Background
Rustam Khan was a son of the Georgian nobleman Bijan Beg (Bezhan), of the Saakadze clan, who attended the Georgian prince Bagrat Khan of Kartli in his exile to Safavid Iran after the Ottoman invasion of the Georgian lands in 1578.
Rustam Khan was a son of the Georgian nobleman Bijan Beg (Bezhan), of the Saakadze clan, who attended the Georgian prince Bagrat Khan of Kartli in his exile to Safavid Iran after the Ottoman invasion of the Georgian lands in 1578.
He was accused of treason and executed under Shah Abbas World War II He features in the contemporary Persian and Georgian chronicles and is also a subject of the 17th-century Persian biography written by a certain Bijan for Rustam Khan"s grandson, his namesake and a high-ranking officer in Iran. He had two younger brothers named Aliqoli and Isa. Having distinguished himself in the campaigns against the Ottoman armies and rising through the ranks, he became yasawal i suhbat (personal attendant) to the shah in 1603-1604, sardar (general) in 1623-1624, diwan-begi (chancellor) in 1626-1627, sipah-salar (commander-in-chief) and beglarbegi (governor) of Azerbaijan in 1632-1633.
However, Rustam Khan Saakadze"s excesses in dealing with the Georgian opposition, especially his devastating raid into the Tsitsishvili family estates, occasioned the split between the two.
The contemporary Georgian accounts attribute Rustam Khan"s relentlessness to his painful childhood memories associated with the persecution of his family. Recalled from Kartli by the Iranian government, Rustam Khan Saakadze was commander in Khurasan at the accession of Shah Abbas II in 1642.
In early 1643, he was based in Mashhad to organize an effort to retake Qandahar from the Mughal Empire. Rustam Khan"s son Safiqoli would later hold influential positions in the Safavid ranks as well.