hands of her husband and had no intention of compromising her autonomy and independence. The Georgian sources emanated from the royal court and written by Tamar’s supporters imply that the queen accused her Rus husband of being drunkard and homosexual. Allegedly, Tamar could not tolerate Iurii’s “sexual misconduct” and frequent indulgence in debauchery anymore and brought the issue of divorce in front of the state council. The degree to which allegations were grounded is not entirely clear, but one should not rule out the possibility that Tamar could have made false accusations to achieve her goal and divorce her husband.
(To be continued…)