13 Facts About Giorgi Saakadze

Giorgi Saakadze was a Georgian politician and military commander who played an important but contradictory role in the politics of the early 17th-century Georgia.

Giorgi Saakadze was known as the Grand Mouravi in Georgia, Murav-Beg in Persia and Maurav-Hun or Magrav-Bek in the Ottoman Empire for having served as a mouravi of Tbilisi.

Giorgi Saakadze was born in 1570 in Noste village, near the town on Kaspi.

In 1614, Giorgi Saakadze took revenge on Luarsab and his nobles by aiding Shah Abbas in the invasion of Georgia which brought Luarsab's reign to an end, but dissuaded the Iranians from committing atrocities in Kartli after the nation surrendered.

Once the hostilities with the Ottomans resumed, Giorgi Saakadze served as one of the leading commanders in the shah's ranks from 1621 to 1623.

Giorgi Saakadze then discovered that the Shah planned to massacre all armed Kartlians, including himself.

Giorgi Saakadze went on to annihilate the Turkic nomads transplanted by the Iranian government to replace the exiled Georgian population, dislodged the shah's governor Paykar Khan from Kakheti and raided the Iranian garrisons as far as Ganja and Karabakh.

Giorgi Saakadze withdrew into the mountains, and organized a powerful guerrilla resistance which forced Abbas I to recognize Teimuraz's royal status.

Giorgi Saakadze's last surviving son, Ioram, later attained to the princely rank in Georgia, and founded the Tarkhan-Mouravi noble family.

The first attempt at the rehabilitation of Giorgi Saakadze was made by his relative Metropolitan Joseph of Tbilisi in his poem The Grand Mouravi.

In October 1940, Stalin commented on Giorgi Saakadze, proclaiming that the Grand Mouravi's hopes for Georgia's "unification into one state through the establishment of royal absolutism and of the liquidation of the power of the princes" had been progressive.

The film emphasized that Giorgi Saakadze, initially an obscure squire, was a victim of machinations at the hands of the wealthy feudal lords who would sacrifice everything, including their motherland, for their own benefit.

Giorgi Saakadze was the name of the Wehrmacht's 797th Battalion, one of the Georgian battalions formed by the Germans to fight the Soviet Union.