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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| She gave birth to 23 children while foreign empires were torturing her family to death for refusing to convert to Islam. Georgia, 1624. Queen Darejan received the news every royal wife dreaded: her mother-in-law, Queen Ketevan, had been tortured to death in Persia. They'd tried to force her to convert to Islam. When she refused, they strangled her with a bowstring, then dismembered her body. Darejan was pregnant. Again. It was perhaps her eighth or ninth pregnancy—she'd already lost count. She had small children clinging to her skirts. Her husband, King Teimuraz I, was in hiding, trying to hold together what remained of their fractured kingdom. And she had to keep going. Keep bearing children. Keep preserving the royal line. Keep surviving. Because that's what Georgian queens did in the 17th century: they endured. Georgia in the 1600s was trapped between two empires that wanted to destroy it. The Persian Safavid Empire to the east. The Ottoman Empire to the west. Both Muslim powers. Both determined to either convert or eliminate the Christian Georgian kingdoms that stood between them. Georgian royalty became pawns, hostages, victims. Shah Abbas I of Persia was particularly brutal. He didn't just want Georgian territory—he wanted Georgian souls. Convert to Islam, or watch your family die. Teimuraz I refused. So the Shah took his mother, Queen Ketevan, hostage. For nine years, she was imprisoned in Shiraz. For nine years, they tried to force her conversion. Promises of release, threats of death, everything in between. She refused. So in 1624, they tortured her to death. Publicly. As an example. Her daughter-in-law Darejan, back in Georgia, learned that her children's grandmother had been murdered for her faith. That this was the price of remaining Christian in a region where Christian kingdoms were being systematically crushed. And she was expected to keep having children. To keep producing heirs. To keep ensuring the royal line survived—even though survival meant watching those children face the same threats. Over her lifetime, Darejan gave birth approximately 23 times. Think about what that means. Twenty-three pregnancies in an era when childbirth was the leading cause of death for women. Twenty-three times risking her life. Twenty-three children born into a kingdom under constant siege, where royal children were targets for kidnapping, forced conversion, or murder. This wasn't the romantic image of medieval queenship. This was industrial-scale motherhood in the service of dynastic survival. The Shah didn't stop with Queen Ketevan. He took several of Teimuraz and Darejan's sons hostage. He demanded they convert to Islam or he'd execute them. The boys refused. The Shah killed them. Darejan lost multiple children—not to disease or accident, but to deliberate murder by a foreign power determined to break her family's faith and resistance. Imagine that grief. Imagine giving birth 23 times, knowing that some of those children would be taken from you. That foreign empires would use them as bargaining chips. That their lives depended on political calculations you couldn't control. And you couldn't stop having children, because the dynasty needed heirs. The kingdom needed continuity. If the royal line died out, Georgia's independence died with it. So Darejan kept bearing children while burying children. Kept managing the royal household while her husband fought wars. Kept holding together what remained of their family while empires tried to tear it apart. She wasn't just a mother. She was a strategic necessity. Every pregnancy was an act of defiance against the empires trying to eliminate Georgian Christianity. Every surviving child was proof that Georgia would continue. Every daughter she raised, every son she protected, was a victory against forced conversion and cultural extinction. Teimuraz was often absent—fighting, in exile, negotiating with one empire against another. Darejan managed the household, raised the children, maintained whatever stability was possible. When Teimuraz was forced into exile, Darejan went with him. Taking as many surviving children as she could. Leaving behind the ones who were hostages, or already dead, or scattered across a region where Georgian royalty had become refugees in their own land. She lived through decades of this. Decades of pregnancy, childbirth, infant deaths, childhood diseases, and political murders. Decades of uncertainty about which children would survive to adulthood. Which would be taken hostage. Which would die for refusing to convert. By the time she died in 1668, Darejan had outlived many of her 23 children. She'd seen her kingdom torn apart by foreign invasions. She'd watched empires use her family as pawns in their territorial games. And she'd kept the royal line alive. Today, we barely remember Queen Darejan. Georgian history focuses on the kings—on Teimuraz's military campaigns, his political maneuvering, his eventual consolidation of power. On the dramatic martyrdom of Queen Ketevan, who was canonized as a saint. But Darejan? She was "just" the wife. The mother. The woman who had 23 children and managed the household and endured exile and buried her babies and kept going. Her labor was private, invisible, relentless. No battles named after her. No dramatic last stands. Just decades of bearing children, raising them, losing them, bearing more. Here's what makes Darejan's story important: She represents the invisible infrastructure of royal survival. While historians write about kings and battles and treaties, women like Darejan were doing the biological and domestic labor that made dynasties possible. Every king needed heirs. Every dynasty needed continuity. And that meant some woman had to risk her life 20+ times in childbirth, had to raise those children through wars and invasions, had to bury the ones who didn't survive, had to protect the ones who did. Without Darejan's 23 pregnancies, there would have been no Georgian royal heirs. Without her household management during Teimuraz's absences, there would have been no stable base for his resistance. Without her endurance through decades of loss and exile, the dynasty would have collapsed. But because her labor was "women's work"—childbirth, child-rearing, household management—it doesn't get the same historical recognition as military victories. She gave birth 23 times while empires murdered her family. She raised children while knowing they might be taken hostage or killed. She managed a royal household while in exile, while under siege, while watching her kingdom torn apart. She endured grief that would have broken most people—the loss of multiple children, the torture-murder of her mother-in-law, the constant threat to everyone she loved. And she did it all without the glory of battle, the recognition of treaties, or the fame of martyrdom. She did it because someone had to. Because the dynasty needed heirs. Because Georgia needed to survive. Because that's what queens did: they bore the unbearable, privately, relentlessly, until they died. Modern Georgia barely remembers Queen Darejan. There are no grand monuments to her 23 pregnancies. No statues commemorating her endurance. No epic poems about the children she buried. But every Georgian king who came after her, every continuation of the royal line, every bit of Georgian independence that survived the 17th century— All of it rested on the foundation of her body, her labor, her losses. She was the invisible infrastructure of royal survival. And she did it while empires were literally torturing her family to death. Twenty-three children. Decades of war. Multiple children murdered or taken hostage. Forced into exile. Watching her kingdom torn apart. And she kept going. That's not just motherhood. That's strategic endurance. That's the private, invisible labor that holds together kingdoms while the men fight the public wars. Queen Darejan gave her body, her children, her entire life to keeping Georgia alive during its darkest century. History barely remembers her name. But without her, there might not have been a Georgia to remember. |
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