Early Reign
He was the son of the king George I (r. 1014–1027) by his first wife Mariam of Vaspurakan. At the age of three, Bagrat was surrendered by his father as a hostage to the Byzantine emperor Basil II (r. 976–1025) as a price for George’s defeat in the 1022 war with the Byzantines. The young child Bagrat spent the next three years in the imperial capital of Constantinople and was released in 1025. He was still in the Byzantine possessions when Basil died and was succeeded by his brother Constantine VIII (r. 1025-8). Constantine ordered the retrieval of the young prince, but the imperial courier was unable to overtake Bagrat – he was already in the Georgian kingdom.
After George I died in 1027, Bagrat, aged eight, succeeded to the throne. Queen Dowager Mariam then returned to prominence and became a regent for his underage son. She shared the regency with the grandees, particularly Liparit IV, Duke of Trialeti, and Ivane, Duke of Kartli.
By the time when Bagrat became a king, the Bagratids’ drive to complete the unification of all Georgian lands had gained irreversible momentum. The kings of Georgia set at Kutaisi in western Georgia whence they run all of what had been the Kingdom of Abkhazia and a greater portion of Iberia/Kartli; Tao/Tayk had been lost to the Byzantines while a Muslim emir remained in Tbilisi and the kings of Kakheti obstinately defended their autonomy in easternmost Georgia. Furthermore, the loyalty of great nobles to the Georgian crown was far from being stable. During Bagrat’s minority, the regency had advanced the positions of the high nobility whose influence he subsequently tried to limit when he assumed full ruling powers. Simultaneously, the Georgian crown was confronted with two formidable external foes: the Byzantine Empire and the resurgent Seljuq Turks. Although the Byzantine Empire and Georgia had centuries-long cultural and religious ties, and the Seljuqs posed a substantial threat to the empire itself, Constantinople’s aggressiveness on the Caucasian political scene contributed to an atmosphere of distrust and recrimination, and prevented the two Christian nations from effective cooperation against the common threat. With assertion of the Georgian Bagratid hegemony in the Caucasus being the cornerstone of Bagrat’s reign, his policy can be understood as the attempt to play the Seljuqs and Byzantines off against one another.
Read more about this topic: Bagrat IV Of Georgia
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