Constantine I of Georgia

Constantine I reigned over Georgia for only five years, from 1407 to 1412, yet his death at the hands of the Kara Koyunlu Turkomans became one of the defining calamities of the kingdom's fifteenth-century decline. He was a son of Bagrat V of Georgia; the sources differ on his mother, one tradition making him a full brother of George VII by Bagrat's first wife Helena, another making him the son of Bagrat's second wife, Anna of Trebizond, daughter of Emperor Alexios III. Through the Trebizond marriage the Georgian royal house was bound once more to the Komnenos emperors of the Pontic coast, a tie that went back to the empire's founding with Queen Tamar's support. Constantine came of age during Timur's devastating invasions. In 1400 he served as an envoy to the conqueror, and in 1402 he and the Samtskhe prince Ivane Jaqeli submitted to Timur while avoiding any part in the attacks on their own country. When his brother George VII died in 1407, Constantine succeeded to a kingdom stripped of its towns and people and began restoring what the Timurid campaigns had ruined. The chief danger now came from Qara Yusuf, chief of the Kara Koyunlu, who was expanding into the southern Caucasus after Timur's death. Constantine allied with the Shirvanshah Ibrahim I and Sidi Ahmad, ruler of Shaki, and led a Georgian contingent, reckoned at some 2,000 horsemen, to their aid. At Chalagan, in what is now Azerbaijan, the allies were routed in a battle that the sources place in 1412, most in December of that year and a few as late as 1413. Constantine, his half-brother David, and the Shirvanshah were captured. The king's defiance in captivity enraged Qara Yusuf, who had him executed, reportedly by his own hand, together with David and some 300 Georgian nobles. Constantine had married Natia Amirejibi, daughter of the court chamberlain Kutsna, and had three sons whom he raised to co-kingship: Alexander, who succeeded him and is remembered as Alexander I the Great of Georgia; Bagrat; and George, whose son Bagrat VI would later claim the crown of all Georgia. His early death left the throne to a young king who spent thirty years rebuilding what Timur and the Turkomans had destroyed.