Adarnase IV of Iberia

Adarnase IV restored the royal title in Georgia after more than three centuries and founded the Kingdom of the Iberians, the state from which the unified monarchy of Bagrat III would grow. He was the son of David I Curopalates, the Bagrationi presiding prince of Iberia. In 881 his father was murdered by a cousin, Nasra, son of Guaram Mampali, and the boy inherited the duchy of Lower Tao amid a family feud. Byzantium declined to recognize him and gave the title of kouropalates to another cousin, Gurgen I of Tao, while Nasra returned from exile with imperial and Abkhazian backing. Adarnase, supported by the Armenian king Ashot I Bagratuni, defeated Nasra in 888, had him executed at Aspindza, and in the same year assumed the title of king. Georgian tradition gives 888, though some scholars prefer 897 or 899, and one account holds that Smbat I of Armenia crowned him in 899.

In 891 he defeated Gurgen I at Mglinavi, and after Gurgen's death Byzantium accepted the situation and recognized Adarnase as kouropalates as well as king. His relationship with Armenia was close at first: he took part in the coronation of Smbat I at Yerazgavors in 891, and in 904 the two kings together defeated Constantine III of Abkhazia, who had seized Uplistsikhe and ravaged Kartli. Adarnase captured Constantine, but Smbat released him, and the resulting quarrel ruined both. Constantine annexed Shida Kartli, so that from 904 the kings of the Iberians ruled only from their southwestern lands, a balance that lasted until the unification of 1008. Adarnase drifted toward the Sajid emir Yusuf and stood aside during the emir's invasions of Armenia, in which Smbat perished in 914; the next year he helped crown Smbat's son Ashot II and returned to the Byzantine alliance.

Adarnase died in 923. He left four sons, David II of Iberia, Ashot II of Tao, Bagrat I of Tao, and Sumbat I of Iberia, and a daughter who married Constantine III of Abkhazia, renewing the Bagrationi tie with the Abkhazian house. Every later Bagrationi king of Georgia descended from Adarnase, and historians regard his coronation as the beginning of medieval Georgian kingship.