Early Medieval Georgian Flags

Introduction

In a moment of madness I bought 52 Essex riders from eBay. Just the riders, no horses. Thankfully, I had a few spare horses and was able to buy enough extra horses from various sources; all the while kidding myself that it wasn't really a new project.

Of the 52, 12 were identified as Syrian and Georgian heavy cavalry (knights) from the early medieval / crusade period. With these my plan was to bolster my contingent of medium knights for my Ilkhanid Mongol army. Not that I really need any more, but they were cheap!

Fun with flags

I plan to paint the dozen in batches of two or three, and the first two are underway. It was at this point that I realised I'd soon have to decide what flags to use.

In 2007, I used some free flags & banners as inspiration for the hand painted banners of my Cilician Armenian contingent.

I thought about using more Armenian banners, but I thought I'd have a look online for medieval Georgian flags first. I was in luck. Wikipedia has a fine selection of suitable flags which I downloaded and used as starting point.

Flags to download

Here are the results of my efforts. Some are historical but others are speculative either on my part or on the part of the person who uploaded them to Wikipedia.

Earliest flag: Christian cross

King David IV (1089-1125 AD) (conjectural, simple version)

Queen Tamar (1178-1213 AD)

Georgian national flag (1300-1500 AD)

Medieval Poti (1327 AD) (simple version)

King David IV (1089-1125 AD) (conjectural, complex version)

Medieval Poti (1327 AD) (tailed version)

Western Georgia (1300-1490 AD)

Georgian national flag (1300-1500 AD) (tailed version #1)

Georgian national flag (1300-1500 AD) (conjectural, tailed version #2)

Tips

One word of caution. The preceding images have a central section designed 15 mm figures with flags that are 14 ± 2 mm in the hoist. If you need smaller flags, and you resize the image accordingly, the central section will be too small. You then have three options:

• paint over the central section,
• edit the image enlarging the central section,
• email me and request a set of images suitable for 9 ±1 mm flags.

Finally, if you need help using the flags, have look at the detailed guide I wrote 2021.