David IX of Georgia

David IX was king of Georgia from 1346 to 1360, the son and successor of George V the Brilliant, and his reign saw the kingdom his father had reunited struck by the Black Death and hemmed in once more by its Muslim neighbors. His mother's identity is uncertain; a princess of Trebizond has been suggested, and the Georgian record of George V's marriage to a daughter of a Greek emperor named Michael Komnenos cannot be reconciled with the Byzantine dynasty of the day. David inherited the throne on his father's death in 1346.

Two years later, in 1348, plague swept through Georgia, decimating the population and bringing on a severe economic crisis. The Ilkhanate that George V had shaken off was in its death throes, but its successors still pressed on the southern borders. In 1349 and 1350 David is recorded as paying the Ilkhan Anushirwan an annual tribute of four hundred thousand dinars to avert invasion, and Kars, Nakhchivan, and Garni passed under Ilkhanid control. Coins struck in Tbilisi in his reign bear the names of foreign rulers, Ilkhanid, Golden Horde, and Jalayirid in succession, and no coinage of David himself is known. Within the kingdom he restored church lands seized during the Mongol period and in 1350 repaired the walls of the fortress of Tmogvi, and he retained the allegiance of vassal territories such as Alania. Little else is recorded of his internal government.

David married Sindukhtar, daughter of Ivane I Jaqeli, prince of Samtskhe, binding the crown to the most powerful of the semi-independent Georgian principalities. Their children were Bagrat V of Georgia, who was made co-king in 1355 and succeeded his father; Gulkhan, who took the name Eudokia when she married Emperor Manuel III of Trebizond in 1379 and died in 1395; and Gulshar, who married the duke of Ksani. Through Gulkhan the Bagrationi renewed their old tie to the Komnenian rulers of Trebizond, which Bagrat V strengthened by his own second marriage to Anna of Trebizond.

David died in 1360 at the palace of Geguti in western Georgia and was buried at Gelati. Bagrat V succeeded him.