Nicholas V of Georgia

Saint Nicholas V (also called the Eighth, Nikoloz) was catholicos-⁠patriarch of Georgia from 28 February 1584 until his death in 1591 (according to one Russian source, until 1589). He was of the Bagrationi dynasty of Kakheti, a son of King Levan (1520 to 1574). He was canonized by the Georgian Orthodox Church; he is commemorated on 18 February (2 March New Style). The sources do not agree on the year of his birth: 1529 according to the English source, around 1510 to 1515 according to the Russian one.

Life

He was a younger son of King Levan of Kakheti, either of his first marriage to the Gurian princess Tinatin or, more probably, his second, to a daughter of the shamkhal of Tarku. He was thus a younger brother or half-⁠brother of Alexander II, who won the bloody contest for the throne of Kakheti after Levan's death in 1574. From childhood he was inclined to monastic life and entered a monastery. The Russian source says that in him were wondrously joined the strength and wisdom of the royal line, monastic obedience and great trust in God, and that by God's providence he became catholicos.

He was enthroned on 28 February 1584, succeeding Catholicos Nicholas IV. His shepherding fell in a turbulent time: the once flourishing medieval kingdom had been divided into several rival states, and the Georgian Church had split into an eastern one, under Nicholas's care, and a western one, mirroring the political division; his native Kakheti was threatened by the rival expansion of Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey. Nicholas corresponded with Patriarch Job of Moscow (died 1607) and exchanged gifts with him. He gave the Metekhi church in Tbilisi an illuminated Gospel manuscript, copied in 1049, bound in leather. The eighteenth-⁠century author Timothy Gabashvili reports that in the refectory of the Iviron monastery on Athos there is an icon of Catholicos Nicholas, and supposes that another refectory, built at Iviron at the order of Prince Ashotan of Mukhrani, might have been the place of Nicholas's death.