Alania - Later History

Later History

After the downfall of Khazaria, the Alan kings frequently allied with the Byzantines and various Georgian rulers for protection against encroachments by northern steppe peoples such as the Pechenegs and Kipchaks. John Skylitzes reports that Alda of Alania, after the death of her husband, "George of Abasgia" (i.e., George I of Georgia), received Anakopia as a maritime fief from Emperor Romanus III. This happened in 1033, the year when the Alans and the Rus sacked the coast of Shirvan in modern-day Azerbaijan. Alania is not mentioned in East Slavic chronicles, but archaeology indicates that the Alans maintained trade contacts with the Rus' principality of Tmutarakan. There is a stone grave cross, with a Cyrillic inscription from 1041, standing on the bank of the Bolshoi Yegorlyk River in present-day Stavropol Krai, immediately north of Alania. Two Russian crosses, datable to ca. 1200, were discovered by archaeologists in Arkhyz, the heartland of medieval Alania.

The Alans and Georgians probably collaborated in the Christianization of the Vainakhs and Dvals in the 12th and 13th centuries, Georgian missionaries were active in Alania and the Alan contingents were frequently employed by the Georgian monarchs against their Muslim neighbors. The Alanian-Georgian alliance was cemented in the 1060s, when the Alans struck across Muslim Arran and sacked Ganja. In the 1120s King David the Builder of Georgia visited the Darial to reconcile the Alans with the Kipchaks, who thereupon were allowed to pass through Alania to the Georgian soil. David's son, Demetre I, also journeyed, c. 1153, to Alania accompanied by the Arab historian Ibn al-Azraq. The alliance culminated in 1187, when the Alanian prince David Soslan married Queen Tamar of Georgia, with their descendants ruling Georgia until the 19th century. The medieval Alanian princesses also married Byzantine and Russian Rurikid rulers more than once. For instance, Maria the Ossetian, who founded the Convent of Princesses in Vladimir, was the wife of Vsevolod the Big Nest and grandmother of Alexander Nevsky.

In the late 1230s all three Christian powers - Alania, Georgia, and Vladimir-Suzdal - fell before the Mongol invaders. Bishop Theodore of Alania described the plight of his metropolis in a lengthy epistolary sermon written during the tenure of Patriarch Germanus II (1222–40). The wars of Timur in the 14th century inflicted the final blow on Alania and decimated its population. Those who survived being killed or enslaved by the Mongols and Timur's armies, broke up into three groups. One retreated into the foothills and valleys of the central Caucasus and produced the two principal Ossetian groups, Digor and Iron. Another group of Alans migrated with the Kipchaks into Eastern Europe and preserved their language and ethnic identity as the Jassic people until the 15th century. The third group joined the Mongol horde and soon disappeared from history.