The High Medieval Era · c. 1000-1245 · Georgia
The Georgian Golden Age
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About This Movement
For two and a half centuries Georgia was a real power in the Caucasus, and its church rose with it. David IV, called the Builder, broke the Seljuk hold at the battle of Didgori in 1121, and in 1106 had begun the monastery of Gelati, which was also an academy: philosophy, astronomy, rhetoric and Greek taught alongside the liturgy, with the Neoplatonist Ioane Petritsi among its scholars. Under his great-granddaughter Tamar the kingdom reached its widest extent, its churches were covered in frescoes, and its language was given a literature to match. The age ended not in decline but in conquest — after the Mongol invasions Georgia became a tributary state, and the death of Queen Rusudan in 1245 closes the age.
Sources
- Kartlis Tskhovreba (the Georgian Chronicles): Robert W. Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History (Clarendon, 1996) (primary) — Annotated English translation of the medieval corpus via the 13th-century Armenian adaptation, which reaches only to c. 1125 - it does not cover the later Golden Age. A complete English translation of the Georgian corpus (ed. S. Jones, Tbilisi, 2014) also exists.
- Tamara Grdzelidze (trans.), Georgian Monks on Mount Athos: Two Eleventh-Century Lives of the Hegoumenoi of Iviron (Bennett & Bloom, 2009) (primary) — The hagiography in the movement's own voice: George the Hagiorite's Life of John and Euthymios, and the Life of George.
- Typikon of Gregory Pakourianos for Petritsoni/Bachkovo (1083), in Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents (Dumbarton Oaks, 2000; free online) (primary) — A Georgian grandee's monastic foundation, with its Georgians-only clause, available in English.
- Hymnography and the Gelati world: 'Shen khar venakhi' ('Thou art a Vineyard', attrib. King Demetre I); Gelati academy translations (Ioane Petritsi); Gelati mosaics (primary) — Available mainly in specialist and Georgian-language editions; some attributions are traditional rather than firmly documented.
- Antony Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia (Penn State, 1998) (secondary) — Standard English analysis of royal-sanctity ideology (Davit the Builder to Tamar) through monuments - material culture doing work the chronicles cannot.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 5, ch. 1 'The Byzantine commonwealth 1000-1500' (Shepard) (reference) — No chapter is dedicated specifically to Georgia; this chapter is the nearest anchor, though its coverage of Georgia specifically has not been confirmed page by page.