This 1820 map of Grodno Province and the Belostok region 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 (five gradations by size), postal stations, roads (four types), provincial and district borders, and taverns. 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 Polish. The territory depicted on the map corresponds mostly to present-day Belarus. Grodno may have been founded in the late tenth century, on the borderlands between Kievan Rus’ and Baltic tribes to the west, such as the Yotvingians and Galindians. The city was an important trading and commercial center that in time fell under the sway of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and eventually the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The famous Lithuanian ruler, Grand Duke Vytautus, was the prince of Grodno in the late 14th century. Other Baltic peoples, such as the so-called Old Prussians, migrated into the Grodno region beginning in the 13th century, after being pushed by the Teutonic Knights out of their homeland in the territory that became known to Germans as East Prussia. Grodno contained several palaces that were used by Polish and Lithuanian rulers, such as the famous Polish monarch Stefan Batory. The last Polish Sejm (parliament) was held in Grodno in 1793. Imperial Russia absorbed the Grodno region in the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, and Polish king Stanislaw II August (also seen as Stanislaw Poniatowski) abdicated his throne in Grodno in that same year.