Alexios Komnenos (son of Andronikos I)

Alexios Komnenos (c. 1170 – 1199) was a natural son of Andronikos I Komnenos, the Byzantine Emperor (r. 1183 – 1185) by his relative and mistress Theodora Komnene, Queen Dowager of Jerusalem.

During the reign of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos (r. 1143–1180), Alexios accompanied his father Andronikos in exile, visiting, inter alia, the Kingdom of Georgia. The Georgian king George III, their relative, granted to Andronikos several castles in Kakhetia in the east of Georgia. Andronikos returned to Constantinople and attained to the Byzantine crown in 1183, only to be overthrown and killed in 1185. Alexios then fled to Georgia, where he was restored to his father's Georgian estates. At one point, he was even considered by some Georgian nobles as a candidate to become a consort of the queen regnant Tamar of Georgia.^[1]

According to the Georgian historical tradition, Alexios's progeny flourished in Georgia, producing the noble family of Andronikashvili, i.e., "scions of Andronikos", so named after Alexios's purported son. In spite of the extremely fragmentary nature of the early Andronikashvili pedigree, Professor Cyril Toumanoff (1976) accepted the Komnenian origin as plausible, but the evidence marshaled by Kuršankis (1977) suggests that this may have been only a legend.^[2] Toumanoff also assumed that the line of the "provincial kings" of Alastani (c. 1230–1348), known from the medieval Georgian sources and including one named Andronikos, might have belonged to the Georgian Komnenoi/Andronikashvili.^[3]

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