George VII of Georgia

George VII ruled Georgia through the most destructive years in its medieval history, when Timur's armies came against the kingdom again and again. The eldest son of Bagrat V of Georgia and his first wife Helena, who died of plague in 1366, he was made co-king with his father in 1369, an arrangement possibly meant to secure his succession after Bagrat's second marriage, to Anna of Trebizond, produced another son. When Timur besieged and took Tbilisi on 22 November 1386 and carried off Bagrat, George led the resistance, and Georgian tradition credits him and his brother Constantine with ambushing the force sent back with their father and freeing him. He assumed full royal power on Bagrat's death in 1393. What followed was a war of attrition against an enemy he could not defeat in the field. Timur is reckoned to have led seven further expeditions against Georgia between 1387 and 1403. In 1399 George struck a Timurid force besieging the fortress of Alinja and won a notable success, but in the spring of 1400 Timur returned; George refused to hand over the Jalayirid prince Tahir, who had taken refuge with him, and the Georgians were defeated on the Sagim River, after which Timurid sources claim 60,000 survivors were led into slavery. Late in 1401 George sued for peace and accepted tributary status, but after his victory over the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402 Timur returned to punish him, storming the fortress of Birtvisi in August 1403 and pursuing the king into western Georgia. Timur's historians boasted that 700 towns were destroyed. The peace of 1403 left Georgia a tributary, paying gold, horses, and a great ruby, but a Christian kingdom under its own king. After Timur's death in February 1405 George recovered lost ground with the forces that remained to him, retaking Nakhchivan and Ganja. His end is variously reported: the usual account has him killed in 1407 fighting the Kara Koyunlu Turkomans of Qara Yusuf, though some modern historians question this, and a few sources give 1405 or 1408. He married Nestan-Darejan, died childless, and was buried at Svetitskhoveli. The crown passed to his brother Constantine I, who fell to the same enemy five years later.