History of Azerbeijan in Ottoman Times

Caucasian History in Ottoman Period (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia)
       The Caucasian isthmus-or, more precisely, the road that passes across it along the shores of the Caspian-is one of the great routes along which nomadic peoples have moved at various times from Central to Southwest Asia. The chief significance of the Caucasus in Asian history, therefore, is as a gateway of migration. It also plays the part of an ethnic museum, for very many of the peoples who have passed this way have left detachments in the remoter parts of the mountains, particularly in Dagestan. Like Afghanistan farther east, Caucasia, along with Armenia, has often functioned as a buffer zone between rival empires-Roman and Parthian, Byzantine and Arab or Ottoman, Persian and Russian throughout the Caucasian History.

      The two greatest and longest-lived of the many semi-independent states of the Caucasus in classical and medieval times were eastern Georgia (called Kartli or Iberia) in the north and Armenia in the south. The culture and ethnic character of both can be traced to the period of the breakup of the Hittite empire in the 12th century BC, and both were converted to Christianity early in the 4th century AD.
       Greek contact with the Caucasus region dates from the colonizing period between the 8th and the 6th centuries BC, when many settlements, such as the Milesian outpost of Dioscurias, were established on the Caucasian coasts of the Black Sea. In the mythology of the ancient Greeks, Prometheus was said to have been chained in the Caucasus Mountains, and Colchis was the setting for the Argonauts' search for the Golden Fleece.
The conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC freed Georgia and Armenia from Persian Achaemenian suzerainty, and, despite Pompey's imposition of Roman control in 66 BC after his defeat of Mithradates VI Eupator, the incursions of the Khazars in the 3rd century AD, and Arab occupation of T'bilisi (Tiflis) in the 8th century, Georgia survived to reach its golden age between the 10th and 13th centuries.
       The country was overrun and devastated by the Mongols in 1234 and the following years and again by the hordes of Timur (Tamerlane) at the end of the 14th century. Thus weakened, it was on many occasions in the later Middle Ages obliged to submit to Islamic rule-Persian hegemony in the east or Ottoman in the west. In 1783 the king of Georgia concluded an alliance with Russia in the hope of gaining protection from Islamic expansion. Russia made increasingly importunate demands, however, and in 1801 it annexed eastern Georgia.
       Eastern Transcaucasia was populated in ancient and early medieval times by Iranian speakers, nomadic Turkic tribes, and the Caucasian Albanians, who converted to Christianity in the 4th century and came under the cultural influence of the Armenians. The region became largely Islamic after Arab incursions in the 7th century AD. Muslim khanates under Persian suzerainty dominated this frontier of Safavid Iran in early modern times. After the Russo-Persian wars of the early 19th century, Russia acquired Baku, Shirvan, Ganja (Gäncä), Nakhichevan (Naxçivan), and Yerevan. Thereafter the Azerbaijani Turks of Caucasia were separated from the majority of their linguistic and religious compatriots, who remained in Iran.

Russian penetration
       Russian interest in the Caucasus began early. In AD 943 Varangian, or Russified Norse, adventurers had sailed down the Caspian from the Volga River and captured the fortress of Bärdä. Subsequently, certain marriage alliances were concluded between the Russian and Georgian royal families, and in the 17th century Caucasian rulers were on several occasions forced to ask for Russian help against their enemies. Peter I the Great was the first to take advantage of the opportunities thus afforded to take possession of Caucasian territory. He occupied Derbent in 1722 and Baku in the following year. In 1770 Russian troops for the first time crossed the Caucasus range and took possession of K'ut'aisi. By 1785 all of the northern region of the Caucasus was designated as a Russian province; and, as already mentioned, Georgia was absorbed in the next century.
       Two large groups of tribes in the middle Caucasus then acknowledged their subjection to the Russians, the Ossetes in 1802 and the Lezgians in 1803. Mingrelia fell in 1804 and the kingdom of Imereti in 1810. By the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813, Persia ceded to Russia a wide area of the khanates of the eastern Caucasus, from Länkäran northward to Derbent. Russia had little difficulty in acquiring by conquest from Persia in 1828 a stretch of the northern Armenian plateau, including the entire plain of Yerevan, and was able to take over more territory in the same area from Turkey in the following year.
       The resistance of the mountain tribes, particularly of the Circassians of Abkhazia and the Lezgians of Dagestan, was more fierce and protracted. During 30 years, from 1815 to 1845, the Russians could do little more than hold these mountain peoples at bay. Some were sustained by patriotic feelings, others by religious fervour. The Circassians of the Western Caucasus were largely quelled between 1832 and 1839, but farther east in Dagestan resistance by the Muslim tribes was carried on longer. A holy war was declared by the sheikh Kasi Mullah (Ghazi Muhammad), and, after he was killed by the Russians, the struggle was continued by his successor Shamil. Shamil was finally captured in a remote fortress of Dagestan in 1859, though the main fighting had ceased four years earlier. Dagestan was completely pacified by 1864, after which almost the entire Circassian nation, numbering perhaps 400,000, preferring exile to subjection, emigrated into Ottoman territory, leaving the Western Caucasus empty and desolated.
       Under tsarist rule a minority of the local peoples received some Western education and benefited from the relative prosperity and peace of the Russian Empire. Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijani intellectuals began to espouse nationalism and socialism, and by the turn of the 20th century revolutionary oppositions were gaining support in T'bilisi and Baku. Social democracy was the leading political movement among the Georgians, while more nationalist political principles, formulated by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, dominated among the Armenians.
       The Russian Empire benefited from the oil industry in Baku and conceived of its role in Caucasia as a civilizing mission. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, the Russian lines of communication in Armenia were ill-prepared, and the Turks were able to support an attempt by Circassian exiles to reoccupy their homeland. But this failed, and, by the Peace of Adrianople, Russia succeeded in adding to its Transcaucasian territories the districts of Kars, Batumi, and Ardahan.
       After the collapse of tsarism in 1917 and the coming to power of the Bolsheviks, the Caucasians drifted toward independence. Rejecting the new communist government under Lenin, Transcaucasia declared itself independent in April 1918, but after a month three separate republics-Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia-were proclaimed. After the communist victory in the Russian civil war, the Red Army was employed to establish Soviet power in the Transcaucasian republics in Caucasian History.