and
Turkey, the Russians crossed over the Caucasus and assisted the
Imeretians to resist the Turks, and from the time of the ensuing peace
of Kuchuk-kainarji the Georgian principalities looked to their powerful
northern neighbour as their protector against the southern aggressors
the Turks. In 1783 George XIII., prince of Georgia and Mingrelia,
formally put himself under the suzerainty of Russia, and after his death
Georgia was converted (1801) into a Russian province. The same fate
overtook Imeretia, nine years later. Meanwhile the Russians had also
subdued the Ossetes (1802) and the Lesghian tribes (1803) of the middle
Caucasus. By the peace of Gulistan in 1813 Persia ceded to Russia
several districts in eastern Caucasia, from Lenkoran northwards to
Derbent. Nevertheless the mountain tribes who inhabited the higher parts
of the Caucasus were still independent, and their subjugation cost
Russia a sustained effort of thirty years, during the course of which
her military commanders were more than once brought almost to the point
of despair by the tenacity, the devotion and the adroitness and daring
which the mountaineers displayed in a harassing guerilla warfare. The
animating spirit of their resistance was Shamyl (Samuel), a chief and
priest of the Lesghians, who, a Mahommedan, proclaimed a "holy war"
against the "infidel" aggressors. At first the Russians were able to
continue their policy of conquest and annexation without serious check.
After acquiring the northern edge of the Armenian plateau, partly from
Persia in 1828 and partly from Turkey in 1829, Russia crushed a rising
which had broken out in the Caspian coast districts of Daghestan on the
north of the Caucasus. This took place during the years 1831-1832. The
next seven years were occupied with the subjugation of the Abkhasians
along the Black Sea coast, and of other Circassian tribes in the west.
Meanwhile Shamyl had roused the Lesghian tribes farther east and begun
his twenty years' struggle for freedom, a struggle which called forth
the sympathy and admiration of nearly the whole of Europe. More than
once he escaped, in a manner that seemed little short of marvellous, out
of the hands of the Russians when they held him closely invested in some
mountain fastness, as at Himry in 1831, at Akhulgo in 1839, and again at
the same stronghold in 1849. The general who at last broke the back of
the long opposition of the prophet-chief of the Lesghians was Prince
Barya