Principality of Svaneti

The Principality of Svaneti was a small state in the Svaneti region of the Greater Caucasus, in north-western Georgia, that emerged from the break-up of the Kingdom of Georgia at the end of the fifteenth century. During the period of Georgian unity it had been a duchy within the Bagratid kingdom, ruled first by the house of Vardanidze and then by the Gelovani, who became virtually independent princes when Georgia fragmented in the 1460s into the kingdoms of Kartli, Kakheti and Imereti and a number of regional principalities. Ottoman invasions and civil wars cut the mountain valleys off from the lowlands, and medieval feudal institutions collapsed; Georgian Orthodox culture declined and some pagan practices returned, while the highlanders fortified their villages with chains of defensive towers. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries Svaneti itself split into three political entities, including Lower Svaneti under the princes of Mingrelia and Upper Svaneti, where the Dadeshkeliani established their rule west of the Enguri by the 1720s. The principality was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1858.