Bektash of Kakheti

Bektash Beg Torkman, also commonly referred to as Bektash of Kakheti, was a Safavid military leader, who was the first member of the Qizilbash to govern Kakheti.

Biography

Bektash's father was an influential Qizilbash commander named Mohammad Khan Torkman, while his mother was a daughter of king Alexander II of Kakheti. By that, he was also both the brother-in-law of Prince Constantine I of Kakheti (Kustandil), as well as being his cousin at the same time, as Alexander II was the father of Kustandil. According Professors Willem Floor and Edmund Herzig, this was part of Abbas' intentions to make the Georgian royal house and Qizilbash leaders related to each other, and to incorporate them into Safavid elite society. A member of the "Torkman tribe", who traditionally held the governorship of Tabriz, Bektash was sent to Kakheti by king Abbas I together with Prince Kustandil and fellow Torkman tribesmen in the 1610s.

In the ensuing period in Kakheti, Kustandil killed his own father Alexander II and Prince Giorgi and controlled Kakheti for a period, but the Georgians soon revolted and Kustandil was killed as a result. Ten years later, when the shah himself led a punitive expedition to Georgia by which Safavid Iranian rule over eastern Georgia (Kartli, Kakheti) would be decisively cemented, Bektash was officially appointed as the first Qizilbash governor of Kakheti.

During the general revolt in Georgia in 1615 against the Safavid rule, Bektash, alongside Mohammad Hosayn of Shaki and Ali Qoli of Kartli, were all slain on the spot.

Sources

• Floor, Willem; Herzig, Edmund (2012). Iran and the World in the Safavid Age. I.B.Tauris. ISBN 978-1850439301. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)