Tamar the Great

The first woman to rule Georgia in her own right, Tamar presided over the kingdom at the height of its medieval power. Born around 1160, she was the daughter of King George III of the Bagrationi dynasty, who crowned her co-ruler in 1178 to secure her succession. On his death in 1184 she became sole sovereign, though the early years of her reign were spent contending with a nobility that sought to limit royal authority, and Georgian sources style her not queen but "king of kings."

Her first marriage, arranged by the nobles, was to Yuri, son of Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal, linking the Bagrationi briefly to the Rurikid princes of Rus'. The marriage failed; Yuri was repudiated around 1187 and later led two noble revolts against Tamar, both defeated. In 1189 she married David Soslan, an Alan (Ossetian) prince reckoned a descendant of an earlier Bagrationi branch, who became her consort and principal general. The couple had two children, the future King George IV and Queen Rusudan.

Under Tamar, Georgian arms were repeatedly successful against Muslim neighbors. A coalition led by the atabeg of Azerbaijan was crushed at Shamkor in 1195, and in 1202 or 1203 the army of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum was defeated at Basian. Georgian forces took Kars and raided deep into Armenia and northern Persia. After the crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, Tamar supported her kinsmen Alexios and David Komnenos — grandsons of the Byzantine emperor Andronikos I, who had Georgian royal blood and had been raised under her protection — in seizing Trebizond, where they founded the Empire of Trebizond, a state that retained ties to Georgia for generations.

Tamar's reign is regarded as the golden age of medieval Georgia. Court culture flourished, and Shota Rustaveli's epic The Knight in the Panther's Skin, the central work of Georgian literature, is traditionally associated with her court and dedicated to her. She died in 1213 and was succeeded by her son George IV; her burial place, by tradition at Gelati, remains uncertain. The Georgian Orthodox Church canonized her as Saint Tamar.