hich
corresponds to the valley of the Rion, that they sent the Argonauts to
fetch the golden fleece. Outside the domain of myth, the earliest
connexion of the Greeks with that part of the world would appear to have
been through the maritime colonies, such as Dioscurias, which the
Milesians founded on the Black Sea coast in the 7th century B.C. For
more than two thousand years the most powerful state in Caucasia was
that of Georgia (q.v.), the authentic history of which begins with its
submission to Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. The southern portion of
Transcaucasia fell during the 1st century B.C. under the sway of
Armenia, and with that country passed under the dominion of Rome, and so
eventually of the Eastern empire. During the 3rd century A.D. Georgia
and Armenia were invaded and in great part occupied by the Khazars, and
then for more than a thousand years the mountain fastnesses of this
borderland between Europe and Asia were the refuge, or the
resting-place, of successive waves of migration, as people after people
and tribe after tribe was compelled to give way to the pressure of
stronger races harassing them in the rear. The Huns, for instance, and
the Avars appeared in the 6th century, and the Mongols in the 13th. In
the 10th century bands of Varangians or Russified Scandinavians sailed
out of the Volga and coasted along the Caspian until they had doubled
the Apsheron peninsula, when they landed and captured Barda, the chief
town of Caucasian Albania.

But, apart from Georgia, historical interest in Caucasia centres in the
long and persistent attempts which the Russians made to conquer it, and
the heroic, though unavailing, resistance offered by the mountain races,
more especially the Circassian and Lesghian tribes. Russian aggression
began somewhat early in the 18th century, when Peter the Great,
establishing his base at Astrakhan on the Volga, and using the Caspian
for bringing up supplies and munitions of war, captured Derbent from the
Persians in 1722, and Baku in the following year. But these conquests,
with others made at the expense of Persia, were restored to the latter
power after Peter's death, a dozen years later. At that period the
Georgians were divided into various petty principalities, the chief of
which were Imeretia and Georgia (Kharthlia), owing at times a more or
less shadowy allegiance to the sultan of the Ottoman Turks at
Constantinople. In 1770, during the course of a war between Russia