Mirdat of Kartli
The Holy Martyr Mirdat, King of Kartli
Martyr · King · d. c. 410
Commemorated 8 July — Death in a Persian prison for refusing to deny Christ
Mirdat, king of Kartli (Iberia, eastern Georgia) about 408–410, is honoured by the Georgian Church as the first of its martyred kings. Reared by his grandfather King Trdat in the Christian faith and in the memory of Georgian independence, he used his short reign to throw off the Persian tribute and to recover Klarjeti from Byzantine control, and then took the field against the Persians. He was defeated near Gardabani and taken alive. The Persian king required him to renounce Christ; he refused, was tortured and loaded with chains, and died of his sufferings in prison. His memory is kept on July 8.
The king
Mirdat was the son of Varaz-Bakur and came to the throne of Kartli in the first decade of the fifth century, in the generation between the conversion of the kingdom under Nino and Mirian and the great reign of Vakhtang Gorgasali. The Georgian chronicle tradition records that he was brought up by his grandfather, King Trdat, who formed him in the Christian faith and in the conviction that the kingdom should be free of its Persian overlords. Kartli in these years lay between the two empires — tributary to Sasanian Persia, with parts of its territory in Byzantine hands — and its kings governed under close Persian supervision.
The revolt and the defeat at Gardabani
Mirdat's reign, given as about 408–410, was a short attempt to reverse that position. He recovered Klarjeti, the south-western march, from Byzantine control, and he stopped the payment of tribute to Persia, which was in effect a declaration of war. When the Persian army came he marched with his forces toward Gardabani, in the lowlands south-east of the capital, and there was defeated. The young king was taken alive.
Martyrdom
The demand made of him in captivity was the demand made of all the Christian princes of the Caucasus under Sasanian rule: to abandon Christ and accept the religion of the Persian court, and with it a place among the king's loyal vassals. He refused. He was tortured for his confession, bound in chains, and thrown into prison; and there, worn out by what had been done to him, he gave up his soul to God — not by execution but of his wounds, which is the form of martyrdom the Caucasian tradition most often records. The Georgian Church counts him a martyr for the faith and the first martyred king of Georgia, the forerunner of Archil II of Georgia and of the long series of Georgian rulers who died rather than apostatise.
Feast and commemoration
July 8 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 21). The commemoration is Georgian, and is carried into English by the Orthodox Church in America's calendar; it is not on the Greek, Slavic or Antiochian day-lists, where July 8 belongs to the Great Martyr Procopius. In Georgia he is commemorated among the martyred kings and princes of the nation, whose memory is a principal theme of the Georgian sanctoral.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Thy martyr Mirdat, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from thee our God; for having thy might he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble arrogance of the demons. By his prayers save thou our souls.
Original translation from the Georgian
Iconography
Mirdat is painted as a young crowned king: the closed crown of the Georgian sovereigns, a jewelled loros or a rich mantle over the tunic, and in his hands the cross of martyrdom and sometimes a sword held downward or a scroll. The martyr's cross rather than the sceptre is the mark that distinguishes him from the merely royal saints. He appears in modern Georgian compositions of the holy kings and queens of Georgia, between Mirian and Vakhtang Gorgasali on the one side and the later royal martyrs on the other.
No pre-1900 icon of Mirdat has been located; his cult, though old in Georgia, has left no medieval image identifiable as his, and the icons now in use are modern and copyrighted.
Disputed questions
- The extent of the record. Everything above rests on the Georgian chronicle tradition — the Kartlis Tskhovreba and the calendars derived from it — and on the synaxarial notice as it now circulates. No contemporary source describes Mirdat's captivity or death, the Persian king who held him is not named in the notice, and the dates of the reign (408–410) are those of the Georgian regnal lists, which for this period are not secure. The Life is honestly short because the record is.
- The name and numbering. Georgian sources number the kings of this name variously, and Mirdat (Mihrdat) is a common royal name in Kartli; this is the king of the early fifth century, son of Varaz-Bakur, and is not to be confused with the earlier Mirdats of the Chosroid line.
- Century of repose. A death about 410 falls in the fifth century, under which he is indexed here.