Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti

Kartli-Kakheti was the last independent Georgian monarchy in the east of the country, formed in 1762 when King Heraclius II joined the kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti under one crown. Ruled from Tbilisi by the Bagrationi dynasty, it tried to survive between Iran, the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Its alliance with Russia in 1783 failed to save it from an Iranian sack of the capital in 1795, and in 1800–1801 it was annexed by the Russian Empire.

After the medieval Kingdom of Georgia broke apart, Kartli and Kakheti spent much of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries under Iranian overlordship. The death of Nader Shah in 1747 threw Iran into turmoil, and Heraclius and his father Teimuraz II seized the chance to rule in practice on their own. Heraclius, already king of Kakheti, succeeded his father in Kartli in 1762, uniting eastern Georgia politically for the first time in some three centuries.

Heraclius trod carefully. In 1762–1763 he formally submitted to Karim Khan Zand, the new master of Iran, and accepted the old title of vali, or governor, of Georgia, by then little more than an honour. His silver coins long carried an inscription pointing to Karim Khan, so they would pass in Iranian trade, while his copper coins for local use showed Christian, Georgian and even Russian imperial images. After Karim Khan died in 1779, Heraclius looked north. By the Treaty of Georgievsk, signed with Russia on 24 July 1783, Russia took charge of his kingdom's defence and foreign affairs, and Heraclius formally gave up any subordination to Iran or other states, while keeping control of internal affairs.

Heraclius kept a court with some Persian ceremony and dressed in Persian style, yet he also pursued a programme of reform along European lines, seeking western experts and military techniques. He held executive, legislative and judicial power himself and tried to weaken the great nobles by governing through his own officials. Georgia's isolation and the constant cost of defence limited what he could achieve.

Russian support proved thin. A small force of two battalions arrived in 1784 but was withdrawn in 1787 when war with the Ottomans broke out. In Iran, the new Qajar ruler Agha Mohammad Khan saw Georgia as a rebellious province and demanded that Heraclius abandon the Russian treaty. Heraclius refused and asked Catherine the Great for at least 3,000 troops, but none came. In 1795 the Qajar army defeated the roughly 5,000 men Heraclius had gathered, including about 2,000 from Imereti, and took Tbilisi within hours, leaving with plunder and thousands of captives. Catherine then declared war on Iran, but her successor Paul I soon recalled the army.

Agha Mohammad Khan was murdered in 1797, and Heraclius died on 14 January 1798. His son George XII faced quarrels over the succession and secretly invited Paul I to take over the government while leaving the Bagrationi as nominal kings. Instead, Paul decreed on 18 December 1800 that Kartli-Kakheti was annexed to Russia. George XII died on 28 December, and Paul's successor Alexander I confirmed the annexation on 12 September 1801. Russian troops took over the administration, and members of the royal family were later removed to Russia.

Iran did not accept the loss, and the annexation led to the Russo-Persian wars of 1804–1813 and 1826–1828, after which Iran ceded eastern Georgia and much of the southern Caucasus. Around 1800 the kingdom had roughly 320,900 inhabitants, about 220,000 of them Georgian, alongside Armenians, Turkoman tribes, Ossetians, Jews and Greeks; large districts in the south had been emptied by war.

Our 1783 and 1800 maps show Kartli-Kakheti in eastern Georgia, first in the year of the Treaty of Georgievsk and then in the final months before Russian annexation. The western Georgian kingdom of Imereti lay outside it, and the Ottoman Empire and Iran were its other powerful neighbours.