Family of David IV of Georgia

He was a direct descendant of the first Georgian Bagratid monarch Ashot I (died 826/830) and bore known lineage, among others, from the Abkhazian, Alanian, Artsruni, Bagratuni, and Guaramid dynasties.

David's paternal aunt Marta-Maria was a consort of the successive Byzantine emperors Michael VII Doukas and Nikephoros III Botaneiates.

[6] A reference to the former wife of David, a king of Georgia, is found in the letter of Ansellus, cantor of the Holy Sepulchre, dating from c. 1120, with which he was sending a relic of the True Cross to the bishop of Paris.

Ansellus reports that he acquired the relic from a convent of Georgian nuns only recently established in Jerusalem under the patronage of the Latin patriarch Ghibbelin.

[11] There is a reference to David's other possible son "Gorgi" (George, Giorgi) in the 13th-century Armenian chronicle of Vardan Areveltsi,[12] but the passage, relating a conspiracy against Demetrius I in 1030, was corrupted by the later copyists and it remains open to more than one interpretation.

If the first theory is true and Helene, a daughter of Isaac and Kata, was indeed the wife of the Rurikid Rus' prince Yuri Dolgorukiy, then this marriage may have provided, through descent from antiquity, a Bagratid ancestry to numerous Russian and Polish descendants.

According to the modern genealogists such as Ioseb Bichikashvili and Cyril Toumanoff, she was named Rusudan and married into the family of Alan kings, which is claimed by the 18th-century Georgian author Prince Vakhushti to have been a collateral branch of the Georgian Bagratids through their descent from Demetrius, son of King George I of Georgia (r. 1014–1027), and of which David Soslan, consort of Queen Tamar of Georgia (r. 1184–1213), was the most famous representative.

[8] In total, Cyril Toumanoff tentatively identifies seven of David's children: Demetrius, George, Rusudan, Zurab, Vakhtang, Tamar and Kata.

[7] Zurab, otherwise unknown, is mentioned, along with David's successor Demetrius, in a brief chronology of the Georgian history attached to an 18th-century manuscript found and published, in 1912, by Ekvtime Taqaishvili.