16 Orientalism and Empirepolicy was not eternally hostile, but vacillated from what Andreas
Kappeler calls “pragmatic flexibility” in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries to the extreme intolerance of the early eighteenth
century, prompted by the desire of Peter the Great and his successors
to make uniform the administrative regulations of the empire.^25 Dur-
ing Catherine’s reign the government formed a series of ecclesiastical
administrations that regulated the activities and property of Muslim
religious leaders and institutions in a way similar to the policy of
Muslim empires such as Ottoman Turkey and Persia. Conversion of
Muslims was also a relatively low priority for the Russian state, and
by comparison to the British or other colonial powers, Russian expan-
sion in the borderlands was not characterized by a vigorous Bible dis-
tribution program or missionary fervour. In the Caucasus the Society
for the Restoration of Orthodoxy in the Caucasus was not founded
until 1860, and before then the regime sponsored only the modest
Ossetian Spiritual Commission, which was created in 1746.
However, the encounter between faiths and religious traditions
was frequently understood by Russians in the Caucasus as a matter
of military conflict and imperial competition. Many Russians con-
ceived of expansion as part of the historic campaign to push back the
frontiers of Muslim “savagery” from the lands of Christendom.
Orthodox churches accompanied the conquest, and they functioned
not as centres of missionary conversion but as symbols of the historic
identity of the Russian Empire. The fortress established by Peter out-
side of Derbent in 1722 was called “Fortress of the Holy Cross.”^26
Mozdok had an Orthodox church from 1763, a church was con-
structed a year after the building of the fortress at Vladikavkaz, and a
monastery was established at the Kizliar fortress in 17 88.^27 Some
Russian military commanders, such as General Nesselrode, hoped to
appeal to fellow Christians such as the Armenians for support in
Russia’s effort to push the frontier farther south.^28
Newspaper accounts of the history of Russian expansion empha-
sized the religious theme far more dramatically than the military re-
ports of the Caucasus Army. The history of the Muslim presence in
the Caucasus, whether in the form of local khans, mountaineers and
Sufi Islam, or the Persian or Ottoman empires, was understood by the
expanding Russian reading public of Tbilisi and the Caucasus to rep-
resent a threat to the religious integrity of Georgia, a neighbouring
Orthodox land that apparently shared with Russia a common
Byzantine heritage. For Russians, an event that best exemplified this
relationship was the expansion north and plundering of Tbilisi in
179 5 by Iranian shah Aga Mohammad while Empress Catherine the
Great directed her attention toward events in the Balkans (the second