Who ruled Tbilisi?

Tbilisi lies in a narrow gorge of the Mtkvari (Kura) River in eastern Georgia, between the Greater and Lesser Caucasus ranges. Its name comes from the Georgian word for "warm", after the sulphur springs that still feed bathhouses in the old town. The site controlled a key passage between the Black Sea, the Caspian and the roads north across the mountains, which made it the natural capital of the Georgian kingdoms and a target for every empire that sought the Caucasus. Its history alternates between periods as the seat of a flourishing Georgian state and long stretches of Arab, Persian, Turkish and Russian domination.

People lived in the area long before the city existed, but Georgian chronicles credit its founding to King Vakhtang I Gorgasali of Iberia (Kartli) in the second half of the fifth century CE. A legend tells that his falcon fell into a hot spring while hunting, revealing the site. His son Dachi moved the capital here from Mtskheta in the early sixth century. The kingdom was then contested between Byzantium and the Sasanian Empire, and by the late sixth century Persian governors ruled from Tbilisi.

Arab armies took Tbilisi in the 730s, and for nearly four centuries it was the seat of a Muslim emirate, at times almost independent of the caliphs in Baghdad. Its trade made it prosperous, though it was sacked by the Khazars in 764 and by a caliphal army in 853. In 1122 King David IV, known as David the Builder, captured the city from the Seljuk Turks and made it the capital of a united Georgia. Under him and later Queen Tamar, who ruled from 1184 to 1213, Tbilisi was the centre of a powerful Christian kingdom, a period remembered as Georgia's golden age, in which churches, palaces and markets were built and Muslims, Armenians and Jews lived alongside Georgians.

The golden age ended violently. In 1226 the Khwarazmian ruler Jalal al-Din sacked the city, and in the 1230s Georgia fell under the Mongol Empire and its successor, the Ilkhanate. Tamerlane invaded in 1386, and after the kingdom split in the late fifteenth century Tbilisi became the capital of Kartli, repeatedly occupied by Persian and Ottoman armies. From the early sixteenth century it was usually under Safavid overlordship, with Ottoman control in the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries.

In 1795 the Persian ruler Agha Mohammad Khan defeated the Georgians at Krtsanisi and burned Tbilisi almost completely. Six years later, in 1801, the Russian Empire annexed the kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti. As Tiflis, the city became the administrative centre of Russia's Caucasus territories, gaining a European quarter of boulevards, an opera house and a large Armenian merchant class. After the Russian Revolution it was capital of the independent Democratic Republic of Georgia from May 1918 until the Red Army entered in February 1921.

Under the Soviet Union the city industrialised and grew to over a million people. On 9 April 1989 Soviet troops killed demonstrators calling for independence, which Georgia declared exactly two years later. Fighting in the city centre in the winter of 1991 to 1992 and the wars of the 1990s left deep scars, followed by the peaceful Rose Revolution of 2003. Today Tbilisi has about 1.2 million inhabitants, close to a third of the country's population.