Kingdom of Kartli

The Kingdom of Kartli was a late medieval and early modern monarchy in eastern Georgia, centred on the province of Kartli, with its capital at Tbilisi — the eastern Georgian kingdom shown on the map. It emerged in the process of the tripartite division of the Kingdom of Georgia: as the old kingdom disintegrated, Bagrat VI crossed the borders of East Georgia into inner Kartli and proclaimed himself King of all Georgia in 1466, and the deposed George VIII could only proclaim himself King of Kakheti, a rump state — leaving Kartli a kingdom of its own among the Georgian successor realms. The kingdom existed, with several brief intervals, through two and a half centuries of Persian and Ottoman pressure, its Bagrationi kings ruling from Tbilisi as Safavid vassals and, at moments, as sovereigns of central Transcaucasia. In 1762 Kartli and the neighbouring Georgian kingdom of Kakheti were merged through dynastic succession into the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, closing the separate Kartli record under Erekle II, who would unite eastern Georgia for its last decades before the Russian annexation.