Ioane Bagrationi
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Ioane Bagrationi (16 May 1768, Tbilisi, Georgia, – 15 February 1830, St Petersburg, Russia) was a Georgian prince (batonishvili), writer and encyclopedist.
A son of George XII, the last king of Kartl-Kakheti kingdom, eastern Georgia, by his first wife Ketevan Andronikashvili, Ioane commanded an avant-garde of a Georgian force annihilated by the Persian army at the Battle of Krtsanisi in 1795.
Following the battle, the kingdom entered a period of economic crisis and political anarchy. To eradicate the results of a Persian attack and to overcome the retardation of the feudal society, Prince Ioane proposed on 10 May 1799, a project of reforms of administration, army and education. This project was, however, never materialized due to the weakness of George XII and a civil strife in the country. In 1800, he commanded a Georgian cavalry in the joined Russian-Georgian forces that defeated his uncle, Alexandre Bagrationi, and the Dagestani allies at the battle of Niakhura.
Upon the death of George XII, Kartl-Kakheti was incorporated into the expanding Russian Empire, and Ioane was deported to Russia. He settled in St Petersburg where he wrote most of his works with a didactic encyclopedic novel Kalmasoba (1817-1828) being the most important of them.
He is also an author of a naturalist encyclopedia (1814), a children encyclopedia (1829), a Russian-Georgian dictionary, a Georgian lexicon, and of several poems.
His manuscripts were discovered in 1861 by a Georgian scholar, D. Baqradze, who published them in an abridged version in 1862.
He married in 1787, Princess Ketevan Tsereteli (1775-1832), and had the only son, Grigol Bagrationi.
[edit] References
- David M. Lang, Prince Ioann of Georgia and His "Kalmasoba", American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Dec., 1952), pp. 274-287
- Soviet Georgian Encyclopedia, vol. 5, pp 188-189. Tbilisi, 1980 (in Georgian)
