David Soslan

David Soslan, the Alan prince who became the second husband of Queen Tamar the Great, was the military arm of Georgia's golden age and the father of its last two sovereigns of the unbroken line, George IV Lasha and Rusudan of Georgia. His marriage joined the Bagrationi house to the Alan (Ossetian) ruling elite of the North Caucasus and gave Tamar the loyal commander she had lacked in her first husband, the Rus' prince Yuri Bogolyubsky. His origins are disputed. The thirteenth-century Georgian chronicle describes him as coming from the descendants of Ephraim who are the Osi, and gives his father's name as Jadaron. The eighteenth-century historian Prince Vakhushti made him a descendant of King George I of Georgia and his Alan wife Alde through their son Demetre, a Bagratid branch settled in Ossetia; scholars such as Cyril Toumanoff and Mariam Lordkipanidze have found this credible, and it remains the prevailing view in Georgian scholarship. Ossetian tradition instead attaches him to the Tsarazon clan, an identification bolstered by a tomb found at the Nuzal chapel in 1946 but not widely accepted. The Georgian sources record that he was raised at the court of Tamar's aunt Rusudan. Tamar divorced Yuri in 1187 and married David at the Didube palace near Tbilisi; the sources place the wedding between 1187 and 1189, and the chronicle stresses that the choice was the queen's own. He remained a subordinate consort, sharing the throne and deriving his authority from his wife, but his name appears with hers on coins and charters. As commander he defeated the Eldiguzid atabeg Abu Bakr at Shamkor in 1195, reducing Shirvan to tributary status, and routed the Seljuk sultan of Rum at Basian, a battle dated by different sources between 1202 and 1204. He also led raids on Barda, Erzurum, and Ganja, and took Kars in 1206. Their son George was born in 1192, and their daughter Rusudan about two years later. David died around 1207; some accounts give 1205 or 1208, and his burial place is not securely known. Shortly before or after his death Tamar crowned George as coregent, and both children in turn ruled the kingdom their father had helped to build.