Donald Rayfield,Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia

Reviewed by: Thomas R. Wier, Free University of Tbilisi, Georgia

Georgian history (as Rayfield’s title suggests) might be summarized as one culture’s dialogue with empire: both its growth in the shadow of larger outside powers, and its own cultural and political influence on the smaller ethnicities of the Caucasus. The earliest records begin with the Urartians’ and Greeks’ views as outsiders, but Georgian history in the narrow, personal sense does not appear so much as coalesce into reality: disjointed and seemingly unconnected peoples and personalities move on and off stage with increasing frequency so that it only acquires something like narrative force rather late in antiquity.

By the mid-to-late first millennium, when this coalescence comes to completion, it is clear that extant texts have been written in the shadow of a kind of social revolution: Christianization, Arab conquests and Turkic migration have fundamentally altered an earlier ideological and demographic make-up of the Caucasus of which we have only glimmers. Rayfield’s narrative thus really only comes into focus with his discussion of the rise of the House of Bagrationi to power, through a complex web of political alliances, fortuitous accidents of birth and childlessness, and occasional acts of treachery, culminating in the quasi-legendary courts of King David IV the Builder and Queen Tamar. This period, in which Georgia somewhat resembled the multi-ethnic empires of Anatolia and Iran, came to an abrupt halt with the Mongol conquests in the early thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Massacre and rapine precipitated economic dislocation and demographic, and eventually political, collapse, and for the next five centuries, Georgia became a pawn in a Great Game stretching along the border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires.

Until the late eighteenth century, Georgia was in many ways effectively cut off from Western civilization. Georgia’s annexation by a new northern power, Russia, occurred in a piece-meal fashion. In 1783, King Erekle II signed a Traktat at Georgievsk with the Russian Empire promising fealty to the Tsar, and in 1795 the new Shah, Agha Mohammad Khan, took advantage of Russian failure to keep its defence commitments under the Traktat and invaded Georgia. At Krtsanisi outside Tbilisi, Erekle II’s armies were completely routed, and the city’s subsequent despoliation left eastern Georgia prostrate. As Rayfield has noted while promoting this book, this kind of episode illustrates how Georgians have often overestimated the extent to which they can rely on outside powers to counteract imminent existential threats.

Georgia’s colonial incorporation into the Russian Empire, its collapse into revolution and civil war, Georgia’s consequent declaration of independence, and its reintegration by force into the Soviet Union represent a complicated period which cannot be easily summarized, but, alongside the events of late antiquity, it laid the foundation for everything that Georgia is today. Rayfield’s work gives the reader a wonderfully firm, albeit sometimes vertiginous, grounding in all this sweep of history.

Rayfield’s work is above all a political work, in effect part of the ‘Great Man’ school of historiography. To a certain extent, this is only how it could be: the very sweep of Rayfield’s work from remote antiquity to the present day means he has to rely on textual sources which often ignored the plight of anyone who was not a male ethnic Georgian aristocrat. Nonetheless, history is more than just the best and the brightest. In this work, the way in which other ethnicities and religious sects interact with the Georgian elites often becomes drowned in minutiae. What, really, was the implication of the fact that King Bagrat III minted coins that bore both the legend ‘O Christ, magnify Bagrat King of the Abkhaz’ (in Georgian!) as well as the Arabic phrases ‘There is no God but One’ and ‘Mohammad messenger of God’ (73)? Such facts speak volumes about the complicated constituencies Georgian kings had to mollify, but Rayfield does not explore such issues in great depth.

There are, however, two areas of content which were almost wholly ignored. The first is the rich history of Georgian art and literature, a huge topic which would have probably been impossible to integrate into the already diverse subject matter of this book without throwing it entirely off course. Fortunately for us, Rayfield himself has already written that book: The Literature of Georgia: A History. The second would have been the increasingly well-understood natural history of the South Caucasus as a region, including advances in palaeontology, archaeology and population genetics. Even a brief mention of the incredible finds of several 1.77-million-year-old Homo erectus skulls at Dmanisi would have thrown light on the immense antiquity of (proto)human affairs in this region.

Lastly, because this history features such a whirlwind of peoples, personalities and purges, it might have been officially divided, as a kind of aide-mémoire, into five significant stages of Georgia’s transition from a motley assemblage of Kartvelian tribes into a nation-state: (1) Origins; (2) Unification and Empire; (3) Disintegration; (4) the Russian Empire; and (5) Socialist Republic(s) and Independence(s). With the (somewhat surprising) exception of the second period, each of these periods gets roughly equal treatment. Adding an additional preface to each section, or a more general analytical one at the beginning, would have given the reader a better sense of how all these often fascinating details fit together into a larger narrative.

As it is, however, many of these nitpicks will surely be correctible in the inevitable second edition: for in its depth and attention to detail of more or less the whole of recorded Georgian history, Rayfield has produced the definitive one-volume work.