David the Builder and Queen Tamar: Georgia's golden-age army

Between about 1100 and 1210, the small Christian kingdom of Georgia became the strongest power in the Caucasus. David IV, "the Builder", threw off Seljuk rule and smashed a huge coalition at Didgori in 1121; a lifetime later Queen Tamar, styled mepe, usually translated "king", ruled Georgia at its height. Here's that golden age, the army that won it, what you can see on each of our Ten Kingdoms medieval Georgian models and why it's there, and how to build and paint the army in 10mm, 15mm or 28mm.

Period

1089–1213, David IV to Tamar

Key battle

Didgori, 12 August 1121

Scales

10mm, 15mm and 28mm

Range

14 Georgian sets, plus Frankish, Turkic and Arab horse

Who was David the Builder?

David IV became king of Georgia in 1089, aged about sixteen, and reigned until his death in 1125 (Britannica). He inherited a kingdom wrecked by Seljuk Turkish raids since the 1080s and paying tribute to the sultan. In 1099, with the Seljuks busy fighting the First Crusade, he simply stopped paying (Wikipedia).

What made the rest possible was an army rebuilt from the ground up. David formed a royal guard, the monaspa, split his forces into garrison troops and a permanent field army, and around 1118 brought tens of thousands of Kipchak families from the steppe north of the Caucasus to settle in Georgia, each owing mounted warriors to the crown. He was married to Gurandukht, daughter of the Kipchak khan Otrok, which helped (Wikipedia).

He was a builder in the plain sense too: in 1106 he began the monastery of Gelati, designed as an academy as well as a church, where he is buried. The nickname itself, Aghmashenebeli, is later: it first turns up in a charter of 1452, and historians fixed it to him in the 17th and 18th centuries (Wikipedia).

What happened at the Battle of Didgori?

By 1121 David's raids and conquests had provoked a Muslim coalition led by Ilghazi, the Artuqid ruler of Mardin, with the Seljuk prince Tughril and the Arab emir Dubays ibn Sadaqa. On 12 August 1121 David met them in the Didgori valley, about 40 km west of Tbilisi, with his son Demetrius commanding part of the army (accounts differ on whether he led a wing or a hidden reserve) (Battle of Didgori). The coalition broke and was pursued for days. Tbilisi, an Arab emirate for centuries, fell to David in 1122 and became his capital. Britannica dates the battle itself to 1122; most accounts give 1121 for the battle and 1122 for Tbilisi.

The numbers are where record and legend part company. Georgian sources, followed by most modern historians, put David's army at around 55,000: about 40,000 Georgians, including 5,000 of the royal guard, some 15,000 Kipchaks, 500 Alans from the north Caucasus and a small band of Frankish knights, usually put at about 200. The enemy is another matter. Christian chroniclers gave fantastic figures: 560,000 to 600,000 in Matthew of Edessa and Walter the Chancellor, and anything from 150,000 to 800,000 elsewhere, while the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir gave 30,000. Treat the big figures as a way of saying "a very large army", not as a count.

Two details from the sources are good for a wargamer. Ibn al-Athir reports that a party of Kipchaks rode over as if to desert, got close to the coalition leaders, and shot them down. And the Franks are said to have led a frontal charge while the Georgian heavy cavalry swept downhill on the flanks. The Kipchak ruse rests on Ibn al-Athir alone; the Franks' role as a spearhead comes from Walter the Chancellor and Matthew of Edessa, while the downhill charge on the flanks is a modern reconstruction of the ground. Read them as tradition rather than proven fact.

Who was Queen Tamar, and why was she called king?

Tamar was crowned co-ruler by her father George III in 1178 and ruled alone from 1184 until about 1213 (World History Encyclopedia). Medieval Georgian sources call her mepe, usually translated "king", a word for the reigning sovereign that doesn't necessarily imply a man (a king's wife was dedopali); she was also mepeta mepe, "king of kings" (Wikipedia).

Under her, Georgia reached its greatest territorial and political height. Her second husband, the Alan prince David Soslan, won the Battle of Shamkor in 1195, where the caliph's banners were captured (World History Encyclopedia), and the battle of Basiani against the Seljuk sultan of Rum in 1202 or 1203 (sources disagree on the year). Her great generals were the brothers Zakare and Ivane Mkhargrdzeli. In 1204 Georgian troops helped her relatives (traditionally called her nephews) found the Empire of Trebizond, and the poet Shota Rustaveli wrote The Knight in the Panther's Skin in her reign (Wikipedia).

Legend has grown around her. Folk tales make her a warrior queen, but the record says she never fought in person, though she sometimes rode with the army. Her grave has never been found: Gelati is the traditional site, and searches there since 1920 have turned up nothing. The Georgian Orthodox Church later made her a saint.

What's on the Georgian king model, and why the falcon?

Look at the king and you see a man at the hunt, not in battle: no helmet or armour, a crown and a long cloak, a falcon perched on his raised hand, a short recurved bow in the other, and a case slung at his saddle. His horse walks in plain harness. The figure isn't a portrait of anyone, and nobody knows exactly what David's crown looked like, so read him as "a Georgian king" rather than a likeness.

The hunting kit is the point. In medieval Georgia the great royal hunt was run like a military operation. A 2025 study of hunting in medieval Georgia by Tristan Macharashvili (Caucasus Journal of Social Sciences) describes the "hunting campaign": everyone able to bear arms could be called, the army was mustered and split into units just as it would be for war, and men turned up in full war kit. Joining the state hunt was a vassal's duty, and anyone who stayed home was treated as a deserter and punished. A 16th-century book of obligations even required church serfs to stand "under the king's flag" for campaigns and hunts alike. Tamar's own chronicler tells of border guards reaching her while she was out hunting with news that war was needed, and she sent them straight off to fight.

The king's own hunters were run first by a chief huntsman and later by a chief falconer, and hunting with hawks was popular across Georgian society. Most of the detailed court rules in the study come from later medieval texts, so they describe the tradition rather than David's own court. Still, a king with a falcon is about as Georgian a command figure as you could ask for: the hunt was where the army trained.

Generals and banners: what's on the command figures?

The command figures show the armoured nobility. Each wears a conical helmet and mail over the shoulders and chest on top of a long coat. The mail is sculpted as big, chunky rings, which reads clearly at 10mm and takes a drybrush beautifully at 28mm. The Armoured General swings a straight sword, his cloak held by a round brooch.

The standard bearers carry the long, round-topped kite shield with a central boss. The shape was made for horsemen: the narrow tail covers the rider's left leg while the broad top guards his body. Kite shields appear in Georgian art from the 11th century, including an engraving of Saint George from Bochorma, and by the mid-12th century the Byzantines had swapped their round shields for them (Wikipedia).

The banner has a five-tailed fly. A banner marked where the king, a general or a noble's contingent stood, and it was where men rallied in a cavalry fight. Every banner set comes with a bare pole too: there's no reliable source for the colours of David's or Tamar's banners, so paint your own design and don't let anyone tell you it's "wrong". The armoured-horse version and the foot version give you a banner for each part of the army.

The lancers: what did Georgian heavy cavalry look like?

Georgia's battle-winners were armoured horsemen: the royal guard and the nobility, from great lords down to the aznauri, the lesser nobles who owed the crown mounted service. Our two lancer sets show them in mail over long coats with conical helmets, carrying long lances with streaming pennons. These are the troops to field as the monaspa, David's royal guard.

Mail wasn't the only armour. Mamuka Tsurtsumia's study of Georgian and Byzantine armour (Byzantina Symmeikta, 2011) traces lamellar and scale armour in Georgia from the 10th to the 12th centuries, developing in step with Byzantium, so a lamellar coat painted over the mail on a few figures wouldn't be out of place.

The armoured-horse set puts the horses in long cloth coverings reaching nearly to the hooves; the Armoured Spear Horse rides unprotected horses in ordinary harness. How many Georgian riders protected their horses isn't well recorded, so treat the covered horses as the richest troops: the guard and the great lords' own men.

Horse archers and the Kipchaks

Not every Georgian rider charged with the lance. The Georgian Bow Horse ride in long coats, with a mix of tall caps and helmets, shooting from the gallop, and the Light Armoured Bow Horse add padded coats: the better-equipped retainers of a lord's household.

The bow they carry is the short composite recurve of the steppe and the Caucasus, built up from wood, horn and sinew (Wikipedia). The design packs a lot of power into a short bow, small enough to handle from the saddle, which is why horse archers from the steppe to Byzantium used it.

Then there are the Kipchaks, Turkic nomads from the steppe. Georgian tradition says David settled 40,000 Kipchak families, each sending a horseman. Mikheil Bakhtadze of Tbilisi State University argues that each family sent two or three fighters, and puts the number of families at about 13,000 to 15,000 (Bakhtadze, 2016). Either way, thousands of steppe horse archers rode for Georgia at Didgori. Our Turkic Bow Horse make ideal Kipchaks, and the Turkic Armoured Spear Bow Horse, in lamellar with lance and bow, give you their better-armed retinues, or Seljuk ghilman for the other side.

The foot: spearmen, archers and javelinmen

The cavalry won the battles, but the foot held the ground. The Armoured Spear Foot wear mail and conical helmets and carry a mix of shields: kite shields and round shields sculpted with a raised rosette of petals. That mix fits the period: Byzantium had swapped round shields for kite shields by the mid-12th century (Wikipedia), and Georgian art shows both. The rosettes are a gift for painting: pick out alternate petals in two colours and the unit looks striking from across the table.

The Armoured Bow Foot are archers in mail who could stand in the line, and the Bow Foot are unarmoured archers in long coats, some in caps and some in helmets, with full quivers at their hips. The Javelin Foot are light troops with javelins and shields, for the broken ground and mountain passes where the cavalry couldn't go.

Franks, Turks and Arabs: allies and enemies

The range includes the armies Georgia fought beside and against:

• Franks. The 13th Century European Armoured Spear Horse and their barded-horse version wear great helms, which date them a century after Didgori. For 1121 they're a stand-in for the Frankish contingent; they're spot on for the 1220s, when Georgia had planned to join the Fifth Crusade until Mongol defeats ended it, and Queen Rusudan wrote to Pope Honorius III in 1223 to explain (Wikipedia).
• Arabs. The Islamic Spear Horse, turbaned light lancers carrying bows, suit the troops of Dubays ibn Sadaqa on the coalition side at Didgori, or the old emirate of Tbilisi.
• Seljuk Turks. Both Turkic sets serve the enemy just as well as the Kipchak allies, so one set of each gives you both sides.

How do you build a medieval Georgian army?

Every set is printed to order in resin (more on that in resin vs filament), unpainted or Tabletop Painted, and the unit sets hold eight figures. Here's what comes in each scale:

• 10mm is the scale for Didgori itself: the whole range is available, and a few hundred figures on a table finally look like an army. Browse 10mm Medieval Georgia.
• 15mm covers the king, generals, banners and Frankish knights: a ready-made command group and allied contingent. See 15mm Medieval Georgia.
• 28mm suits skirmish games and display pieces, where the falcon, the rosette shields and the chunky mail really show. See 28mm Medieval Georgia.

A balanced 10mm or 28mm force to start: the king and a banner, two units of lancers, a unit of horse archers and a unit of Kipchaks, with spearmen and archers to hold a flank. Not sure which scale is for you? Our guide to choosing between 10mm, 15mm and 28mm uses this very range to show the difference.

How should you paint medieval Georgians?

These are our suggested colours, using Warhammer Colour (Citadel) paint names, with The Army Painter washes as swaps. Prime with a grey primer, such as Grey Seer. The colour dots are a guide only.

• Vary the cloth. Give each figure in a unit a different coat colour from the same three or four pots, and keep the metal, wood and horses consistent. The unit looks like a band of individuals but still reads as one unit.
• 10mm: paint the unit, not the figure. Block in the coats, wash everything with Agrax Earthshade, and drybrush the mail with Necron Compound: the big sculpted rings do the rest.
• 28mm: add a highlight to faces and the raised petals of the rosette shields, and paint the falcon's eyes dark with a tiny bone dot.

For the stands, glue 10mm and 15mm figures to our Movement Plates, 40 mm wide, and base them with sand, a drybrush and flock as in our basing guide. Dry, rocky earth suits the Caucasus foothills.

Sources and further reading

• David IV, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• David IV of Georgia and Battle of Didgori, Wikipedia (with references to Matthew of Edessa, Walter the Chancellor and Ibn al-Athir).
• Michael Goodyear, Tamar of Georgia, World History Encyclopedia, 2020.
• Tamar of Georgia, Wikipedia.
• Tristan Macharashvili, Types of Hunting in Medieval Georgia, Caucasus Journal of Social Sciences 18 (1), 2025.
• Mikheil Bakhtadze, How many thousand Kipchaks did David the Builder resettle in Georgia? (in Georgian), Tbilisi State University, 2016.
• Mamuka Tsurtsumia, The Evolution of Splint Armour in Georgia and Byzantium: Lamellar and Scale Armour in the 10th–12th Centuries, Byzantina Symmeikta 21, 2011.
• Kite shield, Composite bow, Gelati Monastery and Mongol invasions of Georgia, Wikipedia.