Vaxt'ang I Gorgasali (“Wolf's head”), probably born 436 and died 502, reigning from the age of six, is arguably the most important of Georgian kings. If only for a few years, he was the second king (the first being the legendary King Parnavaz I of the fourth century bc) to create out of Colchis (or Lazica) and Iberia (or Kartli) a united Georgia; he negotiated and fought with consummate skill several wars, mainly with Georgia's Persian overlords; he established in Georgia an autocephalic church whose katholikos or patriarch would be, for 1300 years, subordinate to the reigning monarch (and often related to him or her). Yet, like many lesser Georgian kings, factual and documentary evidence of his life and work is slender. His life is described by Juansher, a contributor to the main chronicle The Life of Kartli, and some information is found in the chronicles of the Armenian Lazar P'arpec’i. Both these sources were composed at least 600 years after Vaxt'ang's reign (although some date Juansher to the eighth century ad), and nobody knows what written materials they drew on. Everything else has to be extrapolated from histories – Greek, Arab, Iranian, Assyrian – where Georgia, or Iberia, figures only peripherally and Vaxt'ang's name is not even mentioned. His astute dynastic marriages, first to the daughter of Shah Hormizd III, then (on her death in childbirth) to the daughter of the Byzantine emperor, do, however, anchor his name in his neighbours’ histories. The only extant image of Vaxt'ang is a gold and garnet gemma in the British Museum, inscribed with the Pahlavi letters that best approximate to his Georgian name.

Gaga Shurgaia's extensive and exhaustive study really consists of two books in one: the first is a history of Kartli in the second half of the fifth century, focusing particularly on the least improbable timelines for Vaxt'ang's life and for his wars. Georgian historians (non-Georgians have made very little original or reliable input) have for over 200 years used those sources whose language they could read to advance more or less plausible theories. Shurgaia's method is to examine all and to arrive at the least implausible account. Other historians have dated Vaxt'ang's birth as early as 422 and his death as late as 522. While other Georgian kings are reliably attested charging into battle in advanced old age, Vaxt'ang's death from an enemy arrow is best ascribed to the beginning of a new war in 502 (the colourful story of his being poisoned by a cook in the pay of the Persians is, probably rightly, discarded by Shurgaia). Thus the king of Kartli from 502 and 522, a shadowy Gurgen, must have been a separate person, not, as some scholars who believe in the biblical longevity of early Georgian kings, a distortion of the nickname Gorgasali. Shurgaia also uses archaeological data to trace and roughly date Vaxt'ang's work, notably the urbanization and fortification in eastern Iberia, on the frontiers of Persia proper.

One supportive document for all accounts of Vaxt'ang's life, even though the king himself is not named, is the pearl of Georgian hagiography, The Martyrdom of Saint Shushaniki: a Christian, she was driven to her death in 475 by her husband, the Persian pitiaxsh, or governor-general, of Iberia (his subsequent execution by Vaxt'ang is not mentioned). Like most Georgians, Shurgaia does not doubt that this graphic narrative is an eye-witness account by Shushanik's confessor, the bishop Iakob Tsurtavi; it certainly reads as a contemporary testimony, but, as the late Neville Birdsall pointed out, this does not explain why the many quotations from the Gospels come from a later, tenth-century Georgian version.

The second part of the study deals with the conflict between archbishop Mikael and the king, a quarrel which resulted in the king's tooth being kicked out, and the archbishop being deported to Constantinople, from where he was sent to a “non-sleeping” (acoemetic) monastery to repent. This outcome demonstrates Vaxt'ang's prestige at the time. (This coincided, possibly in 476, with Vaxt'ang's marriage to Elene, daughter of the emperor Basiliscus.) The quarrel, as Shurgaia argues, stems not so much from doctrinal or confessional differences between archbishop and king (Vaxt'ang subscribed to the Henotikon decree, which for a while reconciled monophysites and dyophysites), as from Vaxt'ang's determination to have exclusive centralized power – ecclesiastic as well as civil and military.

The less that is known of a historical period, the more the historian has to say in order to arrive at an acceptable hypothesis. A reader unfamiliar with the period, the language and the sources will not find this monograph, even if their Italian is fluent, easy to cope with. This reviewer's advice is to begin with the timeline (prospetto storico-sincronico) at the end of the volume, despite its regrettable omissions of marriages and births, and then proceed to the 30 pages of Conclusioni (from p. 538), which are free of distracting footnotes and other excursions, before reverting to the beginning of the book. One weakness of a study like this is a certain amount of repetition, whole paragraphs verbatim, of material, since the two components of the study have not been thoroughly fused.

The bibliography gives enough reading matter to last even a speed-reader's lifetime. There are, however, a few conspicuous omissions, notably of those Western scholars who have in fact learnt enough Georgian to make useful contributions to Kartvelian history. There is, for example no reference to Stephen Rapp, whose studies of medieval Georgian historiography (New York, 1998; Louvain, 2003) are ground-breaking; nor of Christian Settipani, whose Continuité des élites à Byzance (Paris, 2006), makes sense of the contradictions between mausoleum inscriptions and chronicles. Nevertheless, partly because it is based on an unprecedentedly wide range of sources in many languages, Shurgaia's book will remain a major reference work: to give it the circulation it deserves, it should be translated into English, even though quite a few Kartvelologists who take an interest in the role of the church in Georgia have long found it necessary to acquire a reading knowledge of Italian. When Shurgaia's book is translated, it could be usefully shortened, not only by deleting redundant passages, but by being kinder to earlier authorities and by dealing more gently with their errors and illusions, or, in some cases, perfectly valid differences of opinion.