[1] During his long and eventful reign, Bagrat sought to repress the great nobility and to secure Georgia's sovereignty from the Byzantine and Seljuk Empires.

In a series of intermingled conflicts, Bagrat succeeded in defeating his most powerful vassals and rivals of the Liparitid family, bringing several feudal enclaves under his control and reducing the kings of Lori and Kakheti-Hereti, as well as the emir of Tbilisi to vassalage.

During Bagrat's minority, the regency had advanced the positions of the high nobility whose influence he subsequently tried to limit when he assumed full ruling powers.

With assertion of the Georgian Bagratid hegemony in the Caucasus being the cornerstone of Bagrat's reign, his policy can be understood as the attempt to play the Seljuqs and Byzantines off against one another.

Helena was a daughter of Basil Argyros, brother of Emperor Romanos, and the marriage was a diplomatic effort to establish a strategic association.

However, Helena's death shortly afterwards at Kutaisi presented the Georgian court with the opportunity to pursue yet another diplomatic initiative through Bagrat's marriage with Borena, daughter of the king of Alania, a Christian country in the North Caucasus.

[3] In 1033, the royal court faced another dynastic trouble, this time with Bagrat's half-brother Demetrius, a son of George I of his second marriage with Alda of Alania.

Although an attempt by some great nobles to exploit Demetrius' possible aspirations to the throne in their opposition to Bagrat's rule failed, the Georgian court's efforts to win his loyalty also went in vain.

Threatened by Bagrat, the dowager queen Alda defected to the Byzantines and surrendered Anakopia to the emperor Romanos III who honored her son Demetrius with the rank of magistros.

Now, Bagrat gained a momentum to restrict the power of dynastic princes, reduced the kings of Lorri and Kakheti to impotence, and briefly held Tbilisi.

To secure the alliance, Bagrat's daughter Mart’a (Maria) married, at some point between 1066 and 1071, the Byzantine co-emperor Michael VII Ducas.

At the price of conceding several fortresses on the Iori River, Bagrat ransomed Fadl and received from him the surrender of Tbilisi where he reinstated a local emir on the terms of vassalage.

[12] The last years of Bagrat's reign coincided with what Professor David Marshall Lang described as "the final débacle of eastern Christendom" — the Battle of Manzikert — in which Alp Arslan dealt a crushing defeat to the Byzantine army, capturing the emperor Romanos IV, who was soon deposed and died in misery.