De Boyx

De Boyx was a 13th-century French crusader knight.

An interesting letter from De Boyx to Amadeus de Tramelay, Archbishop of Besançon, France, is preserved in the Fund of Vatican. It must have been written in 1220–1222 (Sh. Lomsadze).

In Georgia, both the Latin text of the letter and its translation (A. Urushadze) were first published in 1974 in V. Chachanidze's book Peter the Iberian and the Archaeological Excavations of the Georgian Monastery in Jerusalem. The French knight wrote that some Christians from Iberia, who were called Georgiens (Georgians),with God's help, fearlessly stood against countless unfaithful warriors, captured 300 of their fortresses and 9 large cities. According to him, the famous sixteen-year-old king, “resembled Alexander the Great in his temper and modesty, but not in his faith. That young man brought the remains of his mother, the powerful Queen Tamar, to Jerusalem, because (Tamar) left him a will during her lifetime that when she died, he had to bring her to Jerusalem and bury her near the tomb of the Lord. Deeply respectful of his mother, he decided to fulfill her wish and bury her remains in the holy city.

According to some scholars (S. Kakabadze, Sh. Amiranashvili), this young king was Lasha Giorgi, and perhaps the remains of Queen Tamar are indeed buried in Jerusalem. The information preserved in the Vatican funds greatly contributed to the start of archaeological excavations in 1946 in Jerusalem, in the desert of Jordan, under the leadership of Virgilio Corbo. It resulted in the discovery of the oldest Georgian inscriptions and the most valuable monuments of culture from a 5th-century Georgian church (1952).

 

Literature: ჩ ა ჩ ა ნ ი ძ ე  ვ., პეტრე იბერიელი და ქართული მონასტრის არქეოლოგიური გათხრები იერუსალიმში, თბ., 1974.