Shushan

Shushan was the youngest daughter of Archil, the martyred Khosroid prince of Kakheti, and the only one of his four daughters whose story the Georgian Chronicles tell. Her refusal of a Khazar khagan and her death by poison rather than captivity made her a figure of Georgian hagiographic tradition, and the episode marks, in the chronicler's own words, the point at which "the sway of the great Khosroid kings began to decline." The Martyrdom of Saint Archil relates that after Archil's execution, dated 786 by Toumanoff although church tradition gives 744, her brother Iovane took their mother and two sisters to Egrisi, while Shushan and another sister remained in Kartli and Kakheti with their brother Juansher. Shushan "was beautiful in appearance," and word of her reached the khagan of the Khazars, who sent an envoy to ask for her hand, "promising aid against the Saracens." Juansher consulted his brother and mother; they refused, saying they would rather withdraw to the Greeks and appeal to fellow Christians "than have our daughter defiled by heathens," and Shushan herself spurned the offer. Three years later the khagan sent his commander Bluchan, who entered Kakheti by way of Leketi, besieged the fortress where Juansher and Shushan were staying, captured them within a few days, and then ravaged Tbilisi and all of Kartli. On the Darial road Shushan told her brother that it was better to die and be numbered among the holy women than to be defiled. "Then plucking the gem out of her finger-ring, she sucked the deadly poison under it and died instantly." When Bluchan reached the khagan without her body, the khagan, who had wished to see it, had him executed by two riders pulling a rope around his neck in opposite directions. Juansher was held for seven years before being released with gifts. The chronicle gives no dates, but modern historians associate the raid with a Khazar invasion of the Caucasus around 799 or 800. Shushan's mother was a daughter of Guaram the curopalate of Klarjeti; her brother Juansher later married the Bagrationi princess Latavri and died childless in 807, so that the royal line she belonged to ended with her generation.