Vakhtang VI of Kartli

Vakhtang VI of Kartli was the most learned ruler of late Safavid-era Georgia, a lawgiver, translator, and patron of the first printing press in the Caucasus, whose reign ended in exile in Russia. Born on 15 September 1675, he was the son of Prince Levan, a younger son of King Vakhtang V, and of Tuta Gurieli, and thus a nephew of George XI. From 1703 to 1714 he governed Kartli as janishin, or regent, for his absent uncle George XI and then for his brother Kaikhosro.

The regency was his most productive period. Between 1707 and 1709 he compiled the code of laws that bore his name and the Dasturlamali, a handbook of state administration, which governed Georgian legal practice until the Russian annexation. He gathered a Commission of Learned Men to revise the chronicles of Kartlis Tskhovreba, and in 1709 founded a press in Tbilisi with help from Anthim the Iberian; its 1712 edition of Rustaveli's The Knight in the Panther's Skin, with Vakhtang's commentary, is the foundation of Rustaveli scholarship.

Summoned to Isfahan in 1712 to be confirmed as king, he refused to embrace Islam and was held until he yielded in 1716, taking the name Husayn-Qoli Khan and command of the Persian army. He reigned from 1716 to 1724, returning home in 1719. Recalled to Persia in 1721 from a campaign against Lezgin raiders, he opened secret contacts with Peter the Great, but Peter's Caspian campaign of 1722 brought no help; in 1723 Constantine II of Kakheti seized Tbilisi with Persian backing, an Ottoman occupation installed Vakhtang's brother Jesse, and in July 1724 Vakhtang fled to Russia with some twelve hundred followers.

Catherine I granted him a pension and estates, and he led the Georgian colony in Moscow. Sent on a mission to Persia in 1734, he fell ill and died at Astrakhan on 26 March 1737, where he was buried in the Assumption Cathedral. His wife, Rusudan of Circassia, died in Moscow in 1740. Their children included Bakar and Tamar, who married Teimuraz II of Kakheti and became the mother of Erekle II, joining the Kartli and Kakheti branches of the Bagrationi. His illegitimate son Vakhushti became Georgia's great geographer and historian.