The history of Georgia

Georgia lies on the southern slopes of the Greater Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian lowlands. Its people, who call themselves Kartvelebi and their country Sakartvelo, formed the ancient kingdoms of Colchis in the west and Iberia in the east, and in the fourth century became one of the first nations to adopt Christianity. United as a single kingdom in 1008, Georgia was a major power of the Christian East under David the Builder and Queen Tamar, before Mongol and Timurid invasions broke it apart. Squeezed for three centuries between the Ottoman and Persian empires, its kings turned to Russia, which annexed the country from 1801; after a brief independence in 1918 to 1921 and seven decades of Soviet rule, Georgia regained its independence in 1991.

At Dmanisi, in the south-east of the country, archaeologists have found human skulls about 1.8 million years old, the earliest evidence of early humans anywhere outside Africa. Between about 6000 and 5000 BCE, farmers of the Shulaveri-Shomu culture built round mud-brick houses, kept cattle and pigs, worked local obsidian and grew grapes; residues in their pottery jars are among the oldest evidence of winemaking in the world, and wine has been central to Georgian culture ever since.

From the fourth millennium BCE the Kura-Araxes culture spread across the South Caucasus. Speakers of the Kartvelian languages, Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz and Svan, were by then established in the region. Inscriptions of Assyria and Urartu from the twelfth to eighth centuries BCE mention tribal unions such as Diauehi in the south-west and Kulkha, the Colchis of later Greek sources.

In the west, the kingdom of Colchis grew rich on the fertile Rioni valley and on gold washed from mountain streams. To the Greeks it was the land of the Golden Fleece, sought by Jason and the Argonauts. Greek colonists founded trading towns on its coast, such as Phasis near modern Poti. The Achaemenid Empire extended its influence to the Caucasus, and Herodotus records that the Colchians sent gifts to the Persian king, though they were probably never fully ruled from Persia.

In the east, the Kartlian tribes around Mtskheta, at the meeting of the Kura and Aragvi rivers, emerged as the leading power. According to Georgian tradition, Parnavaz I founded the kingdom of Kartli, called Iberia by Greek and Roman writers, around 300 BCE, after the age of Alexander the Great. In the second and first centuries BCE both kingdoms were drawn into the wars of Armenia and Pontus with Rome. The Roman general Pompey marched through Iberia and Colchis in 65 BCE, after which the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire treated Iberia as an allied client kingdom, while Colchis came under more direct Roman control. A first-century inscription at Mtskheta calls King Mihrdat I a friend of the Caesars.

For six centuries Georgia lay on the frontier between Rome, and later its eastern successor the Byzantine Empire, and the Iranian powers, first the Parthian Empire and then the Sasanian Empire. In the third century the west became the kingdom of Lazica, known locally as Egrisi.

According to Georgian tradition, a Cappadocian woman named Nino converted King Mirian III and Queen Nana of Iberia, and the king made Christianity the state religion, most likely around 327, although sources suggest dates between about 317 and 337. Lazica also became Christian in the fourth century. The new faith tied the Georgians to the Christian Roman world, while the Sasanians, who dominated eastern Georgia for much of the next three centuries, promoted Zoroastrianism. The Georgian alphabet appears in inscriptions from the fifth century, created to write scripture and church texts.

In the late fifth century King Vakhtang I Gorgasali led a revolt against Persia and strengthened the kingdom; tradition credits him with founding Tbilisi, which his son made the capital. After his death, Persia tightened its grip and abolished the Iberian monarchy around 580. In the west, Byzantium and Persia fought the Lazic War of 541 to 562 for control of the Black Sea coast, which ended with Lazica in the Byzantine sphere of Justinian I.

In the mid-seventh century the armies of the Arab caliphate reached the Caucasus. Under the Umayyad and then the Abbasid Caliphate, an emir ruled Tbilisi, which remained a Muslim city for nearly four centuries, while Georgian princes held out in the mountains and border regions.

As caliphal power weakened, new Georgian states emerged. In the west a kingdom of Abkhazia formed in the late eighth century and spread across western Georgia, using Georgian as its language of church and culture. In the south-west, the Bagrationi family established itself in Tao-Klarjeti, a region now mostly in north-eastern Turkey. In 888 Adarnase IV of the Bagrationi took the title King of the Iberians. Bagrat III, heir to the Bagratid lands through his father and to the Abkhazian throne through his mother, became in 1008 the first king of a united Georgia. The Bagrationi dynasty would reign until 1801.

The young kingdom faced the Byzantines, who annexed parts of Tao, and then the far more dangerous Seljuk Turks, whose invasions from the 1060s devastated the country; by 1080 King George II was paying tribute to the Seljuk Empire. His son David IV, who came to the throne in 1089 aged sixteen, reversed this. He curbed the great nobles, reorganised the church and built a standing army, settling some 40,000 Kipchak families from the steppe as soldiers. Helped by the distraction the Crusades caused the Turks, he stopped paying tribute, and on 12 August 1121 his army routed a much larger Muslim coalition at Didgori. In 1122 he made Tbilisi his capital. Remembered as Aghmashenebeli, the Builder, he also founded the Gelati academy.

His great-granddaughter Tamar, who reigned from 1184 to 1213 with the title king, led Georgia to the peak of its power. Her armies defeated Muslim neighbours, extended Georgian protection over much of Armenia and Shirvan, and raided deep into Iran. When Constantinople fell to the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Tamar helped her Komnenos relatives set up the Empire of Trebizond on the Black Sea coast. It was also a golden age of culture: the cliff monastery of Vardzia was carved, and Shota Rustaveli wrote The Knight in the Panther's Skin, the national epic.

The golden age ended abruptly. Mongol scouting armies defeated the Georgians in 1221, the Khwarazmian ruler Jalal al-Din sacked Tbilisi in 1226, and in the 1230s the main forces of the Mongol Empire overran the South Caucasus. In 1243 Tamar's daughter Queen Rusudan accepted Mongol overlordship, and for most of the next century Georgia paid tribute and provided troops to the Ilkhanate of Iran, while rival kings sometimes ruled east and west. George V, called the Brilliant, who ruled from 1314 to 1346, took advantage of the Ilkhanate's decline to stop paying tribute and reunite the country.

The recovery did not last. The Black Death struck in the 1360s, and between 1386 and 1403 Tamerlane invaded Georgia several times, sacking Tbilisi, destroying towns and churches, and killing or enslaving much of the population. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 cut Georgia off from the Christian West. By 1490 the kingdom had broken up into three kingdoms, Kartli, Kakheti and Imereti, and several principalities, among them Samegrelo, Guria, Samtskhe and Abkhazia.

In the sixteenth century the Georgian states became pawns in the wars between the Ottomans and the Safavid Empire of Iran. The Peace of Amasya of 1555 divided Georgia between them, placing the west under Ottoman and the east under Persian influence. In the west, the Ottomans gradually absorbed Samtskhe and the Black Sea coast and spread Islam there, especially in Adjara. In the east, Shah Abbas I responded to resistance with devastating campaigns between 1614 and 1617, in which, by contemporary estimates, well over 100,000 people were killed or deported to Iran, many of them from Kakheti. Queen Ketevan of Kakheti, held hostage in Iran, was tortured to death in 1624 for refusing to renounce Christianity.

Despite this, Georgian culture survived. King Vakhtang VI of Kartli codified the laws, set up the first Georgian printing press in Tbilisi in 1709 and sponsored the compilation of the Georgian chronicles. Georgian rulers began to look for help to the Orthodox Tsardom of Russia; Vakhtang himself died in Russian exile after an alliance with Peter the Great failed. After the death of the Persian conqueror Nader Shah in 1747, Teimuraz II and his son Heraclius II made eastern Georgia effectively independent, and in 1762 Heraclius united Kartli and Kakheti.

Seeking protection, Heraclius signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with Catherine the Great in 1783, under which Russia guaranteed his kingdom and dynasty in return for control of its foreign relations. When Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar of Iran invaded in 1795, however, no Russian help came; he defeated Heraclius at Krtsanisi and burned Tbilisi. After Heraclius's death, the kingdom was divided by succession disputes, and in 1801 Tsar Paul I and his successor Alexander I annexed Kartli-Kakheti to the Russian Empire, ending the Bagrationi monarchy despite Georgian protests. Imereti was annexed in 1810, and by 1878, through wars with Persia and the Ottomans, Russia had brought most of the lands of present-day Georgia, including Abkhazia, Adjara and Batumi, under its rule. In 1811 the Georgian Church was placed under the Russian Holy Synod.

Russian rule brought security from invasion, roads and railways, but also Russification and revolts by nobles and peasants. Serfdom was phased out from 1864. A national revival led by the writer Ilia Chavchavadze promoted Georgian language, schools and literature until his assassination in 1907. At the same time, Georgia became a stronghold of Marxist social democracy: the Menshevik wing won Georgian seats in the Russian Duma after the 1905 revolution, while a young Georgian Bolshevik, Ioseb Jughashvili, later known as Joseph Stalin, organised strikes and robberies to fund the party.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the Caucasus front in World War I left Georgia on its own. After the short-lived Transcaucasian federation with Armenia and Azerbaijan broke apart, the Democratic Republic of Georgia declared independence on 26 May 1918, first under German protection. Led by the Menshevik Noe Zhordania, it held multi-party elections, carried out land reform and fought a brief border war with Armenia in December 1918. Soviet Russia recognised it in the Treaty of Moscow in May 1920, but in February 1921, with the approval of Vladimir Lenin and at the urging of Stalin and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the Red Army invaded and took Tbilisi on 25 February. An uprising in August 1924 was crushed with thousands of executions.

Georgia was joined to Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Transcaucasian republic of the Soviet Union from 1922 and became a separate Soviet republic in 1936. Within it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia had autonomous status. Under Stalin and his fellow Georgian, the secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, the purges of the 1930s killed or imprisoned many thousands, including much of the intelligentsia. In World War II more than half a million Georgians served in the Red Army and around 300,000 died; in 1944 the regime deported the Meskhetian Turks of southern Georgia to Central Asia. Soviet troops killed demonstrators in Tbilisi in March 1956 who were protesting against Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, and mass protests in 1978 forced Moscow to keep Georgian as the republic's official language. Georgia became one of the more prosperous Soviet republics, known for its wine, tea and Black Sea resorts, and for corruption, which Eduard Shevardnadze tried to curb as party leader from 1972 until he became Soviet foreign minister in 1985.

On 9 April 1989 Soviet troops broke up a peaceful pro-independence rally in Tbilisi, killing about twenty people, many of them young women. A nationalist coalition led by the former dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia won elections in October 1990, and after a referendum Georgia declared independence on 9 April 1991, before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Gamsakhurdia, elected president, was overthrown by armed opponents in December 1991 and January 1992, and Shevardnadze returned to lead the country.

Conflict with the autonomous regions followed. Fighting in South Ossetia in 1991 and 1992 left much of the region outside Georgian control. In Abkhazia, a war in 1992 and 1993, in which Abkhaz forces were helped by volunteers from the North Caucasus and, according to Georgia, by Russian forces, ended in Georgian defeat; more than 200,000 ethnic Georgians were driven out in what the Georgian government and many observers regard as ethnic cleansing. Shevardnadze stabilised the state and backed the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline, but his government was riddled with corruption. When parliamentary elections in November 2003 were widely seen as rigged, mass protests known as the Rose Revolution forced him to resign.

Mikheil Saakashvili, elected president in January 2004, sharply reduced petty corruption, rebuilt the police, liberalised the economy, restored central control over Adjara and sought membership of NATO and the European Union, though critics accused his government of authoritarian methods. Tension with Russia over the breakaway regions escalated in August 2008: after clashes with South Ossetian forces, Georgian troops attacked Tskhinvali on the night of 7 to 8 August, and Russia sent forces into South Ossetia and Abkhazia and beyond into undisputed Georgian territory. A French-brokered ceasefire ended the fighting after five days, but Russia recognised both regions as independent states and kept troops there. An inquiry commissioned by the European Union concluded in 2009 that Georgia had started the war, but that Russia's response went far beyond reasonable self-defence. Most states regard both regions as Georgian territory under Russian occupation.

In 2012 the Georgian Dream coalition, founded by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, defeated Saakashvili's party, in the country's first peaceful transfer of power through elections. Georgia signed an association agreement with the European Union in 2014, and constitutional changes turned it into a parliamentary republic with a largely ceremonial presidency. Saakashvili, convicted in absentia on charges he called politically motivated, was arrested on his return in 2021.

After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Georgia applied for EU membership and was granted candidate status in December 2023. The government's relations with the West deteriorated, however. In May 2024 parliament passed a law requiring organisations receiving more than a fifth of their funding from abroad to register as pursuing the interests of a foreign power, despite large protests and criticism from the EU and United States. Georgian Dream was declared the winner of parliamentary elections on 26 October 2024, which international observers said were marred by serious irregularities and which the opposition and President Salome Zourabichvili rejected as rigged; the government says the vote was fair. When Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced in November 2024 that the government would not pursue EU accession talks until 2028, nightly protests began, and hundreds of protesters were arrested, with widespread reports of beatings by police. In December 2024 an electoral college chose the ruling party's candidate, Mikheil Kavelashvili, as president, although Zourabichvili said she remained the legitimate head of state. Several opposition parties boycotted the local elections of October 2025, and the country remains in a deep political crisis, with its long-standing goal of joining the European Union in doubt.