Long Live the Queens: Mighty, Magnificent and Bloody Marvellous Monarchs History’s Forgotten. Emma Marriott
of Georgia is buried. The scholarly view is that she lies within the vaults of the Bagrationi dynasty at the Gelati monastery in west Georgia, whilst others believe she is buried in the caves of Vardzia in the south or that her holy relics were taken to a vault in Jerusalem. In another legend, she is not dead, but lying in a gold-wreathed coffin somewhere in the mountains of Georgia and that a time may come when she finally wakens from her centuries-old slumber, and that day will be one of revival and great happiness for the people of Georgia.
Such legends are testament to how revered Queen Tamar was, and still is. She remains to this day an important symbol in Georgian culture, the inspiration for poems, songs and stories, who was also canonised as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Reigning from 1184 to 1213, her rule is associated with a ‘Golden Age’ in Georgia, a period which saw political, military and cultural successes credited to a woman who was proclaimed a king (‘mepe’) as there was no word in the Georgian language for ‘queen’.
Tamar was crowned co-ruler with her father King George III of Georgia in 1178 at the age of eighteen. George himself could be ruthless – blinding and castrating his own nephew who had legitimate claim to the throne – but his eldest daughter he described as ‘the bright light of his eyes’. When he died in 1184, Tamar became sole ruler and was crowned a second time to legitimate her rule. She was soon encouraged to find a husband and her aunt encouraged a union with Yury Bogolyubsky, son of the Grand Prince Andrew of Suzdal from the neighbouring Russian kingdom of Kiev. The marriage was strained from the outset as Yury was an able soldier but a heavy drinker and for two years Tamar was forced to put up with his promiscuity with concubines and slaves. As Tamar had not conceived a child, she took the decision to persuade the noble council to annul the marriage, and Yury was duly expelled from the kingdom and sent to Constantinople. He subsequently made two coup attempts with other disaffected nobles but each failed and instead of punishing him harshly (aka executing him, as her father would have done), Tamar showed clemency and exiled him each time.
Tamar chose her second husband for herself and this marriage proved more of a success. He was David Soslan, an Alan prince and military commander, who had been instrumental in defeating the nobles who had rallied around Yury. Tamar and David had two children, a son – George-Lasha – in 1192, and daughter – Rusada – in around 1194, both of whom would be future sovereigns of Georgia. Whilst David appeared on coins and charters, he remained a subordinate ruler to Queen Tamar, although he was praised for his devotion to her and was instrumental in securing military victories against a host of Georgia’s enemies.
Throughout her reign, Queen Tamar faced rebellions from various factions of the nobility, not least her feckless first husband Yury. To counter this, she set upon a series of military campaigns that not only extended Georgia’s boundaries farther than ever before, but also served to keep potential troublemakers occupied and focused on war. Tamar was also able to build upon the achievements of her predecessors, notably her father George III and great-grandfather David IV, ‘the builder’, who had succeeded in driving the Seljuk Turks out of the kingdom. The Queen presented herself as both a figurehead for her troops and as a general and was skilled at strategy and drawing up plans for battle, which her husband David helped to execute. In 1205, Tamar’s troops routed the Turkish army under the Seljuk Sultan of Rum and her armies ventured to previously unknown territories of Azerbaijan, Turkey and even as far as northern Iran. By the last years of Tamar’s reign, the Georgian empire and sphere of influence had reached its greatest extent, and stretched from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and from the Great Caucasus in the north to Erzurum in what is now Turkey.
As new territories and commercial centres came under Georgian control, wealth poured into the country and court, out of which emerged a flowering of Georgian culture. The monarchy sought to associate itself with Christianity and the Byzantine West and set about building a series of cathedrals. Georgia’s capital Tbilisi became a regional power with a thriving economy, a population of 100,000 and impressive cultural output. Trade flourished with the Middle East and coins issued in around 1200 feature both Georgian and Arabic inscriptions.
Queen Tamar and her court also gave inspiration to Georgia’s national poet of the time, Shota Rustaveli. He was a court official and seemingly greatly enamoured with the Queen, writing, ‘God who is six days brought forth out of nothingness all that is, rested the seventh day in the sweet and gentle spirit of Tamara.’ Rustaveli’s great epic poem The Knight in the Panther’s Skin is also dedicated to Tamar, ‘the jet-haired and ruby-cheeked’, and it is believed the description of the Princess Tinatin is a tribute to the Queen: ‘Tinatin is radiant as the rising sun, born to illuminate the world around her, so fair that the very sight of her would make a man lose his wits.’
Queen Tamar died in around 1213, having ruled Georgia as sole monarch for more than a quarter of a century, the first woman to have done so. Georgia had reached the zenith of its power and influence under her rule, although within just a few decades much of her work would be undone, as Mongol forces would overrun much of the kingdom. Whilst we may not know definitively where Queen Tamar is buried, it is perhaps of little importance as her name, certainly in Georgia, lives on. Her achievements, however, deserve greater credit elsewhere in the world. As the Georgian writer Grigol Robakidze put it in an essay from 1918: ‘Thus far, nobody knows where Tamar’s grave is. She belongs to everyone and to no one: her grave is in the heart of the Georgian.’
Born: 1609
Died: 1669
In February 1643, Henrietta Maria, queen consort to the doomed English King Charles I, sailed through a stormy North Sea from the Netherlands to England. Bad weather forced her to disembark at Burlington Bay in Yorkshire, where she sought sanctuary in a nearby coastal cottage. At 5 a.m., a fleet of parliament warships, which had been in pursuit of her, fired cannon directly at the cottage, forcing her to flee with her ladies and her dog, Mitte, to the shelter of a ditch. There they lay in the freezing cold and, as she wrote in her own account, ‘the balls passing over our heads and sometimes covering us with dust’ whilst ‘a serjeant was killed twenty paces from me’.
It’s a story of high drama, but surprisingly little known, and is certainly far less famous than one featuring her son, the future King Charles II, who in a similar escape from enemy forces hid in an oak tree in 1651. And yet the only danger that befell him was not that he was bombarded by cannon but rather that an enemy soldier passed by underneath … He, however, was a man and a future king, and Henrietta Maria simply a queen, and a deeply unpopular one at that, who, depending on who you believe, did little of real importance or was entirely to blame for the downfall of the monarchy.
The reason for her unpopularity? Well, it’s the usual story that not only was she a woman, but also Catholic and French to boot – and indeed the first French princess to marry an English king since Margaret of Anjou – and the English have never exactly warmed to queens of their longstanding enemy. She and the King were also firm believers in the divine right to rule (and thus answerable only to God), which led to an inevitable clash with Parliament, the execution of Charles and the end of the monarchy in England from 1649 to 1660. This intransigence would ultimately contribute to their downfall but Henrietta Maria was, if nothing else, loyal to the King, working tirelessly on his behalf, both in the political arena and on the battlefield.
Henrietta arrived in Protestant England in 1625, a fifteen-year-old French princess who was the youngest daughter of King Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici. Henrietta and King Charles I married in Canterbury,