Bagrat V of Georgia

Bagrat V was the king of Georgia who faced the first onslaught of Timur, and his reign marks the turn from the fourteenth-century recovery to the devastations that permanently weakened the kingdom. The son of David IX and Sindukhtar Jaqeli, he was made co-king in 1355 and succeeded on his father's death in 1360. Georgian tradition remembered him as a victorious general and archer and gave him the byname "the Great." His birth year is not given in the sources consulted. His marriages bound the Bagrationi to Trebizond. His first wife, Helena, died of the plague in 1366 after bearing George VII, Constantine I, and a daughter, Olympias; in June 1367 he married Anna, daughter of Emperor Alexios III of Trebizond, mother of a son, David. Bagrat allied himself with Tokhtamysh of the Golden Horde, Timur's enemy, and in the autumn of 1386 Timur's army invaded. Tbilisi was taken on 22 November 1386 after a siege, its people massacred, and the king, his queen, and their son David carried off captive. Bagrat agreed to accept Islam, and Timur released him with an escort of some twelve thousand troops to enforce the kingdom's conversion. The Georgian Chronicle and the Armenian historian Thomas of Metsoph present the apostasy as a ruse: Bagrat secretly informed his son George, who had governed in his absence, and George ambushed and destroyed the escort, freeing his father. Timur returned in the spring of 1387 to avenge the trick, and again in 1388, but the Golden Horde and revolt in Persia drew him away. Bagrat died in 1393 and was buried at Gelati. His eldest son George VII succeeded him and bore the brunt of Timur's later campaigns, while his second son Constantine I later reigned in turn; through Constantine the line ran to Alexander I, the last king of a united Georgia.