Luarsab I of Kartli

Luarsab I, king of Kartli, spent a reign of nearly thirty years resisting the Safavid shah Tahmasp I and died fighting him. The eldest son of David X and Tamar Jaqeli, he first appears as a young commander at the battle of Teleti in 1522 during an earlier Persian invasion. On 25 March 1526 he married Tamar, daughter of Bagrat III of Imereti, binding the Kartlian and Imeretian branches of the Bagrationi, and he succeeded on the abdication of his uncle George IX. Most historians date his accession to 1527, though some give 1534. His birth year is not stated in the sources consulted. Tahmasp invaded Kartli four times. The campaign of 1541 detached Levan of Kakheti from the Georgian coalition, left much of Kartli in ruins, and placed a Persian garrison in Tbilisi. Further invasions in 1547, 1551, and 1554 overran the country without forcing the king to submit; Luarsab avoided pitched battle with superior forces, though in 1554 the fortress where his mother had taken refuge fell and she was carried off. Meanwhile the Ottomans pressed from the west, and in 1545 a combined Kartlian and Imeretian army was crushed at Sokhoista. The Peace of Amasya of 1555 assigned Kartli and Kakheti to the Persian sphere, but Luarsab refused to recognize the settlement and kept up his attacks around Tbilisi. That defiance brought a fresh Qizilbash army under the beylerbey of Karabakh into Kartli in 1556. Luarsab and his son Simon met it at Garisi; the Georgians beat off the invaders but the king was killed in action. Some sources place the battle and his death in 1557. He was buried at Svetitskhoveli in Mtskheta. Of his eight children, two followed him on the throne in very different ways: Simon I, who continued the war against Persia and later against the Ottomans, and David XI, who accepted Islam as Daud Khan and ruled Tbilisi for the shah. Luarsab's stand made him a lasting symbol of Georgian resistance.