Principality of Abkhazia

The Principality of Abkhazia emerged as a separate feudal state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the civil wars that ended the unified Kingdom of Georgia. Abkhazia had earlier been a duchy of that kingdom, known as the Duchy of Tskhumi and ruled by the house of Sharvashidze from the twelfth century. When George VIII was defeated by a coalition of nobles at Chikhori in 1463, the victorious king of Imereti created principalities for his allies, and so a principality of Abkhazia was founded for the Sharvashidze. Its princes were formally vassals of Mingrelia, itself subject to Imereti, but the dependence was largely nominal, and Mingrelian and Abkhazian rulers fought each other and their overlord as much as they obeyed them. The Ottoman Empire was the greater threat, and its pressure plus slave trading along the coast pushed the principality towards Russia, which established a protectorate over Abkhazia in 1810. The principality kept a shrinking autonomy for another half century before the Caucasian War ended it, and in 1864 Russia abolished the principality outright and deported its last prince, folding the country into the empire.