Bagrat I of Tao-Klarjeti

Bagrat I was the son and successor of Ashot I the Great, the founder of Bagrationi power in southwestern Georgia, and for half a century he carried the Byzantine dignity of curopalates that marked his house as the empire's chosen ally in the Caucasus. When Ashot was murdered at a church altar in the Nigali valley, in 826 or 830 according to differing reckonings, his lands were divided among three sons. Bagrat, though not the eldest, received the title of curopalates and the office of presiding prince of Iberia; the tenth-century writer Giorgi Merchule, in his Life of Grigol of Khandzta, says this was done with the agreement of his brothers Adarnase and Guaram. His own share is thought to have comprised part of Tao and Kola, in what is now northeastern Turkey. Bagrat's ambition was to recover Shida Kartli, the Georgian heartland around Mtskheta and Tbilisi, from the Arab emirs of Tbilisi and their Kakhetian allies. In 842 he joined an Arab expedition under Muhammad ibn Khalid against the rebel emir Sahak ibn Ismail, and in August 853 he took part in the caliph's second campaign, led by Bugha the Turk, which captured Tbilisi and put Sahak to death. The victory gave Bagrat Shida Kartli, but only briefly: the rulers of Abkhazia, who had their own designs on Kartli, drove him out, and Georgian sources record his fighting against an Abkhazian invasion of the region. Kartli would pass between Bagrationi and Abkhazian hands for more than a century until the two lines were joined in the person of Bagrat III of Georgia. Like his father, Bagrat was a patron of the monastic revival in Klarjeti, helping Grigol of Khandzta build the church at Khandzta and supporting the monasteries of Shatberdi and Ishkhani. He married a daughter of the Armenian prince Smbat VIII Bagratuni, sister of the future King Ashot I of Armenia, binding the Georgian Bagrationi to their Armenian cousins. He died in 876 and was succeeded as curopalates by his son David I Curopalates, who was murdered in 881; his other sons were Adarnase, who died in 874, and Ashot, who died in 885. David's son Adarnase IV would take the title of king of the Georgians in 888.