Battle of Ertsukhi

The country was invaded by the Seljuks, which were part of the same wave which had overrun Anatolia, defeating the Byzantine Empire and taking captive the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes at the battle of Manzikert in 1071.

[1] In what the medieval Georgian chronicle refers to as didi turkoba, "the Great Turkish Invasion", several provinces of Georgia became depopulated and King George II was forced to sue for peace, becoming a tributary of Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah I in 1083.

The great noble houses of Georgia, capitalizing on the vacillating character of the king, sought to assert more autonomy for themselves; Tbilisi, the ancient capital of Kartli, remained in the hands of the Emirate of Tbilisi, and a local dynasty, for a time suppressed by George's father Bagrat IV, maintained its precarious independence as the Kingdom of Kakheti-Hereti in the eastern region of Kakheti under the Seljuk suzerainty.

The Seljuk Sultan Berkyaruq sent a large army to Georgia to retake Kakheti-Hereti under the command of the Atabeg of Ganja who fought a decisive battle at the southeastern part of the Kingdom, near the Ertsukhi.

Three of his horses died during the battle, but the monarch, installed on his fourth mount, managed to make his sword flow “a mass of thickened and frozen blood”.