The Medieval Caucasus - Intro and FAQs

[Jubal]

The Medieval Caucasus - An Intro

This forum, previously and still largely about the specifics of high medieval Georgian prosopography, is now more generally becoming the Medieval Caucasus forum on the site. As such, here's an intro thread about what that actually means.

The Caucasus, the mountainous region that sits between the Black and Caspian seas, has for much of human history been at the edge of Empires: the Russians, Ottomans, Safavids, Seljuks, Byzantines, and far more besides have all had their time. It's a wildly culturally diverse part of the world, with a huge range of religions, languages, cultures and ethnic identities, with the rugged terrain creating enough isolation for local areas and peoples to remain distinct but often also channelling enough cultural contact to create new and syncretic ways of life along the way.

This forum is about studying this world as it existed between ca 500 and 1500 AD: at one end of this period we have the closing stages of the Sasanian-Roman divide over the region, which in the seventh century was replaced with the falling back of both against the rapid spread of Islam, an event which would change the character of the region forever. At the later end, the two main early modern powers in the region, the Ottomans in the west and the Safavids in the east, were beginning to muscle in, in some ways re-establishing an ancient pattern of east-west divide contesting the Caucasus. The millennium between these points sees much of the identity formation and religious and cultural development of the groups we know from the Caucasus today - and is still a very hotly contested period in the cultural memories of all the major modern peoples of the region.



FAQs

Q. Isn't there some thing about white people being Caucasian?
A. We have 19th century racism to thank for that term: the 'race science' of the time suggested that white people originated in the Caucasus, a theory that was ultimately derived from people believing that Noah's Ark landed there and that some myths suggested the classical mythic titan, Prometheus, was chained up in the region. This belief is, to put it gently, not endorsed by modern scientists or historians.

Q. Your intro doesn't mention Russia, isn't Russia important in the Caucasus?
A. Russia really only moves into the central Caucasus in the 18th century: before that and certainly in the middle ages it has minimal influence in the region.