The Jaqeli traced their origin to the late 9th-century nobleman Beshken, of the Chorchaneli, whose descendants possessed the valleys of Jaqi, Postkhovi (modern Posof, Turkey), and Uraveli (near Akhaltsikhe, Georgia).

Eventually, under the queen Tamar of Georgia (1184-1213), the family, in the person of Botso, fell in dishonor, and the title of Jaqeli as well as most of their possessions passed to their relatives of the House of Tsikhisjvari (Tsikhisjvreli), also a Chorchaneli offshoot.

It attained, in the person of Sargis I (r. c. 1260-1285), to the hereditary principate of Samtskhe, and became de facto independent of the kings of Georgia under the protectorate of Mongol Ilkhanate in 1268.

By 1490/1491, when the Georgian kingdom finally dissolved into a number of weak and rivaling polities, the Jaqelis were among the most active contending factions, "not without responsibility for the failure to maintain the political unity of the nation", as the British scholar William Edward David Allen puts it.

[1] Beginning from 1578, Samtskhe became a target of Ottoman expansion, and the Jaqeli atabags, after a futile resistance, conveniently apostatized to Islam, and were made hereditary pashas of Akhaltsikhe, a position which they retained, with some brief intermissions, within the family throughout the unceasing wars between the Ottomans, the Iranian dynasties and the Georgian rulers down to the eventual Russian conquest in 1829 (see Battle of Akhalzic).