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CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY OF GEORGIA 99
and Cherkesses, Kabardians, Ossets, Chechens, and Lesghians
(Avårs) alternately invaded and pillaged the dominions of the
three Bagratid kings, or entered into alliance with them.
The proximity of these mountain tribes always rendered life
insecure, especially in Kakhetia and Karthlia ; accordingly
every village had one or more strongholds, with towers and
surrounding walls, where the inhabitants often took refuge
for weeks at a time with their belongings and their animals,
without being able to look after their hornes and their land.
It seems extraordinary that the Georgian nation could live
through this long distressful period without being utterly
disintegrated ; but it goes without saying that the intellec
tual and moral state of the country was deplorable, and it was
chiefly among the peasantry, handicraftsmen, and working
classes generally that a kind of religion and morality survived,
largely mingled with superstition. The clergy sank into
ignorance and immorality, while the nobles were demoralized
by the humiliating political conditions, which frequently
compelled them to send their sons as hostages to be brought
up as mullahs in Isfahan, and to surrender their daughters for
Persian or Turkish harems. They became indifferent to their
own religion, and combined Muhammedan polygamy with
Christian drunkenness, their interest in religion being confined
to " celebrating with admirable impartiality the feast-days of
either religion."
Notwithstanding that it was strictly forbidden by the
Church to seil Christian souls to infidels, the slave-trade
flourished ; the nobles, especially in Mingrelia and Guria,
exported numbers of their female and male serfs to the slave
markets of Tabriz, Akhaltsikh, and Trebizond, to be sold to
Turkish or Persian masters. The French traveller and jewel
merchant Chardin, writing in the second half of the seventeenth
century, estimates that 12,000 peasants of both sexes were sold
to Turkey annually ; and he tells of a poor but enterprising
nobleman who had recently sold twelve priests and his own
wife to a Turkish sea-captain at Trebizond. But wc must
not too readily assume that the customs of Georgia were
much worse than those of Europe at the same epoch—for
instance, at the French or English court, or in Russia.
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