Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, Georgia is a country of rainforests and swamps, snow and glaciers, and semi-arid plains. It has ski resorts and mineral springs, monuments and an oil pipeline. It also has one of the longest and most turbulent histories in the Christian or Near Eastern world, but no comprehensive, up-to-date account has been written about this little-known country—until now. Remedying this omission, Donald Rayfield accesses a mass of new material from recently opened archives to tell Georgia’s absorbing story.
Beginning with the first intimations of the existence of Georgians in ancient Anatolia and ending with the volatile presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili, Rayfield deals with the country’s internal politics and swings between disintegration and unity, and divulges Georgia’s complex struggles with the empires that have tried to control, fragment, or even destroy it. He describes the country’s conflicts with Xenophon’s Greeks, Arabs, invading Turks, the Crusades, Genghis Khan, the Persian Empire, the Russian Empire, and Soviet totalitarianism. A wide-ranging examination of this small but colorful country, its dramatic state-building, and its tragic political mistakes, Edge of Empires draws our eyes to this often overlooked nation.
Donald Rayfield is professor emeritus of Russian and Georgian in the Department of Russian, Queen Mary, University of London. Among his many books, he is the author of The Literature of Georgia: A History and Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him as well as editor-in-chief of the immense Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Emergence of the Kartvelians 2. The Origins of the Kingdom of Kartli 3. Conversion 4. The Arab Conquest 5. Unification 6. Davit the Builder 7. Demetre and Giorgi III 8. Queen Tamar 9. Mongol Invasion 10. The Fractured State 11. Timur Lang and the Destruction of Georgia 12. Fratricide 13. King Teimuraz I 14. Teimuraz Dispossessed 15. The Eighteenth Century 16. The Russian Conquest of Kartli-Kakhetia 17. King Solomon’s End 18. Vice-regency 19. Reaction and Revolution 20. Independence 21. Soviet Annexation 22. After Stalin 23. Independence Restored
References Chronology Maps and Dynastic Trees Select Bibliography Acknowledgements Index