Khuddan

Khuddan was a twelfth-century king of the Alans, the people whom the Georgian sources call the Osi or Ossetians, and the maternal grandfather of Tamar the Great. He is known from a single reference: the anonymous Histories and Eulogies of the Sovereigns, one of the chronicles gathered in the Georgian Chronicles, states that Demetrius I, in his own reign, brought for his son George "the daughter of the King of Khuddan, by name Burdukhan." The Life of Tamar in the same collection calls the queen simply "daughter of the King of the Ossetians." One modern English translation renders the phrase as though Khuddan were a place, but the usual reading takes it as the king's personal name. Nothing further is recorded of him, neither his parentage, the length of his reign, nor the date of his death. Alania in this period was a Christian kingdom north of the Caucasus, and its rulers had intermarried with the Georgian Bagrationi for more than a century: Alda, wife of George I, and Borena, sister of King Durgulel and wife of Bagrat IV, were both Alan princesses. Khuddan's daughter continued that pattern when she married the future George III in the 1150s, during the lifetime of his father Demetrius I. Through Burdukhan, Khuddan became grandfather to Tamar, who ascended the throne in 1184, and the Alan tie was renewed in the next generation when Tamar married David Soslan, described by a Georgian source as her relative on her mother's side and a son of the Ossetian royal house.