Vakhushti Bagrationi

Prince Vakhushti Bagrationi was the geographer, cartographer, and historian whose Description of the Kingdom of Georgia gave his divided homeland its first systematic account of itself and introduced Georgia to European scholarship. Born in Tbilisi in 1696, he was an illegitimate son of King Vakhtang VI of Kartli. He was educated at court by the Garsevanishvili brothers and by Roman Catholic missionaries, who taught him Latin and European languages; he came to command Greek, French, Turkish, Russian, and Armenian.

His early career was practical. He fought in his father's campaigns against rebellious nobles in 1719 and 1720, was appointed governor of Kartli in 1721, when he conducted a census, administered the kingdom in 1722 during Vakhtang's absence, and commanded forces in Kvemo Kartli. When the Ottoman occupation of 1723 drove Vakhtang from his throne, Vakhushti followed him into Russian exile in 1724 and settled in Moscow on an imperial pension.

Exile made him a scholar. Working from the annals of Kartlis Tskhovreba and his own observations, he completed the Description of the Kingdom of Georgia on 20 October 1745, a history from the earliest times to his own day joined to a region-by-region geography of the Georgian lands. Two atlases of the Caucasus followed in 1745 and 1746, and a separate Geographic Description of Georgia in 1750; he also drew a map of Georgia for the Russian military department. In 1743 he and his half-brother Bakar completed the first printed Georgian Bible at their Moscow press. A guiding purpose of his history was to insist on the unity of Georgian lands then divided among several kings and princes.

Vakhushti married Mariam Abashidze and had at least nine children, among them Prince Ioane, a general in the Russian army who died in 1781. He died in Moscow in 1757, the date most authorities accept, and was buried at the Donskoy Monastery. His works were translated into Russian and French, and in 2013 the Description and the atlas were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. Georgia's Institute of Geography bears his name.