Luarsab II of Kartli

Luarsab II, king of Kartli from 1606 to 1615, refused to abandon Christianity under Safavid pressure and died a prisoner, becoming one of the martyr saints of the Georgian church. Born in 1592, he was the son of George X of Kartli and Tamar Lipartiani, a daughter of the Dadiani house of Mingrelia, and a grandson of the warrior king Simon I. He came to the throne at fourteen on his father's death, and during his minority government lay with his tutor Shadiman Baratashvili. In 1609 an Ottoman force of Crimean Tatars entered Kartli intending to seize the young king at Tskhireti; a Georgian named Teudore Keteli misdirected them at the cost of his life. On 16 June the general Giorgi Saakadze fell on the raiders at dawn at Tashiskari and all but destroyed them, after which Luarsab recovered the citadel of Tbilisi. Late in 1611 the king married Saakadze's sister Makrine, a match beneath his rank; the great nobles, led by Baratashvili, persuaded him that she was a Persian agent, and within the year he repudiated her and drove Saakadze into exile in Persia, where the general would later serve Shah Abbas I. Relations with the shah worsened when Luarsab and Teimuraz I of Kakheti executed pro-Persian nobles in 1612 and evaded a summons to court in 1613. Early in 1614 Abbas invaded Kakheti, and both kings fled to Imereti. In October 1615 Luarsab surrendered to spare his kingdom further destruction. Abbas received him well at first, but on learning that the two kings had sought an Ottoman alliance he demanded that Luarsab accept Islam. When he refused he was imprisoned, first at Astarabad and then at the fortress of Gulab-Qala near Shiraz. There, in 1622, he was strangled on the shah's orders. He left no children. The Georgian Orthodox Church canonized him and keeps his feast on 1 July, the date of his death in the modern calendar. Kartli passed to Muslim Bagratids appointed from Isfahan, and within a generation his kinsman Rostom, son of Daud Khan, would rule it as the shah's viceroy.