"mountaineers." From a mere assemblage of stragglers, fugitives and vagabonds they developed in the course of four or five hundred years into a brave, hardy, self-reliant people, and as early as the eighth century they had established in the mountains of Daghestan a large number of so-called _volnea obshesve_, or "free societies," governed by elective franchise, without any distinction of birth or rank. After this time they were never conquered. Both the Turks and the Persians at different periods held the nominal sovereignty of the country, but, so far as the mountaineers were concerned, it was only nominal. Army after army was sent against them, only to return broken and defeated, until at last among the Persians it passed into a proverb, "If the shah becomes too proud, let him make war on the mountaineers of the Caucasus." In 1801 these hitherto unconquered highlanders came into conflict with the resistless power of Russia, and after a desperate struggle of fifty-eight years they were finally subdued and the Caucasus became a Russian province. At the present time the mountaineers as a class, from the Circassians of the Black Sea coast to the Lesghians of the Caspian, may be roughly described as a fierce, hardy, liberty-loving people, whose component members have descended from ancestors of widely different origin, and are separable into tribes or clans of very different outward appearance, but nevertheless alike in all the characteristics which grow out of and depend upon topographical environment. They number altogether about a million and a half, and are settled in little isolated stone villages throughout the whole extent of the range from the Black Sea to the Caspian at heights varying from three to nine thousand feet. They maintain themselves chiefly by pasturing sheep upon the mountains and cultivating a little wheat, millet and Indian corn in the valleys; and before the Russian conquest they were in the habit of eking out this scanty subsistence from time to time by plundering raids into the rich neighboring lowlands of Kakhetia and Georgia. In religion they are nearly all Mohammedans, the Arabs having overrun the country and introduced the faith of Islam as early as the eighth century. In the more remote and inaccessible parts of the Eastern Caucasus there still remain a few isolated _aouls_ ("villages") of idolaters; in Daghestan there are four or five thousand Jews, who, although they have lost their language and their national character, still cling to their religion; and among the high peaks of Toochetia is settled a tribe of Christians said to be the descendants of a band of mediaeval crusaders. But these are exceptions: ninety-nine one-hundredths of the mountaineers are Mohammedans of the fiercest, most intolerant type.