Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti

The Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti was the eastern Georgian kingdom created in 1762 by uniting Kartli and Kakheti under the Bagrationi house. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries both kingdoms had lived under Iranian suzerainty, divided between the Persian and Ottoman spheres by the Peace of Amasya. After Nader Shah died, the local kings Heraclius II and Teimuraz II seized the chaos and took de facto independence, and Heraclius then fused the two small kingdoms into one. To hold the new state he signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with the Russian Empire in 1783, laying its investiture in the Russian monarch's hands and making it a Russian protectorate with a written guarantee against hostile powers. The guarantee failed its first test: in the 1790s Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar rose in Persia, and when Heraclius refused to scrap the Russian treaty the shah invaded the Georgian lands. Russia annexed the kingdom in 1801.