Alda

Alda was an Alan princess, the second wife of George I of Georgia, whose surrender of the fortress of Anakopia to the Byzantine Empire in the early 1030s cost Georgia its Abkhazian stronghold for generations. The Georgian Chronicles call her simply "the daughter of the King of the Ossetes," the Georgian name for the Alans, and the Byzantine historian John Skylitzes names her Alda, "wife of George, of the Alan race." Whether she was George's lawful wife or a concubine has been debated, but no contemporary source questions the legitimacy of the marriage. George I, who reigned from 1014 to 1027, had a son by Alda named Demetre, and left him in possession of Anakopia. When the king died, some of the nobility spoke of raising Demetre to the throne in place of his half-brother Bagrat IV, the son of George's first wife Mariam, but the boy was a minor and the plan failed. Neither Bagrat nor his mother could win him over. Threatened by Bagrat, Alda defected to the Byzantines: Demetre "sought asylum with the King of the Greeks, transferring Anakopia to him," and, the chronicler adds, "since then, to the present day, Anakopia has been lost to the King of the Abkhazians." Skylitzes confirms that the emperor Romanos III Argyros received the fort from Alda and honored her son with the rank of magistros; the event is usually dated to 1033. Demetre returned in 1039 with Byzantine troops and the support of the powerful duke Liparit, and fought Bagrat with initial success, but he died unexpectedly in 1042. Alda then left Georgia with Demetre's young son David for her native Alania. The eighteenth-century historian Prince Vakhushti held that David's descendants flourished there as a line of Alan princes from which came David Soslan, the second husband of Tamar the Great, a reconstruction that rests on late tradition. Alda's date of death is not recorded. Her marriage was the first of a series that bound the Bagrationi to the Alan royal house: Bagrat IV, her stepson and adversary, himself took as his second wife Borena, sister of the Alan king Durgulel, and the connection was renewed a century later through Burdukhan, mother of Tamar.