Between 1386 and 1403 Timur invaded Georgia eight times, taking Tbilisi in 1386 and capturing King Bagrat V, and returning repeatedly to devastate Kartli and Kakheti when Georgian rulers renounced tribute. Persian chronicles written for Timur's court describe cities stormed, populations enslaved, vineyards and churches destroyed and captives marched to Transoxiana, while Georgian chronicles record flight into the mountains and into western Georgia. The scale is not recoverable: chronicle numbers are rhetorical, and archaeologists and historians instead infer heavy depopulation of the eastern lowlands from abandoned settlements and from the weakened, fragmented kingdom of the fifteenth century. Georgia survived as a Christian tributary state but never recovered its earlier position, and the invasions are conventionally treated as the end of the Georgian golden age.
Timur's armies repeatedly invaded the Christian kingdom of Georgia, sacking towns and carrying off captives
No defensible denominator exists. Georgia in the late fourteenth century has no surviving fiscal register or census, and modern estimates of its population are extrapolated from monastic and chronicle references. Georgian historiography holds that the eight invasions between 1386 and 1403, following the Black Death, reduced the country severely and that the Kartli lowlands never fully recovered, but no baseline figure can be defended.
No defensible range can be given. The chronicles report slaughter at Tbilisi and in later campaigns without figures that can be checked, and no independent demographic reconstruction of medieval Georgian mortality exists.
Timurid court chronicles themselves record the storming of towns, the destruction of churches and the removal of captives, and Georgian chronicles corroborate the church destruction.
Georgia, Uzbekistan