A son of George XII, the last king of Kartl-Kakheti kingdom, eastern Georgia, by his first wife Ketevan Andronikashvili, Ioane commanded an avant-garde of a Georgian force annihilated by the Persian army at the Battle of Krtsanisi in 1795.
Following the battle, the kingdom entered a period of economic crisis and political anarchy. To eradicate the results of a Persian attack and to overcome the retardation of the feudal society, Prince Ioane proposed on 10 May 1799, a project of reforms of administration, army and education. This project was, however, never materialized due to the weakness of George XII and a civil strife in the country.
Upon the death of George XII, Kartl-Kakheti was incorporated into the expanding Russian Empire, and Ioane was deported to Russia.
He is also an author of a naturalist encyclopedia (1814), a children encyclopedia (1829), a Russian-Georgian dictionary, a Georgian lexicon, and of several poems. His manuscripts were discovered in 1861 by a Georgian scholar, Dimitri Bakradze, who published them in an abridged version in 1862.
