Helena Argyre

Helena Argyre, the first wife of Bagrat IV of Georgia, was the living seal on the peace that ended the Byzantine-Georgian wars of the early eleventh century. Her father was the magistros Basil Argyros, first Byzantine governor of Vaspurakan after its Armenian king ceded it to the empire, and her uncle was the emperor Romanos III Argyros. The Armenian connection was not incidental, for Bagrat's mother and regent, Mariam, was a daughter of that same king of Vaspurakan.

The marriage was arranged during Mariam's embassy to Constantinople in 1031 or 1032. Georgia had lost Tao and its neighboring districts to Basil II in 1022, and Romanos now offered a treaty of peace, the court dignity of kouropalates for the boy-king, and his own niece as queen. Mariam brought Helena back with her, and the wedding was celebrated at Bana, one of the great royal churches of the Bagratids in Tao, when Bagrat was about fourteen. Georgian tradition holds that Helena brought as her dowry one of the nails of the Crucifixion, the icon of Okona, and great riches, and that Byzantine craftsmen accompanied her.

Her time in Georgia was brief. She died at Kutaisi in 1033, leaving no children, and the Georgian chronicle records little else about her. Bagrat afterward married Borena of Alania, whose daughter Martha would herself become a Byzantine empress; the Argyros match was thus an early link in the chain of Bagrationi marriages into Constantinople that Martha's would continue.