I should note that I wrote this in several disjointed sessions, so I might have messed up the dates. Like I said yesterday I'm also making updates shorter, so I deliberately cut some things out. Just let me know if you have any questions.
Part LXIV: Union (1534)
In the aftermath of Ananuri and the Mongol ravaging of Kartli and Kakheti, Kartvelia as a whole was radically changed. Many branches of the country’s ancient nobility were hacked down, and paupers became lords as easily as lords became paupers. Mamia Dadiani struggled to hold the country together throughout this period of chaos, but ultimately he would fail. His autocratic and erratic behavior would turn subject after subject away from his cause, and those disgruntled ones banded together to unseat their king. After a brief mirage of stability, Kartvelia would once again erupt into civil war, and the Megalokomnenoi would move eastward….
The Battle of Ananuri and the years following had absolutely gutted the eastern half of Kartvelia, killing hundreds of thousands of people within a few short months and driving God only knew how many into exile in Qutlughid and Trapezuntine territory or slavery across the mountains. The ensuing civil war between the Dadianis and the Lord of Arishni was also horrifically bloody, with a half-decade of raids, counterraids and even occasional pitched battles killing or driving out tens of thousands before the post-war purges of anyone even vaguely affiliated with Arishni even began. Kakheti was so devastated that there were more Azeri nomads in the region than natives for a few decades.
While warfare of the time typically came down fairly lightly on the nobility, the ancient and expansive aristocracy of pre-war Kartvelia was absolutely gutted, as Nogai Ahmed Khan had gone out of his way to kill noblemen and their families to sow chaos in the lands which he didn’t directly conquer. The Bagrationis, the oldest and most venerable of the Kartvelian nobility, were the worst hit. Before Ananuri, they had controlled the four most powerful duchies in the kingdom as well as Kartvelia itself, but after the kingdom had been reunified they held, or rather clung, to only Guria in the south-west.
Mamia’s policies played a large part in this. After defeating the Lord of Arishni--or more accurately after Ananuri, he just had time to deal with the nobility now--the king decided, in one of his few wise administrative decisions, that there was no reason the powerful magnates that had been a recurring headache for Kartvelian monarchs since time immemorial should get their land back. He allowed the nobility that had survived on the western side of the Likhni Mountains to keep their land and titles but cut back on their political autonomy sharply, but gave the vast tracts of empty land on the eastern side of the Likhnis to loyal followers and commanders, mostly Abkhazians. By itself, this would have been a wise decision, but Mamia had little interest in managing the affairs of his realm and so passed the task of giving out secondary titles and land grants to his councillors, many of whom were quite corrupt. Within a few short years, the project of redistributing and colonizing the east had turned into a godforsaken mess as rival clans and sometimes entire hostile ethnic groups were settled beside each other and land given to the highest bidder.
This angered a lot of people. The surviving members of the old nobility were furious that they or their cousins had been stripped of what they saw as their lands and many members of the new nobility and even the army were furious that Mamia, whom they had seen as one of them, a tough and strong general who would reform Kartvelia to erase the abuses of the old system had morphed into just another palace mandarin. Most of the peasants were angry at Mamia because of his inability to defend them against Azeri raids, or because they, the Kartvelians, were being replaced by Armenians, Circassians and Vainakhs in lands that had once been theirs. Mamia was aware of the fomenting disgruntledness amongst many of his subjects, but in his mind this grumbling came solely from the old nobility whose power he’d broken. The answer, of course, was to win some military victories to make himself look better. Mamia wasn’t a dumb man, but he wasn’t especially good at most things beyond being a general and so his bickering councillors were essentially running Kartvelia internally.
Mamia’s favored tactic of ‘victory to bring legitimacy’ led him north across the mountains in 1532. He attempted to force Ma’aru the Grey, as he was now known, to pay tribute to him, and advanced up the Caucasian Gates with a large army. However, Ma’aru had moved more quickly and occupied Aleks’andretsikhe against the Kartvelians, hauling cannons up into it and effectively barring the door over the mountains. Upon reaching the fortress, Mamia was driven back under heavy cannon-fire, and after a few weeks of failed siege he was forced to sue for peace. (Note: This is a highly truncated version of events).
This defeat sparked a conspiracy to depose Mamia. The previously mentioned aggrieved parties came together to overthrow the king, but this burgeoning coup was nearly strangled in its crib by infighting amongst the would-be rebels. All parties agreed that a king should be raised up to replace Mamia, but they couldn’t agree which king ought to be the one to take the throne. Most of the old nobility wanted either themselves or Giorgi Bagrationi of Guria, the most powerful of the surviving Bagrationi, to take the throne, while most of the new nobility wanted one of their own, a former lieutenant of Mamia named Giorgi Bzipi. This divide threatened to tear apart the revolt plot for several harrowing months and caused a long delay in any real organization, but then a compromise was reached: David of Trapezous. Unlike the other candidates, David could offer outside support, and to the old nobility his Trapezuntine holdings would be enough of a distraction to keep him from interfering on their affairs, while to the new nobility his foreignness would allow him to reform the Kartvelian state and crush those whose interference had caused Ananuri. In 1533, an invitation was quietly sent to Trapezous. David had already been preparing to proclaim himself the rightful King of Kartvelia via Keteon’s claim once Arslan had died, and so after vacillating for about a second he wrote back and agreed. After some negotiation by correspondence, David and the Kartvelian nobles agreed to a joint strike against Mamia once Arslan was no longer a factor.
In the interim, David began mobilizing and making final preparations for an invasion of Kartvelia, something that should have been noticed immediately by Mamia or the Qutlughids. However, Mamia was distracted by Circassian raids and migrations coming from the north-east frontier--the collapse of the Golden Horde had sent waves of Mongols and other steppe peoples out in all directions, and Circassia was one of the few regions too weak to hold them off or assimilate them--and trying to deal with increasingly aggressive Azeri and Armenian clans, while the Qutlughid bureaucracy was far more concerned with Arslan’s impending demise than they were with one of their vassal states acting strangely. The Kartvelian nobility, or at least those in on the planned revolt, also began to quietly prepare themselves for war. Word of Arslan’s death reached Akhaltsikhe in late April, and the first of the Kartvelians proclaimed the revolt a few days later. Word of this actually reached Trapezous before Arslan’s death had, and so David had two panic-inducing days before word of the old lion’s death and the rest of the rebels joining the cause reached him. Once confirmation that the rebels had in fact kicked off the war reached him on the 1st of May he leapt into action.
The first lord to raise the standard of revolt was Alek’sandre of Lidza, the Lord of Samtskhe-Akhaltsikhe, and for this reason the war would be known to history as the Samtskheote Rebellion. The namesake region struck for David from the outset, as Mamia had done little to protect them from Armenian migrations from the south (or so they thought), and Lidza led a rebel army north towards Kutaisi within a week of his proclamation. Other lords soon followed. Guria, of course, also struck for the rebels, as did the Principality of Gori, which controlled the Mtkvari Valley north of Tbilisi, the tribes of the Pkhovelian March in the north-east and the Duchy of Racha, which lay in the mountains north of Kutaisi. Meanwhile, the royal crownlands, most of Imereti, all of Abkhazia and a few distant holdings including the ruins of Tbilisi struck for Dadiani. Several territories in the east were held by men loyal to Dadiani, but seeing the strength of the rebels they proclaimed their neutrality. The Svans descended into their own civil war over who to back.
Mamia reacted swiftly. If not a good ruler, he was at the very least a good general and recognized at once that the situation was difficult but not unsalvageable. His first act was to sack most of his advisors for letting a conspiracy of this scale go undetected. Most of the western half of the country remained loyal, and though on paper it was smaller it was by far the most densely populated part of Kartvelia. Trapezuntine involvement was certain--the rebel motto was ‘For God and King Davit’, not exactly subtle--and Kartvelia’s coastline would immediately become a liability. Racha was the most isolated rebel region, and if he could knock it out he could turn his full attention to the other rebels. Once Racha was subdued he could move against Gori, knock it out and swing the neutrals back onto his side, allowing him to break Guria, Samtskhe and whatever Trapezuntine forces had managed to arrive. He raised his armies immediately and summoned his brother Dyrmit, the new march-ward of Abkhazia, with all his men.
With speed a priority, Mamia struck north in early May with a force of 4,000 cavalry and mounted infantry. The decision to betray the Dadianis was unpopular with the common people of Racha, and he had no trouble finding guides for an overland attack against Ts’esi, using a network of small valleys and forgotten roads to race through the Caucasian foothills and bypass most of the Duchy’s defenses in the process. After only six days of hard riding through the backcountry, Mamia and his men exploded out of the wilds at Ambrolauri and took the city by storm. Ts’esi, less than an hour’s ride away[1], heard, or rather saw, of Mamia’s approach before the word had even reached them, and the panicking defenders surrendered at once. Shoshita Chkheidze, its duke, was killed on the spot for treason, and Mamia elevated his chief guide, one Rati the Shepherd, as its duke, and the rest of the region was quickly secured.
Meanwhile, the Trapezuntines burst onto the scene in the west. 10,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry landed at Vatoume on 6 May, followed a day later by 10,000 infantry at Poti near the mouth of the Rioni. In one swift move, David had deposited two formidable armies at Mamia’s back doorstep. The southern army, led by David himself, raised a small garrison from the (majority Pontic) population and then went north, linking up with the Gurian army under Bagrationi on 11 May near Shekvetili. The two men despised each other almost at once, but were willing to put aside their mutual hatred for the sake of their shared goals. With constant naval resupply and hence no baggage train, the Davidine force was able to advance with great speed along the coast, reaching Poti on 14 May. The city was under siege by a few hundred militia from the surrounding countryside--the Trapezuntines hadn’t sallied out because it seemed like a trap--but the arrival of the main force caused them to disperse. There were now some 30,000 Davidine soldiers camped less than a month’s march from Kutaisi: the situation for the Dadianis was rapidly becoming untenable.
Nonetheless, Dadiani was able to assemble a force of some 12,000 men in Kutaisi, most of them infantry and many of them veterans of previous campaigns under him. Things looked quite grim, and even with Dyrmit’s army of 5,000 he would be outnumbered by nearly two-to-one in a standup fight. Still, he might be able to pull out a victory. As far as he could tell, David was motivated by simple avarice. Imereti was probably already lost, but if he could inflict a bloody enough defeat against the Ponts and knock out the nobles in the east, then he might be able to cling to power in the east. He just needed to buy time. He dispatched Dyrmit to delay the Davidine advance in the west while he went for a crushing victory in the east.
The Samtskheotes had converged with the other eastern rebels at Gori by mid-May, together forming a host of about 1,000 cavalry and 8,000 infantry, most of the latter being poor quality and overall being a very uninspiring force. However, 3,000 Pkhovelian highlanders, renowned for their ferocity in battle, would join them two weeks later. With their army united (but not their leadership), the eastern rebels began making their way west by the beginning of June. Had Mamia been able to move with his desired speed, he would have crushed them. However, some years before he had made the foolish decision of allowing the majority-Pontic garrisons of Vakhanistskalikastron, Bezhatubanikastron and Rikotitskhe to settle in the lands around their castles and intermarry with the locals. As soon as word of David’s arrival had reached them, these Ponts had taken up arms, quietly slipped into their old keeps--they had built them, after all--turned out the official garrisons and then turned their cannons west. Rather than winning a quick victory, Mamia spent weeks banging his head against their walls before being forced to withdraw by the approach of the rebels.
Meanwhile, in the west, Dyrmit was doing the opposite of what he was supposed to be doing. Seeing the writing on the wall, the king’s brother entered secret negotiations with David as soon as he was within a day’s ride, offering to surrender his force to the Davidines if not outright switch sides in exchange for estates, a position of nobility in the new Trapezuntine government and total amnesty from the many enemies he’d made in Kartvelia. Seeing this as a small price for removing a major piece from the board and a potential major morale blow to the Dadiani cause, David accepted. However, Dyrmit feared that his men would kill him if he just surrendered, so he made another agreement with David. He contrived to cross the Rioni in the middle of the day at a prearranged point, and as soon as his army was halfway across the Davidines sprung their ambush and forced his men to lay down their arms. Most were sent away without their weapons, but those willing to defect joined the ranks of Bagrationi’s men.
Word of this defeat spread like wildfire, and soon reached Mamia, who was fighting a delaying action at Shorapni in hopes that the rebels would turn to infighting if they failed to make headway. When informed that his brother had been captured and that the road to Kutaisi was now wide open, he fell into a brief period of despair. Realizing that their hopes of victory were now slim to none, Dadiani’s army began to fall apart around him. The king realized what was happening and tried to stop it, breaking camp and marching west in hopes of offering a final defense of the capital, but his men weren’t eager to lose their lives in what was clearly a doomed cause. By the time he reached Kutaisi on 12 June, with rebel forces close behind, his host had dwindled to only 3,000. The main Davidine host was camped less than three days to the west, and the walls were closing in. He pondered burning the city until his wife, Maria, caught wind of it.
“It is over.” she said. “We have lost. Too many of our people are dead, do not kill more.”
Dadiani and a few followers abandoned the city and rode north into the wilds. Kutaisi was taken by the eastern rebels the next day, and on 15 June, after a stunning whirlwind of a campaign, David entered the city in a triumphant procession and was crowned Davit X of Kartvelia.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] At this time Ts’esi sat on a ridgeline opposite its current location.
. 