This 1821 map of Moscow 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 prince of Suzdal’, Yury Vladimirovich (known as Yury Dolgoruky), founded Moscow in the mid-12th century as a fortified outpost for his realm in the northern reaches of Kievan Rus’. Moscow rose in prominence as many of its neighboring cities were sacked by the Mongols in the 13th century. The princes of Moscow were masterful in the complicated politics of the Golden Horde and advanced their interests through subtle negotiations and service to the khans in Sarai. In the late 14th century, Dmitrii Donskoi raised an army and inflicted the first major Russian military defeat on the Mongols at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. Thereafter, the grand princes of Muscovy stopped paying tribute to the Golden Horde and began the process of the “gathering of Russian lands” with Moscow as the effective national capital, which gained pace in earnest under Ivan the Great in the late 15th century. Ivan the Terrible became the first Russian tsar in the mid-16th century, and continued the expansion of Muscovy into the Lower Volga and ultimately into Siberia. Upon the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, Moscow also assumed the moniker of the “Third Rome” and by 1589, the seat of an Orthodox patriarch. In the early 18th century, Peter the Great turned westward and moved the national capital to his new city on the Baltic, Saint Petersburg.