Multiple wars were fought against the local rulers of the regions, as well as the dominant powers, the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran, for control.

[1] During the 943 expedition, the Rus' rowed up the Kura deep into the Caucasus, defeated the forces of Marzuban bin Muhammad, and captured Bardha'a, the capital of Arran.

After about 1580 Russia disengaged from the Caucasus region for about 200 years, holding Astrakhan and slowly pushing settlement south toward the Black Sea.

During the Russo-Persian War (1722–1723), Peter the Great conquered the west and south shore of the Caspian, but the land was soon returned when Persia grew stronger.

In 1775, after a Russian explorer had died in captivity, Catherine the Great sent a punitive expedition which briefly captured Derbent.

In 1813, Persia was forced to recognize the loss of its northern territory, comprising modern-day southern Dagestan, eastern Georgia, and most of what is now the Azerbaijan.

During the Russo-Turkish War (1768–74), fought mostly in the west, Catherine launched a diversion in the east and, for the first time, Russian soldiers crossed the Caucasus.

Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar was working to restore Persian power and saw the king of Georgia ("Gorjestan") as another disobedient wali.

In the summer of 1800 Fath-Ali Shah Qajar demanded that George XII of Georgia send his son to Teheran as a hostage.

The Persians backed off but the Avar Khan Omar invaded anyway and was defeated by General Lazerev on the Alazani River.

[4] Russian officials in Georgia were the envoy Peter Ivanovich Kovalensky and Generals Lazarev and Gotthard Johann von Knorring.

He could see himself both a servant of the Czar and Georgian patriot, holding that only Russian power could protect Georgia from Persians, Turks, mountain raiders, and internal disunity.

The disaster of Tsitsianov's death and Zavalivshin's apparent cowardice was retrieved by General Glazenap, who commanded the Line.

When the Russians crossed the border the khan was expelled by his own subjects and Derbent was occupied for the fourth and last time (22 June 1806).

Viceroys of the Caucasus during the war years were 1802: Pavel Tsitsianov, 1806: Ivan Gudovich 1809: Alexander Tormasov 1811: Philip Osipovich Paulucci 1812: Nikolay Rtischev.

The war with Turkey is of no concern since it left the border unchanged, although Russia did retain the Black Sea port of Sukhum-Kale.

Pyotr Kotlyarevsky was sent east, defeated the Persians at Aslanduz, crossed the steppe and bloodily captured the capital of Talysh.

Some think Yermolov's harshness provoked the long and bloody Murid War, but during his rule, it appeared that he had subdued most of Dagestan and part of Chechnya.

Yermolov moved south from Tarki to Mekhtulil, sacked the abandoned Paraul, stormed the capital (Djengutai) and abolished the Mekhtuli khanate.

Matadov crossed the mountains from Shirvan and defeated an estimated 20000 men near Khosrek 23 km southeast of Kumukh.

In 1823, Ammalat Bek, a nephew of the Shamkhal and a state prisoner, murdered his friend Colonel Verkhovsky while out riding and fled to Khunzakh but was rejected there.

The treaty mainly concerned the Balkans, but on the Caucasus side, Russia returned most of the Turkish territory but kept the two border forts and the Black Sea ports of Poti and Anapa.

In 1722, Peter the Great took advantage of Persian weakness and temporarily took over the west and south sides of the Caspian (Russo-Persian War (1722–23)).

Further south the coastal plain became wider and the population was Abkhazian – relatives of the Circassians under significant Georgian influence.

At war's end, the ports would be used as bargaining chips by diplomats dealing with far more important matters on the opposite side of the Black Sea.

At the end of the war, Crimea became independent of Turkey but in fact dependent on Russia, thereby blocking most Turkish access to the steppes.

At the end of the Russo-Circassian War in 1864, several hundred thousand Circassians were expelled to the Ottoman Empire and their lands settled by Cossacks.

Suvarov called a great meeting at Yeysk on the Sea of Azov and announced that sovereignty over the Nogais had been transferred from the Crimean Khan to the Russian Czar.

According to Professor Ronald Grigor Suny:"Pushkin's evocative poem, "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," was at one and the same time travelogue, ethnography, geography, and even war correspondence.

In Pushkin's imaginative geography, the communion with nature "averted the eye from military conquest" and largely disregarded the native peoples of the Caucasus, who represented a vague menace to the Russian's lyrical relationship with the wilderness.