Kingdom of Kakheti - Iranian Hegemony

Iranian Hegemony

In the mid-1610s, Shah Abbas I renewed his effort to bring Georgia more completely into the Safavid empire and subjected Kakheti to repeated invasions from 1614 to 1617. In a series of Georgian insurrections and Iranian reprisals, sixty to seventy thousand people were killed, and more than one hundred thousand Kakhetian peasants were forcibly deported into Iran. The population of Kakheti dropped by two-thirds; once flourishing towns, like Gremi and Zagemi, shrank to insignificant villages; agriculture declined and commerce came to a standstill. By 1648, the indefatigable Taimuraz had finally been ousted from Kakheti. The Safavid government tightened its control of Kakheti, implemented a policy of replacing the native population with nomadic Turkic tribes. At the same time, the Dagestani mountaineers started to attack and colonize the Kakhetian marchlands.

In 1659, the Kakhetians staged a mass uprising, massacred the nomads and surrendered their country to Vakhtang V Shah-Nawaz, a Muslim Georgian king of Kartli, who managed to obtain the shah’s permission to install his son Archil as king in Kakheti. For a time, the two kingdoms of eastern Georgia were virtually united under Shah-Nawaz and his son, and a period of relative peace ensued. Making the town of Telavi his capital, in place of Gremi which was ruined by the Iranian invasions, Archil set out to implement a program of reconstruction. However, the promising situation was of short duration. Archil’s ascension in Kakheti marked the beginning of a rivalry between the two Bagrationi branches – the Mukhrani, to which Archil belonged, and the House of Kakheti, dispossessed of the crown in the person of Teimuraz I. This latter house finally succeeded, at the expense of their apostasy to Islam, in reestablishing themselves in 1703, and ruled, henceforth, at the pleasure of their Safavid suzerains. This proved to be of little benefit, however, and the kingdom continued to be plagued by the incessant Dagestani inroads.

From 1724 to 1744, Kakheti was subjected to the successive Ottoman and Iranian occupations. However, the service rendered by the Kakhetian prince Teimuraz II to Nader Shah of Iran in the struggle against the Ottomans resulted in an annulment of heavy tribute paid by Kakheti to the Iranian court in 1743. Teimuraz II’s cooperation with Nader enabled him to secure his power in both Kakheti and Kartli, and to gain recognition for himself as king of Kartli, and for his son, Erekle II, as king of Kakheti. Both monarchs were crowned in accordance to a Christian tradition in 1745. They exploited the turmoil in Iran that followed Nader’s assassination in 1747 and established themselves as virtually independent rulers. Their rule helped to stabilize the country; economy began to revive, and the Dagestani attacks were reduced, but not eliminated. When Teimuraz died on January 8, 1762, Erekle succeeded him, thus uniting eastern Georgia as a single state for the first time in nearly three centuries.