Gurandukht of the Kipchaks

Gurandukht of the Kipchaks was the second wife of David IV the Builder and the queen through whom Georgia secured the Kipchak alliance that transformed its army. She was a daughter of Atrak, son of Sharaghan, the Kipchak chieftain known in the Rus' chronicles as Otrok, son of Sharukan, whose people had been driven from the steppe north of the Black Sea by the campaigns of Vladimir Monomakh from 1109 onward. Gurandukht is a Persianate name common among medieval Georgian royal women; her original Turkic name is not recorded. David's biographer in the Georgian Chronicles is the only medieval Georgian source to name a wife of the king. Explaining David's decision to summon the Kipchaks, he writes that "many years before he had brought the worthy Guarandukht, daughter of the Kipchaks' leader Atrak, son of Sharaghan, and made her his lawful spouse and Queen of the entire Georgia." The marriage therefore preceded the great migration, which the chronicle places after David had gone in person to Alania, taken hostages from the Alans and Kipchaks alike, and secured the Darial pass. He then "brought a multitude of them: his father-in-law and the brothers of his wife," and settled forty thousand Kipchak families in Georgia, an event modern historians date to about 1118 to 1119. Kipchak troops fought in David's victory at Didgori in 1121. Which of David's children were hers is disputed. The Armenian historian Matthew of Edessa says that David's eldest son, Demetrius I, was born of an Armenian woman, evidently an earlier wife whom the Georgian sources pass over in silence. Toumanoff assigned all of David's children to that first marriage, while the Georgian genealogists Bichikashvili and Chikovani hold that the elder children came from it and that at least one son, Vakhtang, whose birth the chronicle records during the Kipchak migration, was Gurandukht's. Nothing is known of her later life or death. Her father Atrak, according to the Rus' chronicles, returned to the steppe after Monomakh's death in 1125, moved by a sprig of wormwood sent to remind him of his homeland, and there fathered Konchak, later a famous adversary of the princes of Kiev.