Stepanos II

Stepanos II is a figure whose record is thin and whose identity is contested, yet a hinge in the Khosroid genealogy: the son of Adarnase I, whom the emperor Heraclius installed at Tbilisi, and, in the chronicle's account, the father of Mihr and Archil. The Georgian Chronicles say that after Adarnase's death authority in Iberia was exercised by his son Stepanos, a man firm in the faith, who divided his property between his two sons before withdrawing westward. Modern scholarship complicates this. Cyril Toumanoff placed Stephen II's rule as presiding prince of Iberia from about 637 or 642 to about 650, seated at Tbilisi and aligned, like his father, with Byzantium; in 645 the Arabs entered Georgia and he was compelled to acknowledge the caliph as overlord. On this reckoning he was succeeded by his son Adarnase II, and the Stepanos who fathered Mihr and Archil was a different man two generations later, the Stephen of Kakheti attested by an inscription of 735 at Ateni Sioni. The chronicle has telescoped the two. The genealogy given here follows the chronicle in giving Stepanos II the sons Archil and Mihr and a death in 663. Toumanoff also proposed that the plaque on the church of Jvari names Stephen II among its builders, though Georgian scholars have read those names as belonging to the previous generation. However the details are resolved, Stepanos II stands where the old royal house of Iberia became a line of Christian princes between Constantinople and the caliphate.