George IV Lasha

George IV, called Lasha, ruled Georgia at the very summit of its medieval power and was the first of its kings to face the Mongols. Born in 1192 at Tabakhmela, the son of Queen Tamar the Great and her Alan consort David Soslan, he was declared coregent by his mother in 1207 and became sole ruler on her death in 1213. The Georgian chronicle explains his byname Lasha as meaning "illuminator of the world" in the Abkhaz tongue. He continued Tamar's expansionist policy. When the atabeg of Ganja stopped paying tribute after her death, George convened the royal council and marched on the city in 1213; the siege was won and tribute resumed, though the chronicler faults the young king for rashly detaching a large body of troops from the main force. A campaign of 1219 against Erzurum, Nakhchivan, and Ahlat reasserted Georgian dominance over its Anatolian and Iranian neighbors. Pope Innocent III had sought Georgian participation in the Fifth Crusade, and in the late 1210s George began preparing an army for the Holy Land. Those plans ended when a Mongol reconnaissance force under Subutai and Jebe crossed the Caucasus. Georgian armies were defeated twice, and at the battle of Khunan on the Kotman River, which sources date to 1221 or 1222, George was badly wounded in the chest. He did not recover, and died on 18 January 1223 at Bagavan in Armenia, aged about thirty. He was buried at Gelati. George never made a dynastic marriage. While in Kakheti he took as his mistress a married woman of Velistsikhe, who in 1215 bore him a son, David; the church objected, and George refused all other proposals. His illegitimate son later reigned as David VII Ulu, but at his death the crown passed to his sister Rusudan, whose accession the chronicle marks as the beginning of the end of the golden age.