Georgia's history: a kingdom made whole in 1008 and seldom since

Who ruled Colchis and Iberia before Georgia existed

People were on this ground about 1.8 million years ago, the date given to the finds excavated at Dmanisi in the south-east of the country. Farming arrived between 6000 and 5000 BC with the Shulaveri-Shomu culture, whose villages worked local obsidian and kept cattle and pigs. Grapes were among their crops. Metalworking began there in the 6th millennium BC.

The division that organises the rest of this history had formed by the end of the 8th century BC. Culture and terrain produced two core areas, one in the west and one in the east, and each became a kingdom. The west was Colchis, which existed from the 6th to the 1st century BC and which Greek legend made the destination of Jason and the Argonauts. Greek traders founded colonies on its coast between 1000 and 550 BC, among them Dioscurias, now Sokhumi, and Phasis, now Poti. The east was Kartli, which Greek and Roman writers called Iberia. Georgian tradition dates its founding to around 300 BC, under Parnavaz I.

For the next thousand years the two halves were pulled in different directions by the empires on either side of them. Colchis became the Roman province of Lazicum, then the kingdom of Lazica, known locally as Egrisi, which Byzantium absorbed in 562. Iberia accepted Roman protection, then spent most of the 4th and 5th centuries under Persian control. Its king Mirian III made Christianity the state religion, in 327 by the most common dating; other accounts give 317, 319, 324 or 330. In 591 Byzantium and Persia split Iberia between them, Tbilisi going to Persia and Mtskheta to Byzantium, and by the late 7th century Arab conquest had displaced both.

How a Bagrationi heir joined Abkhazia to Iberia

The dynasty that eventually joined the two halves rose in the south-west. The Bagrationi fought the Arab occupation from Tao-Klarjeti as nominal dependents of Byzantium, and Adarnase IV took the title King of the Iberians in 888. The family then divided its lands among three branches and could not hold them together.

The union came through inheritance. David III of Tao adopted a young Bagrationi prince named Bagrat and placed him in Kartli with his natural father, Gurgen, as regent. Bagrat's mother Gurandukht was the sister of Theodosius, the childless king of Abkhazia, and in 978 the Abkhazian aristocracy overthrew Theodosius and invited Bagrat to take his throne. Gurgen died in 1008. Bagrat inherited Iberia as well and became the first king of a unified Abkhazia and Iberia, and around 1010, after two years of fighting and diplomacy, he annexed Kakheti-Hereti in the east.

The medieval Kingdom of Abkhazia covered what is now western Georgia, a much larger area than the modern region that carries the name. The kings of the united realm ruled from Kutaisi in the west for more than a century.

The union was also incomplete from its first day. Tbilisi stayed under a Muslim emir. The kings of Kakheti-Hereti went on defending their autonomy. Tao was lost to Byzantium: Basil II fought George I for it from 1021 to 1023, won, took further land in the south-west, and held George's three-year-old son, the future Bagrat IV, as a hostage in Constantinople until 1025. Historians treat the kingdom Bagrat assembled as the principal precursor of the present state, and Georgia's record lists 1008 among its founding dates.

What David the Builder and Tamar held together

The kingdom was nearly taken apart within a century of its founding. The Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan laid waste to its south-western provinces in the 1060s, Malik Shah I invaded in 1076, and from 1079 or 1080 George II paid an annual tribute to buy peace. Georgian historians call the period the Great Turkish Invasion.

His son David IV took the throne in 1089, aged sixteen, and rebuilt the state around a standing army. He stopped the tribute in 1099. In 1103 he bound the church to the crown by appointing a court chancellor as its Catholicos. In 1118 and 1119 he invited some 40,000 Kipchak warriors from the North Caucasus to settle in Georgia with their families, and each family owed him a soldier. In 1121 the Seljuk sultan Mahmud declared a holy war on Georgia, and David's army defeated his general Ilghazi at Didgori that year. In 1122 David took Tbilisi and made it the capital. Georgians call him Agmashenebeli, the Builder. He also founded the academy at Gelati near Kutaisi, and Gelati Monastery is inscribed on the World Heritage List.

Tamar, David's great-granddaughter, reigned from 1184 to 1213. Her armies campaigned in southern Armenia between 1194 and 1204. In 1204, when Crusaders took Constantinople, she sent troops along the Black Sea coast, and the Empire of Trebizond created there in 1205 under her relative Alexios Komnenos was a Georgian dependency. Further campaigns took Tabriz and Ardabil in northern Persia in 1208.

She was addressed as "Queen of Abkhazians, Kartvels, Rans, Kakhs and Armenians", a list of peoples and lands under one crown, each with its own nobility. The kingdom stayed whole for as long as the crown could make those parts answer to it.

Why the Georgian kingdom broke apart

Khwarazmian forces under Jalal al-Din took Tbilisi in 1225, and the Mongols held most of Georgia by 1236. Under the treaty Queen Rusudan signed with them in 1243, Georgia gave up its client states, paid tribute and let the Mongols occupy more than half of what remained. The lords of Samtskhe in the south dealt with the Mongols directly and had practically seceded by 1266.

George V, called the Brilliant, reigned from 1314 to 1346. When the Ilkhanate fell into civil war after 1335 he stopped paying tribute, expelled the Mongol army and restored the borders of before 1220. The recovery lasted about a generation. Plague came in 1346 with soldiers returning from a campaign in the south-west, and by one account it killed a large part of the population, perhaps half. Timur's invasions followed, and then the Turkoman confederations: Jahan Shah of the Kara Koyunlu entered Georgia with 20,000 troops in 1440 and sacked Tbilisi. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 closed the Black Sea and cut the Georgian states off from the rest of Christian Europe, apart from contact through the Genoese colonies in Crimea.

The unified kingdom ceased to exist after 1466. Three kingdoms took its place, Kartli, Kakheti and Imereti, along with five principalities: Guria, Svaneti, Meskheti, Abkhazeti and Samegrelo. Each was independent of the others, and none stayed independent of its larger neighbours for long. The Peace of Amasya in 1555 assigned Imereti in the west to the Ottoman Empire and Kartli-Kakheti in the east to Safavid Persia, so the line between the two empires' spheres ran roughly where the old line between Colchis and Iberia had run.

In 1616 Shah Abbas I answered a rising in Tbilisi with a massacre in which an estimated 130,000 to 200,000 people died, and deported thousands from Kakheti to Persia. The Georgian courts went on legislating inside that frame: Vakhtang VI issued a new law code for Kartli, and the first Georgian-language printing press was set up there in 1709. In 1762 Heraclius, known in Georgian as Erekle, inherited Kartli on top of Kakheti and joined eastern Georgia politically for the first time in three centuries.

How Russia reunited Georgia and took its sovereignty

Heraclius looked north for protection. In 1783 he signed the Treaty of Georgievsk, which made Kartli-Kakheti a Russian protectorate. Russia guaranteed the kingdom's territorial integrity and the continuation of the Bagrationi dynasty. In return every new Georgian king needed the tsar's confirmation and could conduct no diplomacy without Russian consent. The arrangement came apart within four years. When a new Russo-Turkish war began in 1787, Heraclius signed a separate treaty with the Ottoman pasha of Akhaltsikhe and Russia withdrew its troops, and in 1795 the Persian shah Agha Mohammed Khan, who regarded the treaty as treason, captured Tbilisi and burned it.

When Heraclius died, a war over the succession broke out and one claimant asked Russia to settle it. Tsar Paul I signed a decree incorporating Kartli-Kakheti into the Russian Empire on 8 January 1801, and Alexander I confirmed it on 12 September. The Georgian envoy in Saint Petersburg, Garsevan Chavchavadze, delivered a note of protest. In May 1801 General Carl Heinrich Knorring set aside the heir, David Batonishvili, and installed a Russian administration. In April 1802 he assembled the nobility in Tbilisi's Sioni Cathedral and made them swear an oath to the Russian crown, and arrested those who refused.

Russia annexed Imereti in the west in 1810 after suppressing the resistance of Solomon II, and its wars with Persia and the Ottoman Empire between 1803 and 1878 added Batumi, Artvin, Akhaltsikhe, Poti and Abkhazia. Those areas make up most of the territory of the present state. The Georgian lands were back under one government for the first time in centuries, and that government sat in Saint Petersburg.

Russian rule was at first high-handed and insensitive to local law and custom. A conspiracy of nobles in 1832 and a revolt of peasants and nobles in Guria in 1841 followed. The Georgian Orthodox Church lost its independence: Russian clergy took over its churches and monasteries, banned the Georgian liturgy and damaged medieval frescoes. Serfdom, abolished in Russia in 1861, was phased out in the Georgian provinces from 1864 and satisfied neither the serfs nor the nobles.

A national movement grew in the same decades. Ilia Chavchavadze paid for Georgian schools, supported a national theatre and launched the newspaper Iveria in 1866. After the peasant revolt of 1905, the Social Democrats won every Georgian seat in the new Russian State Duma.

What the Democratic Republic of Georgia wrote down

The collapse of the Russian Empire gave the Georgian lands their chance to be whole and sovereign at once. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan tried a joint state first. The Transcaucasian Sejm declared an independent federation on 22 April 1918, and it lasted five weeks. On 26 May 1918 the Georgian National Council declared the Democratic Republic of Georgia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan declared independence two days later.

The Menshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party governed the republic, first under German protection and then, after the German defeat, with British troops partly occupying the country. The British kept Batumi out of Georgian control until 1920. The republic's borders came out of wars and treaties with its neighbours, among them a border war with Armenia over Lori and Javakheti in December 1918, and in 1918 to 1921 its territory came to about 107,600 square kilometres, half as large again as the 69,700 of Georgia today. The Constituent Assembly elected on 14 to 16 February 1919, with women voting and no property qualification, gave the Social Democrats 81.5% of the vote.

Soviet Russia recognised the republic in the Treaty of Moscow in 1920, in exchange for a promise to host no forces hostile to Russia. The League of Nations rejected Georgian membership on 16 December 1920, with 10 votes for, 13 against and 19 abstentions. The Allied powers granted de jure recognition on 27 January 1921.

The constitution was adopted on 21 February 1921, with the Red Army already inside the country. It had 17 chapters and 149 articles. It abolished the death penalty, provided for jury trials, separated church from state and required that anyone arrested be brought before a court within twenty-four hours. Its Article 107 gave autonomy to Abkhazia and to Zaqatala, which was the first time in the modern era that Abkhazia was defined as a geographic unit. The invasion meant the terms of that autonomy were never settled.

The Red Army came in from the Armenian side in February 1921. On 25 February the government left Tbilisi for Batumi, and by March the republic had fallen. The government in exile under Noe Zhordania moved to France. France, Britain, Belgium and Poland recognised it as the legitimate government of Georgia until the 1930s, and it continued to exist until 1954.

How Soviet rule redrew Georgia's borders

The Soviet state kept a Georgian republic on a smaller map. In the Georgian Affair of 1922, Georgia was forcibly incorporated into a Transcaucasian federation with Armenia and Azerbaijan, and with the move came the cessions: Tao-Klarjeti and part of Batumi province to Turkey, Hereti, also called Saingilo, to Azerbaijan, the Lore region to Armenia and the north-eastern corner of Khevi to Russia. Measured against the republic of 1918 to 1921, Georgia lost almost a third of its territory. Inside the Georgian republic, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were constituted as autonomous units, an autonomous republic and an autonomous oblast, and it was in those two units that the secessions of the 1990s began.

Guerrilla resistance from 1921 to 1924 was followed by a large uprising in August 1924. Collectivisation, begun in 1930, went slowly and had reached 75% by 1937. About 40,000 people died in collectivisation and the purges under Stalin and his secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, both Georgians. The federation was dissolved in 1936 and Georgia became the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Between 1941 and 1945 it sent almost 550,000 soldiers to the Red Army, of whom 300,000 were killed.

About a hundred Georgians were killed on 9 March 1956 demonstrating against Khrushchev's policy of de-Stalinisation. When Moscow moved in 1978 to revise the constitutional status of Georgian as the state language, street demonstrations on 14 April forced it to restore the guarantee, and the date became the Day of the Georgian Language. On 9 April 1989 Soviet troops broke up a peaceful demonstration at the government building in Tbilisi and twenty people were killed. Georgia declared sovereignty on 19 November 1989.

Why Tbilisi does not govern Abkhazia or South Ossetia

Set side by side, being whole and being independent have coincided in short stretches only:

The open multi-party election of 28 October 1990 gave the Round Table bloc of Zviad Gamsakhurdia 155 of the 250 seats. On 31 March 1991 a referendum on independence passed with 98.9% of the vote, and independence was declared on 9 April 1991. The constitution in force defines Georgia as "an independent, unified and indivisible state" and rests that on the referendum, which it says was held "in the entire territory of the country, including the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Abkhazia and the former Autonomous Region of South Ossetia".

What the wars after independence left behind

The breakaway conflicts had started before the Soviet Union ended. On 11 December 1990 the Georgian Supreme Soviet, responding to South Ossetia's attempt at secession, annulled the region's autonomy, and the fighting that followed caused several hundred casualties and sent 100,000 refugees into North Ossetia. Ceasefires brokered by Russia in 1992, 1993 and 1994 set up a Joint Control Commission in South Ossetia.

In 1992 Abkhazia reinstated its constitution of 1925 and declared independence, which the international community refused to recognise. Government forces and paramilitaries were sent in that August, and in September 1993 they were defeated and driven out. The Georgian population of Abkhazia was expelled with them. Around 14,000 people died and 300,000 fled, and by 2003 the population of Abkhazia had fallen from 525,000 to 216,000. A ceasefire in 1994 brought CIS peacekeepers. Tbilisi's own authority was fractured at the same time: armed opposition groups overthrew Gamsakhurdia on 22 December 1991, and Adjara in the south-west was governed from 1991 to 2004 by Aslan Abashidze with little reference to the capital, until protests and an ultimatum in 2004 forced him out.

What the August war changed

On 7 August 2008 Georgian army units entered the South Ossetian conflict zone after days of shelling and took most of Tskhinvali. Russia launched a land, air and sea offensive on 8 August, which it called a "peace enforcement" operation, and Russian and Abkhaz forces attacked the Kodori Gorge, the part of Abkhazia still held by Georgia, and an Abkhaz defence officer said Georgian forces had been driven out of it. A ceasefire was negotiated on 12 August by Nicolas Sarkozy of France. The war displaced about 192,000 people in 2008, 127,000 of them within the undisputed parts of Georgia. On 26 August 2008 Russia recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, and Georgia broke off diplomatic relations and left the CIS the following year.

This catalogue records the positions without taking one. Russia treats the two as sovereign states. Georgia's constitution treats them as Georgian territory over which jurisdiction is to be restored. Freedom House, reporting in 2025, describes them as "separatist, Russian-occupied territories" and assesses them in separate reports. In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia's "direct control" over both regions made it legally responsible for the human rights violations there.

The constitution in force fixes the state's territory as it was determined on 21 December 1991. It provides for a revision of the country's territorial arrangement "after the complete restoration of the jurisdiction of Georgia over the entire territory of the country", and it defers a second parliamentary chamber, a Senate with members elected from Abkhazia, Ajara and the other territorial units, to the same moment. Its preamble claims the legacy of the constitution adopted on 21 February 1921, four days before the government of the first republic left Tbilisi.