Rusudan of Georgia

Rusudan, queen regnant of Georgia from 1223 to 1245, presided over the collapse of the golden age her mother Tamar had built. Born in 1194 to Tamar the Great and David Soslan, she succeeded her brother George IV Lasha on 18 January 1223, inheriting a kingdom that had just been wounded by the first Mongol reconnaissance. In a letter to Pope Honorius III she confessed that the Georgians had at first taken the newcomers for Christians because they fought Muslims. In 1224 she married Ghias ad-Din, a Seljuk prince, son of Tughril-shah, emir of Erzurum, and grandson of Kilij Arslan II, who converted to Christianity for the marriage; the Arab chronicler Ibn al-Athir called it a turn of events without parallel. Their children were David, born in 1225, the future David VI Narin, and Tamar, who married Sultan Kaykhusraw II of Rum and is known as Gurju Khatun. The marriage itself did not last; Ghias ad-Din wavered in his faith during the invasions that followed and Rusudan repudiated him. Those invasions came almost at once. The Khwarazmian ruler Jalal ad-Din, himself fleeing the Mongols, defeated the Georgians at Garni in 1225 and stormed Tbilisi on 9 March 1226; the court withdrew to Kutaisi in the west. The Georgians briefly retook Tbilisi in 1227 but set it alight and abandoned it. From 1235 Mongol armies under Chormaqan overran the east, and in 1239 Rusudan accepted a treaty with Batu Khan that bound Georgia to a heavy annual tribute in gold and to furnishing troops, in return for recognition of her son David as heir. She had her nephew David, George IV's illegitimate son, held at the court of her son-in-law Kaykhusraw II, and in 1243 sent her own son to the Mongol court. Rusudan died in 1245 and was buried at Gelati. Her plan for the succession failed: the Mongols made her nephew David VII Ulu senior king and her son David VI Narin his junior, the division that eventually produced the separate kingdom of Imereti.