Tbilisi

Tbilisi lies in the gorge of the Mtkvari, or Kura, below the walls of Narikala, where the sulphur baths of Abanotubani steam beside Georgian, Armenian and Persian quarters. King David the Builder took it from the Seljuks in 1122 and made it the capital of a united Georgia, and by 1200 it had perhaps 100,000 people. The Khwarezmian and Mongol invasions ended that golden age. The Mongols withdrew from Georgia in the 1320s, and under George V the city was again the capital of an independent kingdom, until Timur sacked it on 22 November 1386.

From the 1510s Kartli was a Safavid vassal, and Tbilisi became a border city between Iran and the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans captured it in 1578 and kept it for some forty years; then Iranian rule returned, with a Georgian governor of Kartli seated in the town. The Ottomans took it again in 1723 and Nader Shah in 1735, and in 1748 Heraclius II freed it, and under him it became a lively cultural centre. Agha Mohammad Khan's Qajar army burned the city in 1795, and Russia annexed Kartli-Kakheti in 1801.