Borena of Alania

Borena of Alania, sister of the Alan king Durgulel the Great, was queen consort of Bagrat IV of Georgia, the mother of George II, and the grandmother of the future king David IV. Through her daughter Martha, who became the Byzantine empress Maria of Alania, she linked the Bagrationi to the imperial houses of Doukas and Botaneiates, and she is remembered in Georgian tradition as a patron of monastic life and as a probable author of a hymn to the Virgin. The Georgian Chronicles record that Bagrat's first wife, Helena, a niece of the emperor Romanos III Argyros married in 1033, "died at Kutaisi" after a short time, and that "King Bagrat married Queen Borena, daughter of the King of the Ossetes, sister of Dorgholel." No date is given; since her children were born in the early 1050s, modern scholars place the marriage in the 1040s or early 1050s. Her son George was born about 1050 and her daughter Martha about 1053. A further daughter, Mariam, who may have married the Byzantine governor Theodore Gabras, is also attributed to her. At five Martha was sent to Constantinople under the empress Theodora, and about 1065 she married the future emperor Michael VII Doukas, later wedding his successor Nikephoros III. The Alan alliance was active as well as dynastic. The chronicle relates that Bagrat brought Durgulel with forty thousand troops to ravage Ganja under the command of Prince George, and that afterward "Dorgholel, the great King of the Ossetes, wished to visit his brother-in-law Bagrat" and traveled through Abkhazia to Kutaisi, where "he saw his sister the Queen, mother of Giorgi the Kuropalate," and was feasted for twelve days. Borena sponsored the Georgian monastery of Kapata on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and she is generally identified with the Borena named as author of a hymn to the Virgin inscribed on an icon of the Theotokos now kept at the church of Lenjer in Svaneti. The last notice of her is at Bagrat's deathbed: when the king fell ill in 1072 and was carried to Kartli, "his mother, Queen Mariam, his wife Borena, and his daughter Mariam arrived," and he died on 24 November of that year. Her own death is unrecorded.