The passion of queen ketevan. . (georgia.part2)

 ... . . .   . .. .      Part.1

 During the six centuries which elapsed between the lifetime of the great Georgian Athonites and that of the tragic Queen Ketevan, the kingdom of Georgia underwent great vicissitudes. At the time of the Crusades the inspiring leadership of King David the Builder (1089-1125) and Queen Tamar ( 1184-1213) enabled the country to emerge as leader of a pan-Caucasian Christian empire. But the Mongol invasions of the 1230's, and the later campaigns of Tamerlane, brought all this achievement down in ruins. The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 cut off Georgia from Western Christendom, and left her a prey to the rising Muhammadan powers Ottoman Turkey and Safavi Iran.

Early in the XVII -th century, Shah Abbas the Great of Persia embarked on a series of campaigns to subjugate Eastern Georgia. He was helped by the defection of Giorgi Saakadze, a prominent general in the service of the young Georgian monarch, Luarsab of Kartli. Saakadze guided the Shah's armies, which vented their fury on Eastern Georgia; churches were devastated, icons and crosses broken up and the jewels given for ornaments to the Shah's concubines. Many people saved themselves by fleeing to the woods and mountain strong-holds, hut at least sixty thousand were massacred. The rest of the population was deported to remote parts of Persia. To quote Pietro Della Valle, a contemporary Italian observer:

"Today Persia proper, Kirman or Carmania, Mazanderan on the Caspian Sea and many other lands of this empire are all full of Georgian and Circassian inhabitants. Most of them remain Christian to this day, but in a very crude manner, since they have neither priest nor minister to tend them. . .. There is no grandee who does not want all his wives to be Georgian, because it is a very handsome race, and the king himself has his palace full of them. . . . It would be too long to narrate all that has passed in this miserable migration, how many murders, how many deaths caused by privation, how many seductions, rapes and acts of violence, how many children drowned by their own parents or cast into rivers through despair, some snatched by force from their mother's breasts because they seemed too weak to live and thrown down by the wayside and abandoned there to be food for wild beasts or trampled underfoot by the horses and camels of the army, which marched for a whole day on top of dead bodies; how many sons separated from their fathers, wives from their husbands, sisters from their brothers, and carried off to distant countries without hope of ever meeting again. Throughout the camp, men and women were sold on this occasion much cheaper than beasts, because of the great number of them."

King Luarsab of Kartli was sufficiently trusting to accept the Shah's offer of peace negotiations; on arriving in the Persian camp he was arrested, and later strangled near Shiraz. The other ruler of Eastern Georgia, Teimuraz I of Kakheti, preferred resistance, and allied himself alternately with the Russians and the Turks to carry on guerrilla warfare.
In revenge, Shah 'Abbas castrated the two young sons of Teimuraz whom he already held as hostages. To the mother of Teimuraz, the Queen Dowager Ketevan, whom he also held in his power, he offered the chance of adopting Islam and entering his harem. On her refusal, she was cruelly martyred at Shiraz on September 22nd, 1624. The following account of her Passion is translated from a contemporary report from the Angustinian missionary fathers in Persia addressed to the Papal See; the original text was first published in 1910 by the late Father Michael Tamarati.