ABSTRACT
It is reported later by Ioane Batonishvili (იოანე ბატონიშვილი) in Alms-Gathering (კალმასობა) that around 1390 the Mongol khan Tamerlane took all the Georgian books he could find to Turkestan, where of course they vanished. Tamerlane’s six genocidal attacks between 1384 and 1403 made the first Mongol invasions seem benevolent by comparison. The number of Georgian-speakers (archaeological data suggest) dropped from perhaps 5,000,000 of the 1200s to perhaps 2,000,000; the flow of ideas, clerics, and statesmen between Europe and Georgia was cut for 200 years; the unified state split into three, Imeretia, Kartli, and Kakhetia, and the church’s structure also crumbled. Forced to adopt Islam or to recant it, Georgia’s rulers lost their ideological bearings, and their politics degenerated into desperate, treacherous, and violent contrivances to survive a suzerainty that threatened to exterminate not just their culture but their language and ethnos. From Tamerlane’s disappearance in 1403 until the Russian conquest of 1801, Georgia endured 400 years as a carcass torn between Turkey and Iran. In the first half of this desolate period Georgian literature could amount only to a pale pastiche of what went before: a nadir of two centuries had to be endured.
