The country of Georgia is located in the southern Caucasus where Europe meets Asia. The region has often found itself at the crossroads of empires. After unification in the 11th century CE, the kingdom of Georgia experienced a Golden Age in the 12th century. Mongol invasion and infighting within the Bagrationi dynasty forced separate Georgian kingdoms to submit to Ottoman and Safavid Persian rule. Georgia regained its independence in 1991 after two centuries of Russian and Soviet control, but the country continues to face internal instability and external threats.
What’s in a Name?
The country of Georgia is understandably confused with the state of Georgia in the United States. In the Georgian language, the country is called Sakartvelo, and the people are known as Kartvelians. Sakartvelo simply means “the land of the Kartvelians,” while the demonym Kartvelian derives from Kartli, a historical name for the region.
The English name Georgia is usually associated with St. George, the country’s patron saint. There is a long history of the veneration of St. George, and the flag of independent Georgia contains five St. George’s crosses. However, most scholars believe that the name originally came from the Persian word gurğ or wolf, which was transmitted to Russian and other Slavic languages as Gruziya.
Georgia in Antiquity
The ancestors of the Kartvelians have lived in the southern Caucasus region since the Neolithic period. Georgia is known as the birthplace of wine, with a history of viticulture dating back at least 8,000 years. The practice of placing crushed vines in clay pots called qvevri and burying them underground for several months to ferment using natural sugars and yeast from the grapes continues to this day.
One of the earliest political entities in present-day Georgia is Colchis in western Georgia. Known locally as Egrisi, Colchis was formed in the 13th century BCE following the unification of local tribes. Major Colchian cities included Aia on the site of present-day Kutaisi, and Vani, a site of religious significance where large quantities of golden artifacts have been excavated. By the 6th century BCE, a number of Greek colonies were established in Colchis on the Black Sea Coast, including at Phasis (Poti) and Dioscurias (Sukhumi). Colchis is also famous in Greek mythology as the final destination of Jason and the Argonauts in their quest for the golden fleece.
Further to the east, the kingdom of Iberia (known locally as Kartli) was founded in the late 4th century BCE. Known as Caucasian Iberia to avoid confusion with the Iberian peninsula in southwestern Europe, the kingdom was founded by King Pharvanaz with its capital at Mtskheta. Pharvanaz’s government was modelled on that of the Persian Empire, which had recently been conquered by Alexander the Great. Pharvanaz himself was a vassal of the Seleucid Empire, one of the successor kingdoms that emerged after Alexander’s death.
By the beginning of the 1st century BCE, Iberia came under the control of the Kingdom of Armenia. The King of Armenia, Tigranes the Great, was an ally of King Mithridates VI of Pontus, one of the Roman Republic’s most formidable rivals. During the Mithridatic Wars, the Roman general Pompey the Great invaded Iberia and occupied Mtskheta in 65 BCE.
Iberia was close to the frontlines of the conflict between Rome and the Parthian Empire, though the kingdom was usually a close ally of Rome during this period. The Romans also established a presence in western Georgia, where the kingdom of Lazica emerged as the successor to Colchis in the 2nd century CE. During the early empire the principal Roman military settlement in the region was the Gonio-Apsaros Fortress near Batumi.
The Arrival of Christianity
When the Parthian Empire gave way to the Sassanian Empire in Persia in 224 CE, the kingdom of Iberia gravitated towards the Sassanians. In around 284, the Sassanians placed an Iranian nobleman on the Iberian throne as King Mirian III. When the Sassanians were defeated by the Romans at Satala in Armenia in 298, Mirian submitted to the Romans.
The Chosroid dynasty founded by Mirian governed Iberia until the 9th century CE. Mirian was a contemporary of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, and during his reign Iberia officially adopted Christianity as the state religion. The king built a number of churches in his capital of Mtskheta, including Samtavro’s Convent and the first Svetitskhoveli Cathedral.
In 363, Rome was forced to cede Iberia to the Sassanians, who sought to restrict Iberian autonomy. Around a century later, King Vakhtang I Gorgasali of Iberia (447-502) led successful military campaigns to conquer Lazica and Abkhazia. He centralized his power and sought to break away from Persian rule, establishing a strong base at Tbilisi near Mtskheta. When the Persians invaded Iberia, Vakhtang appealed in vain for assistance from the Byzantine Empire. After a protracted struggle, he was defeated and killed in battle in 502.
The Sassanians re-established control over Iberia for the next century, and in 580 the kingdom of Iberia was downgraded to a principality. The Byzantines briefly regained hegemony in the region after Emperor Heraclius II defeated the Sassanians in 628, but less than two decades later the Byzantines themselves were expelled by the Arabs, who captured Tbilisi in 645.
The Rise of the Bagrationi Dynasty
Following the Arab conquest, Prince Stephan II of Iberia was forced to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Caliphate. While the region was integrated into the province of Arminiya in 654, it remained on the periphery of the Arab world, and it was not until the 740s that the Emir of Tbilisi was also made governor of Kartli. Tbilisi became a thriving commercial center on the trading route between the Middle East and northern Europe with a predominantly Muslim population.
Arab rule in Georgia was frequently challenged by Georgian and Armenian nobles, and in the late 8th century a nobleman named Adarnase Bagrationi established himself as the ruler of the lands of Tao and Klarjeti, a region straddling the present-day Georgian-Turkish border. In 813, the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun re-established the principality of Kartli and appointed Adarnase’s son Ashot I to the office.
Although the Georgian lands were divided between Ashot’s sons who founded rival branches of the Bagrationi dynasty, Arab rule was weakening, and in the 880s, the Abbasids restored the kingdoms of Kartli and Armenia in a forlorn effort to maintain control over their rebellious Caucasian vassals. While the Arabs were capable of launching devastating punitive campaigns in Georgia, by the 10th century three centuries of Arab rule were coming to an end.
During the second half of the 10th century, David III of Tao-Klarjeti paved the way for the unification of Georgia under his kinsman King Bagrat III, who united the realms of Abkhazia and Kartli in 1008. Bagrat further expanded his realm by conquering the regions of Kakheti and Hereti in eastern Georgia. With Tbilisi remaining in Arab hands for another century, Bagrat ruled his kingdom from Kutaisi, where he built the magnificent Bagrat Cathedral, completed in 1003.
The Golden Age
Although the Bagrationi kings had received support from the Byzantine Empire in wars against the Arabs, after Bagrat III’s death in 1014 his successors often had to face down attempts by the Byzantines to expand their frontiers at Georgia’s expense. The arrival of the Seljuk Turks proved a further complicating factor, and King Bagrat IV of Georgia narrowly avoided capture during a 1064 Seljuk invasion of Georgia.
Bagrat naturally sought assistance from the Byzantines, but the Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 left the Seljuks in control of Anatolia and the Georgians completely isolated. A Seljuk raid in 1080 devastated the Georgian countryside, and Bagrat’s son Giorgi II was compelled to recognize Seljuk ruler Malik Shah as his overlord.
Despite these calamities, Georgian fortunes revived during the reign of Giorgi’s son David IV, who was raised to the throne in 1089 by rebellious nobles. A gifted military leader, David first consolidated power by vanquishing his internal enemies. With the Seljuks facing internal disorder and threatened by the First Crusade (1095-1099), David took advantage and declared independence from the Seljuks.
By 1104, David had recaptured Kakheti and Hereti, and he followed up with a series of campaigns which left the Emirate of Tbilisi—now a Seljuk vassal—completely isolated from the rest of the Seljuk lands. His greatest battlefield success came in 1121, when he defeated the Seljuks at Didgori near Tbilisi. The victory allowed David to capture Tbilisi in 1122, transferring his capital from Kutaisi the same year.
David had inaugurated a Golden Age in Georgian history and heralded a cultural renaissance by founding the Gelati Academy near Kutaisi and the Ikalto Academy in Kakheti. His achievements in reuniting the country earned him the sobriquet David the Builder. While David’s immediate successors had trouble maintaining his conquests after his death in 1125, his great-granddaughter King Tamar ruled Georgia at the zenith of its power.
Tamar’s second husband David Soslan, an excellent military commander, won brilliant victories over Turkish and Arab armies at Shamkor in 1195 and Basiani in 1202. These victories enabled Tamar to establish a series of vassal states on the southern frontier, and in 1204 she took advantage of the Sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade to establish the Empire of Trebizond on the Black Sea under the Comnenus family.
Conquest and Partition
Georgia’s Golden Age came to an unexpected and abrupt end with the arrival of the Mongols in 1220. During the initial clashes against a raiding party led by the fearsome generals Jebe and Subutai, Tamar’s son Giorgi IV was wounded in battle and died from his injuries two years later. The reign of his sister and successor Rusudan was beset by invasions from the rump Khwarazmian Empire and the return of the Mongols in 1236.
As the Mongol Empire split into four parts, Georgia became part of the Ilkhanate centered in Persia.
Mongol rule in Georgia lasted less than a century, and in the 1320s King Giorgi V led a series of campaigns to reunify the country. However, infighting between Giorgi’s descendants and a series of brutal invasions by Tamerlane’s armies in the early 1400s led to the disintegration of the kingdom in 1466. The kingdoms of Imereti in the west, Kartli in the center, and Kakheti in the east were ruled by rival branches of the Bagrationi dynasty.
The tripartite division of Georgia weakened each of the three kingdoms in the face of pressure from the Ottoman Turks in the southwest and Safavid Persia in the south. Kartli was vassalized by the Safavids in the mid-16th century, followed by Kakheti in the early 17th century. Meanwhile, King Alexander III of Imereti swore loyalty to Tsar Alexei of Russia in 1651 in response to Ottoman encroachments, but the Russians were not yet in a position to intervene in the southern Caucasus, and throughout the 18th century Imereti faced considerable internal disorder.
Russian Rule
In 1736, the Safavid rulers of Persia were deposed by Nader Shah, a great conqueror who expanded his realm to encompass Georgia in the west to Afghanistan in the east. In 1744, Nader installed King Teimuraz II of Kakheti as King of Kartli, and the crown of Kakheti passed to Teimuraz’s son Erekle II. Both were crowned at Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in Mtskheta on October 1, 1745 and were allowed to retain their Christian faith. When Nader was assassinated in 1747, Kartli and Kakheti regained their independence.
Upon Teimuraz’s death in 1762, Erekle inherited a united kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti. He introduced a series of reforms to modernize his kingdom along European lines and strengthened diplomatic relations with the Russian Empire. Erekle remained anxious of a Persian invasion, and following the 1783 Treaty of Georgievsk, the kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti became a Russian protectorate. Despite the agreement, Russian forces did not come to Erekle’s aid when the Qajar sultanate of Iran sacked Tbilisi in 1795. Russia annexed Kartli-Kakheti outright in 1801 after the death of King Giorgi XII. The kingdom of Imereti was formally annexed in 1810. Iran formally recognized Russian control of Georgia with the signing of the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813.
Following Georgia’s incorporation into the Russian Empire, Tbilisi became the capital of the viceroyalty of the Caucasus. The city once again became a thriving commercial center with a large Armenian community that accounted for over 70% of the city’s population. Georgia also attracted a large number of Russian intellectuals and writers. Alexander Griboyedov married the Georgian princess Nino Chavchavadze, and after Griboyedov was murdered on a diplomatic mission in Tehran in 1829 his body was brought back to Tbilisi for burial. Alexander Pushkin visited Tbilisi in the same year and wrote several poems about Georgia, while a brief visit to Georgia in 1837 inspired Mikhail Lermontov’s creativity as a poet and a landscape painter.
Under the leadership of viceroys Alexei Ermolov, Ivan Paskevich, and Mikhail Vorontsov, all veterans of the 1812 campaign against Napoleon, Russian armies led brutal campaigns to subdue the Circassians and the Chechens in the northern Caucasus. Over time, small Georgian principalities which remained nominally independent were annexed to Russian Georgia. Following Russia’s victory over the Ottomans in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, the region of Ajara on the Black Sea was reincorporated into Georgia.
While Russian rule enabled the expansion of Georgian territory, a Georgian nationalist movement emerged in the 1860s led by Prince Ilia Chavchavadze. Like the rest of the Russian Empire, Georgia experienced social and economic change in the last decades of the 19th century with the introduction of an industrial capitalist economy. By the early 1900s, Chavchavadze’s brand of liberal nationalism was eclipsed by the Marxist Social Democratic Party. Following Chavchavadze’s assassination in 1907, the moderate Menshevik wing of the Social Democrats dominated Georgian politics.
Soviet Georgia
When the Russian Empire collapsed in the February Revolution of 1917, the Georgian Menshevik Nikolai Chkeidze became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan formed the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic in April 1918. With the region threatened by German and Ottoman forces in World War I, the federation collapsed and the Democratic Republic of Georgia was proclaimed on May 26, 1918.
The Menshevik government led by Noe Jordania sought to prevent the country being taken over by the Bolsheviks, and in May 1920 Russia and Georgia signed an agreement recognizing Georgian independence. However, this did not prevent the Soviet invasion of Georgia in February 1921 that overthrew Jordania’s government.
The Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic became a constituent of the Soviet Union, formed in 1922. Several Georgians achieved prominence in the Soviet leadership, most notably Joseph Stalin, who emerged as de facto leader in the years following Lenin’s death in 1924. Stalin left his ally and compatriot Sergo Ordzhonikidze in charge of Caucasian affairs before bringing him to Moscow to manage economic and industrialization policy. When Ordzhonikidze protested against Stalin’s heavy-handed methods, he was purged in 1937. Between 1938 and 1946 Lavrentiy Beria served as the head of the NKVD, the notorious secret police that later became the KGB.
During the Second World War, the Germans launched an offensive in the south to take control of the Caucasus oil fields in 1942. While the offensive never reached Georgian territory, over 700,000 Georgians served in the Red Army, and around half this number lost their lives.
In the years following Stalin’s death in 1953, Georgian students staged a major protest against Nikita Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization in 1956 after the new Soviet leader made disparaging remarks about Georgians. The ensuing clashes resulted in over 100 protestors losing their lives. During the Brezhnev era, the Georgian economy was characterized by a thriving black market and blatant corruption. Eduard Shevardnadze cracked down on corruption during his tenure as First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party between 1972 and 1985, when he went to Moscow to serve as Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign minister.
Independent Georgia
The 1980s saw the rise of a Georgian nationalist movement led by Merab Kostava and Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Gorbachev’s reforms encouraged the democratization of the Soviet system, and in October 1990 Gamsakhurdia was elected head of state. He declared independence from the Soviet Union in April 1991 but was removed in a coup in December 1991 by opponents who claimed that he was acting despotically.
The early 1990s witnessed ethnic conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia as the government in Tbilisi struggled to exert its authority over these autonomous republics. In 1993, Eduard Shevardnadze became head of state and remained in office until 2003, when he was overthrown in the Rose Revolution. Mikheil Saakashvili, who was elected president in 2004, was an energetic pro-European reformer who sought to crack down on corruption. His desire to establish central control over South Ossetia and Abkhazia led to the Russo-Georgian War of August 2008.
Since 2012, Georgian politics has been dominated by the Georgian Dream movement, founded by billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili. Although Ivanishvili only served as prime minister for a year between 2012 and 2013, he continues to be seen as an influential political figure. With support of Saakashvili’s United National Movement, Georgian Dream pursued closer integration with the European Union from 2013 onwards, and formally submitted its membership application in February 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Georgia was granted candidate status by the EU in December 2023, but the adoption of a controversial foreign agents law in May 2024 led to protests and invited criticism from the European Union. Georgian Dream’s victory in October 2024 parliamentary elections was disputed by opposition parties, and the government’s announcement on November 28, 2024 to suspend EU accession negotiations fueled high-profile protests throughout the country continuing into 2025.
