A son of
George XII, the last king of
Kartli-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
Saint 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,
Dimitri Bakradze, who published them in an abridged version in 1862. == Biography ==