David IV of Georgia - Family Background and Early Life

Family Background and Early Life

The year of David's birth can be calculated from the date of his accession to the throne recorded in the Life of King of Kings David (ცხორებაჲ მეფეთ-მეფისა დავითისი), written c. 1123–1126, as k'oronikon (Paschal cycle) 309, that is, 1089, when he was 16 years old. Thus, he would have been born in k'oronikon 293 or 294, that is, c. 1073. According to the same source, he died in k'oronikon 345, when he would have been in his 52nd or 53rd year. Professor Cyril Toumanoff gives 1070 and 24 January 1125 as the dates for David. The earliest known document that makes mention of David is the royal charter of his father, George II of Georgia (r. 1072–1089), granted to the Mghvime monastery and dated to 1073.

According to the Life of King of Kings David, David was the only son of George II. The contemporaneous Armenian chronicler Matthew of Edessa mentions David's brother Totorme, who, according to the modern historian Robert W. Thomson, was his sister. The name of David's mother, Helene, is recorded in a margin note in the Gospel of Matthew from the Tsqarostavi monastery; she is otherwise unknown. David bore the name of the biblical king-prophet, from whom the Georgian Bagratids claimed their descent and whose 78th descendant David was proclaimed to be.

David's father, George II, was confronted by a major threat to the kingdom of Georgia. The country was invaded by the Seljuq Turks, which were part of the same wave which had overrun Anatolia, defeating the Byzantine Empire and taking captive the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes at the battle of Manzikert in 1071. In what the medieval Georgian chronicle refers to as didi turkoba, "the Great Turkish Invasion", several provinces of Georgia became depopulated and George was forced to sue for peace, becoming a tributary of the sultan Malik-Shah I in 1083. The great noble houses of Georgia, capitalizing on the vacillating character of the king, sought to assert more autonomy for themselves; Tbilisi, the ancient capital of Kartli, remained in the hands of its Muslim rulers, and a local dynasty, for a time suppressed by George's energetic father Bagrat IV, maintained its precarious independence in the eastern region of Kakheti under the Seljuq suzerainty.