So, of all the sections of the Kartlis Tskhovreba (the Georgian Chronicles), I'm starting with the
Chronicle of Giorgi Lasha and his Time. It's one of the shorter constituent parts of the KT, despite covering an unusually long time-span. It claims internally (and as far as I know, validly) to have been written during the reign of Rusudan I, Tamar's considerably less successful daughter who was queen from the 1220s onwards. In fairness to Rusudan, Tamar never had to deal with the Mongols, who were an extreme threat throughout Rusudan's reign. The Chronicle goes up essentially to the death of Rusudan's brother, Giorgi IV "Lasha", who died after being wounded in battle in the 1220s (at the age of just 31). It starts with the reign of his great-grandfather, Demetre, skips over the reign of Demetre's elder son David V (which lasted six months before he died in mysterious circumstances), and then covers the reigns of Giorgi III, Tamar, and Giorgi IV.
Given my focus is initially going to be Tamar's reign, picking this as a starting chronicle is in some ways an odd choice.
- It's short. I will be able to work through just about all the information in the Chronicle in a fairly short period, giving me an initial dataset that includes a number of the most important characters I'll need when I get onto the bigger chronicles.
- It has numbers in it. There are actual koronikon dates in several places in the Chronicle, which whilst several of them are almost certainly wrong (certainly the dates of the battle at Basiani and that of Tamar's death) at least gives me a few general time-hooks to start hanging things on. This will be useful for my event-sorting functions, which will mostly consist of "date X was probably/was definitely before date Y" with a few "hook" dates and will then hopefully turn the whole information dump into a best-guess timeline based on the ordering of that graph.
Anyhow - it's an interesting document, it doesn't have as much fun stuff as the bigger chronicles but it's a good start point I think :)