David X of Kartli

David X was the second king of Kartli, the eastern Georgian kingdom left when the united Georgian monarchy broke apart, and the first Georgian ruler to face the full weight of the new Safavid state in Persia. The eldest son of Constantine II of Georgia, whose realm had shrunk to Kartli alone by 1490, he succeeded his father in 1505. His mother is recorded as Tamar. His younger brother Bagrat later received the princedom of Mukhrani, founding a cadet line of the Bagrationi that endured for centuries. His reign was spent defending a small kingdom on two fronts. To the west lay the rival Bagrationi kingdom of Imereti under Alexander II; to the east lay Kakheti, whose king George II invaded repeatedly. In 1512 Bagrat held the fortress of Ksani against a Kakhetian siege, and in 1513 George II was taken in an ambush and died in prison, after which David annexed Kakheti. The union did not last, and by 1518 a Kakhetian king, Levan, again ruled there. The graver threat came from the south. In 1518 Shah Ismail I sent an army under Div Sultan Rumlu that forced David to pay tribute. In 1522, when the king refused the shah's demand that he convert to Islam, Ismail's forces met David and his son Luarsab at Teleti; the Georgians were outnumbered and defeated, and Tbilisi was taken and garrisoned by a Persian force, placing eastern Georgia for the first time under nominal Safavid rule. On Ismail's death in 1524 David retook Tbilisi and drove the Persians out, and in 1525 he recovered Lower Kartli, where Turkoman Qizilbash had been settled. That same year he abdicated in favor of his brother George IX and withdrew to a monastery under the name Damiane. David married twice, first to a lady of the Baratashvili family in a union his father had disapproved of, and then to Tamar Jaqeli of the ruling house of Samtskhe, who outlived him by many years. He had eight children, among them Luarsab I, king of Kartli from 1527, and the princes Demetrius, Bezhan, Adarnase, and Ramaz. David died in 1526 and was buried at Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in Mtskheta; some sources give 1527 for his death.