Lazica

Lazica, the land of the Laz on the Black Sea's eastern shore, was the west Georgian kingdom lasting from about 100 BC to about 700 AD. It grew from the wreck of Colchis: when that old gold-land broke, its tribal districts won free, and by 131 AD Rome recognised their Lazic king. Small, mountainous and surf-battered, Lazica mattered because it guarded the passes: whoever held its valleys held the road between the steppe and Anatolia. So the two superpowers of late antiquity tore it in half for twenty years in the Lazic War of the sixth century, Romans and Persians besieging the same fortresses back and forth while Lazic kings changed sides to survive. Christianity came with Rome and stayed. In the seventh century Arab armies overran the Caucasus, Lazica slipped under their rule, and by the eighth its lands had passed to the rising Abkhazian kingdom, the seedbed of medieval Georgia. The Laz themselves remain on those coasts to this day.