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62 THE EXTLUliATlUX UF THE CAUCASUS
of the population of the lowlands ; but in the mountains it yielded
in many places to Mohammedanism, and as years went on, both
faiths became little more than a cover to more primitive forms
of religion. There was a revival of Paganism. The churches
and chapels were desecrated and profaned.
The powers of Nature,
the spirits of the storm, the forest, and the flood, were separately
worshipped. Sacred yews and groves regained their former reverence
; the spirits of ancestors were appeased or solaced with the
ancient offerings.
In modern geography Georgia is equivalent to the basin of the
Kur. But the old Georgian Kingdom extended its territory or
its suzerainty to the shores of the Black Sea and the sources of
the Rion and the Ingur.
The reign of Queen Thamara, in the first
years of the thirteenth century, was the time of Georgia's glory
and greatest extent. In the succeeding centuries the country
suffered severely from the Persians and the Turks, until in 1802
its last sovereign secured the peace of his kingdom l)y putting
an end to its separate existence and accepting the rule of Russia.
His feudatories, the semi-independent princelets of Mingrelia and
Imeretia, the Dadians and Dadish Kilians of Suanetia, soon followed
his example.
The beginning of the nineteenth century found the Russians
firmly established on both sides of the Caucasus, but holding
only a narrow line of communication through the mountains.
Vladikavkaz was a forti'ess exposed to the assaults of hostile
tribes. The hills to the east of it were as much forbidden ground
to the Russian as the mountains round Peshawur wei'e to the
Englishman — up to last summer. On the western flank the postroad
to the north had to be protected from the forays of the
independent Circassians by a chain of Cossack stations. It was
not until 1834 that the Russians undertook the subjugation of
Circassia and Daghestan. The Crimean War found them with
the task stiU incomplete. Attempts to support the tribes were
made by the Allies, but owing to the ignorance of Western
statesmen of the political and physical conditions of the Caucasus,
they were ill-planned and futile. The operations of the Turkish