Adarnase I of Tao-Klarjeti

Adarnase, father of Ashot I the Great, is the figure with whom the documented history of the Georgian Bagrationi begins. The chronicle that continues the Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali relates that in the days of the Chosroid ruler Archil a man of the line of the prophet David, Adarnase, a nephew or, in another manuscript, a grandson of Adarnase the Blind, came from Armenia, asked Archil for land, and pledged himself his vassal. Archil granted him estates usually identified with Shulaveri and Artani, modern Ardahan; this genealogy records them as Rhisha, Shghuer, and Atone. Adarnase's daughter Latori, the chronicle's Latavri, then married Archil's son Juansher.

Sumbat Davitis-dze, the dynasty's eleventh-century historian, mentions Adarnase only in passing, as son of Nerse and grandson of Waraz-Bakur in a male line running back to Guaram the kouropalates and to King David. Modern scholarship rejects that descent. Cyril Toumanoff argued, and most historians accept, that Adarnase was a grandson of Ashot III the Blind, presiding prince of Armenia from 732 to 748, and that his father Vasak, of the Armenian Bagratuni, crossed into Kartli after the failed Armenian rising of the 770s, having married a daughter of the Guaramid Guaram III; on this reading the Bagrationi are a branch of the Bagratuni.

Adarnase married a daughter of Nerse, the Nersianid presiding prince of Iberia, and had two children: Ashot, who became presiding prince about 813, received the title of kouropalates, and founded the principality of Tao-Klarjeti, and Latori. When Juansher died about 807 without children, his lands passed to Adarnase, giving the family the hereditary domain from which Ashot rose. No source records Adarnase's death. Reference works usually count him as the first of his name in Tao-Klarjeti; he is distinct from Adarnase III of Tao, a later duke, and from the Nersianid Adarnase III of Iberia, Nerse's father.