A woman of some importance | 6 July 2017

It might seem unlikely that a Christian noblewoman could have had influence over a Muslim city in the 13th century, when women were considered by Muslim society as being ‘underlings without complete intelligence’ and by Christian society as ‘a fish hook of the devil… a source of evil… a treasury of filth’. However, Tamta — a woman of Armenian Christian heritage, who travelled extensively and acted as a link between people of various faiths and backgrounds — seems to have governed, influenced taxation, provided passage for pilgrimage and even, possibly, played a role in battles and military negotiations, in Akhlat, a Muslim city in what is now Turkey, in the early 1200s. Antony Eastmond, professor of art history at the Courtauld Institute, asks how this came to be.

References to Tamta are few in chronicles from the Middle Ages. Eastmond studies the society Tamta was born into, the context of her marriages, the idiosyncrasies of societies and cultures she moved through, and the perceptions of Christianity, of women, and of various races in the 13th century, in an attempt to tease out the shape that Tamta’s life and identity likely took.

Tamta passed through the hands of various elite men during her lifetime. She was, like many women in the 13th century, a ‘commodity’ for her male relatives ‘to dispose of however they saw fit to further their own ends’. First, she was a bargaining chip in the negotiations for her father’s ransom after he was captured outside the walls of Akhlat in 1210. She was married to
Ayyubid al-Awhad, then passed onto his brother, al-Ashraf, following al-Awhad’s death.

She was subsequently captured by Khwarazmshah invaders, raped by their leader Jalal al-Din, then illegally married to him, returned to al-Ashraf at the conquering of the Khwarazmshahs by the Ayyubids, captured by invading Mongols, sent by Batu (grandson of Gengis Khan) to the court of the Great Khan, Ogodei, and then, finally, returned to Akhlat to be its sole ruler, under the Mongols.