Saakadze, Giorgi

(c. 1570 –1629) was a Georgian politician and military commander who played an important but contradictory role in the politics of the early 17th-century Georgia. He was also known as Grand Mouravi in Georgia, Mūrāv-Beg in Iran and Maghraw-Bek in the Ottoman Empire for having served as a mouravi (appointed royal official) of Tbilisi. Saakadze’s controversial career has always been a source of conflicting perceptions of his role in Georgia’s history. The traditional historiography of Georgia, viewed him as a feudal adventurer and ambitious warlord involved in the turbulent whirl of intrigues and disturbances which fill the history of seventeenth-century Georgia. In the 1940s, Joseph Stalin’s wartime propaganda established Saakadze as a major symbol of Georgian patriotism, 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.