Abstract
In the 4th-6th centuries, the struggle between the Roman Empire and Persia often led to short-term, but strategically important regional confl icts that did not capture the territories of the empires themselves. Most often these confl icts arose in the South Caucasus, where the fi ghting took place strictly according to the rules. This paper is devoted to one of such campaigns, which took place in the 460s, when some Southern and Western Caucasian kingdoms were involved in this campaign, that is, Suania, Lazika, Abasgia (Abkhazia) and Kartli. The kingdom of Kartli was the main actor in the struggle. At that time, Kartli was ruled by the warlike king Vakhtang Gorgasal, whose hostilities unfolded in Abkhazia (Abasgiya), where Vakhtang Gorgasal invaded. The confl ict between Kartli and Abkhazia is completely ignored in the Greek texts, they mention only the battles between the Romans and the Persians in Lazika and Suania. However, Vakhtang’s invasion of Abkhazia was intensively covered in Georgian medieval chronicles called “Kartlis Tskhovreba” (“The Life of Kartli”). With all due respect, the author of this article seeks to bring together the evidence of both “Kartlis Tskhovreba” and the early Byzantine historian Priscus Paniumsky in order to study, fi rstly, how the Eastern Roman (early Byzantine) Empire and Persia contributed to the Vakhtang campaign, and secondly, how Lazika, Kartli and Suania were interconnected with each other during this campaign, and thirdly, how the invasion of Abkhazia changed the geopolitical conditions of Kartli within the South Caucasian Kingdom.
Keywords
Kingdom of Kartli, the Persians, East Roman Empire, Abkhazia (Abasgia), Priscus of Panium, the Huns of Kidaritai.
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