This 1822 map of Kazan Province 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, monasteries, and factories. 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 Kazan region has played a central role in Russian history for a millennium. Founded, in all probability, by Volga Bulgars around the 11th century, Kazan was later conquered by the Golden Horde and became a key Mongol-Tatar successor state known as the Khanate of Kazan. For more than a century the khans of Kazan rivaled the princes of Muscovy for regional control of the lower Volga and areas near the Ural Mountains. Tsar Ivan the Terrible subjugated Kazan to Russian rule in 1552, after which Russia endured waves of Cossack and peasant rebellions along the Imperial borderlands. Kazan subsequently became a manufacturing center in both tsarist and Soviet times.