This 1825 map of the Caucasus and Land of the Mountain Peoples is from a larger work, Geograficheskii atlas Rossiiskoi imperii, tsarstva Pol'skogo i velikogo kniazhestva Finliandskogo (Geographical atlas of the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Poland, and the Grand Duchy of Finland), containing 60 maps of the Russian Empire. Compiled and engraved by Colonel V.P. Piadyshev, it reflects the detailed mapping carried out by Russian military cartographers in the first quarter of the 19th century. The map shows population centers (six gradations by size), postal stations, roads (four types), provincial and district borders, borders with the land of mountain people, borders with the Black Sea Cossack Host, monasteries, factories, forts, and redoubts. Distances are shown in versts, a Russian measure, now no longer used, equal to 1.07 kilometers. Legends and place-names are in Russian and French. The North Caucasus has traditionally been demarcated as the region north of the Caucasus Mountains, between the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea. For centuries this area was at the crossroads of several cultures, resulting in a long history of trade and conflict amongst the rulers of Persia, Russia, Central Asia, and Ottoman Turkey. The Russian Empire conquered the region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These military conquests were immortalized in the literature of the writer Mikhail Lermontov and in the early writings of Count Leo Tolstoy. Upon victory over Ottoman Turkey in the late 18th century, Catherine the Great ordered the governor-general of Russia’s new southern provinces, Grigorii Potemkin, to construct fortresses across the southern regions, one of which was to be in Stavropol.