Shalva of Akhaltsikhe
The Holy Martyr Shalva, Prince of Akhaltsikhe
Martyr · Prince · d. 1227
Commemorated 17 June — Repose in the prison of Jalal ad-Din after torture
A Georgian commander of the generation that won the great victories of Queen Tamar and lived to see them undone. Shalva of Akhaltsikhe, of the princely house of the Toreli, was one of the victors of Shamkori in 1195, where he took the caliph's own standard and gave it as an offering to the Khakhuli icon of the Mother of God. Thirty years later, in the reign of Rusudan, he and his brother Ivane were sent with six thousand men against the vast army of the Khwarazmian sultan Jalal ad-Din, and were left unsupported by a jealous commander-in-chief; Ivane was killed, and Shalva taken. The sultan offered him cities and treasure to become a Muslim. He refused, was tortured through a day, and was thrown half dead into prison, where he died in 1227.
Shamkori and the standard
Shalva belonged to the Toreli-Akhaltsikheli, one of the great feudal houses of southern Georgia, in the reign of Tamar — the height of the medieval Georgian kingdom. He was already a commander in 1195 at Shamkori, the battle in which the Georgian army broke the forces of the atabeg of Azerbaijan; and it was Shalva, the chronicle says, who took the banner sent by the caliph of Baghdad to the Muslim commander.
He did with it what a Georgian of that age did with a trophy: he carried it to Gelati and offered it to the Khakhuli icon, the great gold-and-enamel triptych of the Mother of God that was the palladium of the kingdom. The gesture is the key to the man. The victory was not his; it was hers.
Garnisi, 1226
The world Shalva had fought for collapsed within a generation. The Khwarazmian sultan Jalal ad-Din Mangburni, driven west by the Mongols and destroying as he came, entered Transcaucasia in the 1220s. Queen Rusudan, Tamar's daughter, sent out the army.
At Garnisi, Shalva and his brother Ivane commanded the advance guard — the chronicle gives them six thousand men, against a force it reckons at two hundred thousand. They engaged, held, and sent back for support. The commander-in-chief, the atabeg Ivane Mkhargrdzeli, standing with the main body within reach, would not move. The Georgian chronicler, who understood exactly what he was recording, breaks off his narrative to exclaim: O envy, the source of every evil!
The vanguard was destroyed. Ivane of Akhaltsikhe was killed in the fighting. Shalva was taken alive.
The offer, and the martyrdom
Jalal ad-Din knew the value of what he had. He kept Shalva in honour and pressed him, over a period, to renounce Christ and accept Islam, offering him wealth, command, and the government of cities — the standard and entirely serious inducement held out to a captured Christian noble whose conversion would have been worth an army to the conqueror.
Shalva refused, and went on refusing. The sultan at last ordered him tortured to death. The torturers worked at him for hours and could not finish him; and he was thrown, half dead, back into the prison, where he died. The year is 1227.
He is honoured by the Georgian Church as a martyr — not for falling in battle, which the Church does not by itself count martyrdom, but for the death he chose afterwards, in a cell, with the whole of a great career offered back to him as the price of denying Christ.
Feast and commemoration
June 17 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 30), kept in the Church of Georgia and on the OCA calendar. The feast falls within the window of the Apostles' Fast in most years, though not in all — the fast has no fixed beginning.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Shalva, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Shalva is painted as a warrior-saint of the Georgian type: a nobleman in the mail and long coat of the thirteenth-century Georgian cavalry, or in a princely robe, bearded, holding the martyr's cross in the right hand and a sword — sheathed, or held point-down — in the left. The captured banner he offered to the Khakhuli icon is his own attribute where the fuller cycle is painted, and in some modern Georgian work he is shown with his brother Ivane beside him and the icon of the Mother of God above.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection. The Georgian iconography of Shalva is of the modern revival and is in copyright.
Disputed questions
- The battle and its date. The Georgian sources put the disaster of the vanguard at Garnisi in 1225 or 1226; Shalva's death in captivity follows in 1227. The numbers the chronicle gives — six thousand against two hundred thousand — are the conventional figures of medieval narrative and should be read as "hopelessly outnumbered," not as a count.
- Shalva and Ivane. The two brothers are commemorated together in Georgian usage. Ivane died in the battle; the martyrdom, strictly, is Shalva's. The OCA's day-page for June 17 carries Shalva alone, and this entry is filed under his name with his brother named in the Life.
- Attestation. He is kept by the Church of Georgia and carried on the OCA calendar for June 17. He is not in the Greek Menaion or the general Slavonic books.