Teodos I

Teodos I, numbered Theodosius II in lists that count the earlier archons of Abasgia, was the eldest son and successor of Leon II, who had made Abkhazia an independent kingdom seated at Kutaisi, and the first of three brothers to reign in turn. The Divan of the Abkhazian Kings records him as Leon's son but gives no dates, and modern reconstructions disagree: Toumanoff placed his reign about 828 to 855, Georgian scholars have proposed brackets ending as early as 825 or as late as 837, and the chronology followed in these pages has him die about 838.

The Georgian chronicle records his part in the struggle over Kartli. When the prince of Kakheti, allied with the Arab emir of Tbilisi, moved into Inner Kartli, Teodos supported Ashot I Kuropalates, the Bagratid ruler of Tao-Klarjeti, and the Kakhetians were pushed back east of the Ksani river. This is the earliest recorded cooperation between the Abkhazian kings and the Bagratids of Tao, the houses whose union under Bagrat III would create the Georgian kingdom. Byzantine sources add that in 837 the emperor Theophilos sent the patrikios Bardas and the general Theophobos against the Abkhazians and was defeated. A later tradition also credited Teodos with facing Bugha the Turk, but that campaign of 853 belongs to his brother.

Teodos died without an heir, and the crown passed to his brother Demetre, then to Giorgi Aghtsepeli. Nothing is recorded of his marriage; his reign survives as a few chronicle lines and a name in the Divan.