Leon II

Leon II was the founder of the independent kingdom of Abkhazia, the ruler who broke with Byzantium in the later eighth century and took the title King of the Abkhazians. The Chronicle of Kartli records that when the Greeks grew weak, Leon, kinsman of the earlier Leon to whom Abkhazia had been granted as an appanage, and himself the son of a daughter of the king of the Khazars, separated from the Greeks with Khazar aid, took possession of Abkhazia and Egrisi as far as the Likhi range, and assumed the royal title, at a time when Kartli's Chosroid princes were failing: Ioane was dead and Juansher had grown old. Different translations call him nephew or cousin of Leon I, and the chronicle's editors allow that he may have been a son; his Khazar mother made him grandson of the reigning khagan.

His kingdom embraced the whole of western Georgia, and he moved its seat from the coastal fortress of Anakopia to Kutaisi, closer to the center of the country; Abkhazian historians date the move between 788 and 797. The name Kingdom of the Abkhazians, taken from the dynasty, came to cover the Lazian and Georgian-speaking lands of Egrisi as well. He is also credited with organizing the realm into eight duchies, Abkhazia proper, Tskhumi, Bedia, Guria, Racha with Takveri, Svaneti, Argveti, and Kutaisi. Under him and his successors the western church, until then subject to Constantinople, turned toward the Georgian Katholikos of Mtskheta, a shift that made the kingdom Georgian in liturgy and culture.

The Divan of the Abkhazian Kings gives him a reign of forty-four years; modern scholars date it from about 767 or 778 to about 811 or 828. He was succeeded by three sons in turn, Teodos I, Demetre I, and Giorgi I Aghtsepeli. The chronicle notes that Teodos was son-in-law of Ashot I Kuropalates, the first Bagrationi ruler of Tao-Klarjeti, and fought beside him against Kakheti, an early instance of the Abkhazian-Bagrationi alliance that two centuries later, through Bagrat III of Georgia, united the two crowns.