Claim of the biblical descent of the Bagrationi dynasty

Origin of the legend

The legend originated in the Armenian–Georgian milieu in the latter half of the 8th century. A Hebrew provenance is first ascribed to the Armenian Bagratids (Bagratuni) by the early medieval Armenian historian Movses Khorenatsi, but he in no way suggests that the family descended from King David. Around 800, the early Georgian Bagratids creatively manipulated the claim so as to present themselves as the direct biological descendants of the biblical king. They did not explicitly apply a Davidic origin to their Armenian cousins, although the Armenians subsequently adopted the Georgians' innovation as their own.

The first Armenian source familiar with the Davidic origin of the Bagratids is The History of Armenia by the early 10th century historian Hovhannes Draskhanakerttsi, who would have been exposed to the Georgian legend while voluntarily residing at the court of the Georgian Bagratid ruler Adarnase IV (died 923). In general, the Armenian Bagratids displayed little interest in the Hebrew theory and its Davidic development, as compared with their Georgian counterparts.

The earliest extant native reference to the Georgian Bagratids and their Davidic clamoring is found in Pseudo-Juansher's brief historical work, written between 800 and 813, where is related the arrival in Kartli, a core Georgian region, sometime after 772, of Adarnase, "who was of the House of David the Prophet". The Life of St. Grigol Khandzteli, written in 951 by the Georgian hagiographer Giorgi Merchule, is next to refer to the tradition of the Davidic origin as extant at the time of Ashot I, Adarnase's son and the first Georgian Bagratid monarch, whom the monk Grigol addresses as "lord, called the son of David, the prophet and God-anointed".

Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus

The legend became well-known enough to feature in the 45th chapter of the treatise De Administrando Imperio, written c. 950 by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, whom the claim apparently reached through the Caucasians serving at the imperial court in Constantinople. According to Constantine, the Georgians believed they were scions of Uriah's wife Bathsheba, with whom King David committed adultery, and who had children by him. Thus, they claimed to have been related to the Virgin Mary, inasmuch as she was also descended from David.

Constantine Porphyrogenitus's account betrays Georgian influence, but some of its details are uncorroborated elsewhere. It contradicts the Georgian historian Sumbat's more elaborated version by citing the genealogical line leading to the Virgin Mary instead of that leading to Joseph, the husband of Mary. Finally, Constantine's genealogy reaches the two brothers, David and Spandiatis, who had left Jerusalem at the advice of an oracle and settled at the boundaries of Persia, where they founded their kingdom in Iberia (i.e., Kartli) and increased their power through the help of the emperor Heraclius. Spandiatis was childless, but David had a son Pankratios, who had a son Asotios, whose son Adarnase was made curopalates by the emperor Leo, Constantine's father.

Sumbat's chronicle

The fullest expression of the Davidic claims of the Georgian Bagratids in Georgian literature is preserved in the 11th-century Life and Tale of the Bagratids by Sumbat Davitis-dze (Sumbat, son of David), who may himself have belonged to the Georgian Bagratid family. This work, which has come down to us as part of the larger compendium known as the Georgian Chronicles, contains the most elaborated version of the Bagratid family legend. Sumbat's history commences with a lengthy stemma, tracing the ultimate origin of the Georgian Bagratids from Adam through King David down to Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary; and then from Cleopas, brother of Joseph, to a certain Solomon, whose seven sons left the Holy Land and went to Armenia, where a certain queen Rachael baptized them. Three of them remained in Armenia and their offspring later ruled that country, while the four brothers arrived in Kartli. One of them, Guaram, was made a ruler there and became, as Sumbat claims, the forefather of the Bagrationi. Guaram's brother Sahak established himself in Kakheti, while two other brothers, Asam and Varazvard, conquered Kambechani, east of Kakheti, from a Persian governor.

Sumbat's genealogy from Adam to King David is based on the Gospel according to Luke (3:32 ff.), while the one from King David to Joseph is borrowed from the Gospel according to Matthew (1:1-16). The source of the genealogy of Cleopas and his descendants is apparently the Roman scholar Eusebius of Caesarea, who, in his Ecclesiastical History, quotes Hegesippus, according to whom, the Romans searched for King David's scions in order to remove from the Hebrew territory the potential pretenders to the throne who would have had the biblical legitimation. By adding Cleopas into the Bagratid genealogy, Sumbat purposefully led the dynasty's ancestry to the God-anointed king of Israel. Thus, Sumbat's work contains the version of the family legend, which became the basis of a dynastic and political ideology, and, in the course of history, influenced the worldview of the Bagrationi dynasty.

Parallels

Since the King-Prophet David was considered as a model ruler and a symbol of the God-ordained monarchy throughout medieval Western Europe and Eastern Christendom, the Georgian Bagratids were not the only ruling family to claim a link to David. The Carolingians often connected themselves with David, but did not allege to be descended directly from him. As the historian Ivan Biliarsky have conjectured, the Caucasian paradigm of Davidic royalty may have influenced the Old Testament-modeled vision of kingship in early medieval Bulgaria, the country then in transition from an ethnic pagan state to a Christian empire, as evident in the case of Tsar Izot, cited in the Narration of Isaiah, the so-called Bulgarian Apocryphal Chronicle of the Eleventh Century.

The closest parallel to the Georgian Bagratid experience is that of Ethiopia. The medieval Ethiopian historical work Kebra Nagast claims that the Ethiopian rulers were the direct descendants of the biblical Solomon's first born, Menelik. The Georgian and Ethiopian dynasties may have been aware of each other's claims; the Georgian Bagrationi prince Ioann in his didactic encyclopedic novel Kalmasoba, written between 1817 and 1828, cites a 1787 letter sent by the Ethiopian emperor—"also descended from David the Prophet"—to Ioann's grandfather, King Heraclius II of Georgia, in which the Georgian monarch was reportedly addressed by his Ethiopian counterpart as "a beloved brother and the one related through the common bloodline".

Modern interpretations

The Bagrationi's Hebrew or Davidic origin is considered by modern scholarship as purely legendary forged by the Georgian dynasty early in their history to help assert their legitimacy. The family's alleged Hebrew provenance was utilized and elaborated by the Georgian Bagratids to claim the descent from the divinely appointed model biblical king David, himself a descendant, in an unbroken line, of Adam and the ancestor of Jesus Christ, at the same time obscuring the dynasty's true origin and blood-ties with Armenian cousins. These claims became articulated in the medieval Georgian texts, especially in the chronicle by Sumbat Davitis-dze, himself a purported Bagratid. Moreover, Sumbat erroneously or purposefully presented the earlier, pre-Bagratid Guaramid dynasty of Kartli as the first Bagratids on the Georgian soil by identifying the Guaramid prince Guaram as a scion of the biblical King David. It is true, however, that the early Georgian Bagratids were related to the Guaramids by marital ties and a Guaramid dowry formed an important segment of the original Bagratid realm.

In the 20th century, the British historian Steven Runciman attempted to rehabilitate the theory of the Hebrew origin of the Bagratids. Runciman suggested that there was no reason to doubt their Jewish origin given the presence of Jews, fleeing from the Assyrian captivity, in Caucasia, "where, as in Babylonia, there were hereditary chiefs who claimed descent from David known as the "Princes of the Diaspora", till the high Middle Ages". The hypothesis has not been accepted by other scholars and Toumanoff have thoroughly dismissed such as possibility.