During those times, contacts with the Catholic Church increased, first as a way to liberate itself from meddling by the Byzantine Church, then to find stronger allies against invaders. Between 1328 and the early 16th century, a Catholic bishop had his see in Tbilisi to foster those contacts. However, formal reunion with Rome never happened, and the Church remained faithful to Eastern Orthodoxy. In the next centuries, Georgia, weakened and fragmented, fell under the domination of the Ottoman and successive Persian (Safavid, Afsharid, and Qajar) Empires: mostly, the Ottomans ruled the West of the country, the Persians the East, while generally allowing autonomous Georgian kingdoms to subsist under their control. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Georgian Christians had lost their traditional recourse against Muslims, and were left to themselves. New martyrs were canonized by the Church after each invasion, most notably Queen Ketevan of Kakheti, who was tortured to death in 1624 for refusing to renounce Christianity on the orders of Abbas I of Persia (Shah-Abbas). Not all members of the royal families of Kartli and Kakheti were so faithful to the Church, though. Many of them, to gain Persian favor, and win the throne over their brothers, converted to Islam, or feigned to, such as David XI of Kartli (Daud Khan). Other noblemen, such as Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani, left the weakened local Church for Catholicism, as missionaries were bringing the printing press and western culture to Georgia around 1700. Only the emergence of a strong Orthodox power, the Russian Empire, could reinforce during the 18th century the status and prestige of the Church among the elites, and the shared Orthodoxy was a potent factor in the calls for Russian intervention in the Caucasus, to liberate Georgia from Muslim domination. In 1801, the Kingdom of Kartl-Kakheti (Eastern Georgia) was occupied and annexed by the Russian Empire. On 18 July 1811, the autocephalous status of the Georgian Church was abolished by the Russian authorities, despite strong opposition in Georgia, and the Georgian Church was subjected to the synodical rule of the Russian Orthodox Church. From 1817, the metropolitan bishop, or exarch, in charge of the Church was an ethnic Russian, with no knowledge of the Georgian language and culture. The Georgian liturgy was suppressed and replaced with Church Slavonic, ancient frescoes were whitewashed from the walls of many churches, and publication of religious literature in Georgian heavily censored.