TIFLIS

Tiflis (Tbilisi in Georgian) is the capital of the Republic of Georgia. Its legendary origins begin with the early medieval king of eastern Georgia (Kartli), Vakhtang Gorgasali (c. 447–522), who is said to have shot a deer that fell into a pool of hot spring water on the spot where he then decreed his capital to be built. The city's name derives from the Georgian word for "warm" (tbili ). From its origins, Tiflis was in the Iranian sphere of cultural influence, as was much of eastern Georgia, and even today the oldest parts of the city, around Maidan (square) and stretching up the Holy Mountain (Mtatsminda) have a Middle Eastern appearance with their narrow winding streets and elaborately carved balconies. From the arrival of the Arab conquerors in the seventh century, the city was often in the hands of Muslim rulers. Indeed, in 853 the caliph of Baghdad sent an army to put down the rebellious Muslim emir of Tiflis and had the city burned to the ground, thus ending any pretension of the town becoming the center of a rival Islamic state.

After nearly four hundred years in Muslim hands, Tiflis was taken by the Georgian king David

the Builder (1089–1125) and reached its medieval zenith in the reigns of Queen Tamar (1184–1212) and her son Giorgi the Resplendent. In the centuries that followed the Mongol invasions (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries), Georgia suffered a long, slow decline, and Tiflis and eastern Georgia came under the hegemony of Iran. In the mid-eighteenth century the last great king of eastern Georgia, Erekle II (1744–1798), recaptured the city, which became the center of a multinational empire that reached north to the Great Caucasus and south into Armenia.

After a devastating invasion by the Persians that destroyed large parts of the city, the Russians marched into Tiflis (1800), which soon became their principal administrative center in Caucasia. The city was then largely Armenian in population, but through the century the percentage of Georgians increased steadily until they became a majority in Soviet times. In the twentieth century Tiflis (Tbilisi) was successively the capital of the Transcaucasian Federation (1918), the first independent Georgian Republic (1918–1921), the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia (1921–1991), and the second independent Republic of Georgia (since 1991). Today it is a city of more than one million people, but since the end of the Soviet Union Tiflis has lost much of its cosmopolitan flavor as Armenians, Russians, and Jews have steadily migrated elsewhere. The post-Soviet disintegration of Georgia and the collapse of its economy have taken a toll on the town, but the beauty of its buildings and natural setting remains intact.

See also: caucasus; georgia and georgians; islam; transcaucasian federations

bibliography

Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1986). "Tiflis, Crucible of Ethnic Politics, 1860–1905." In The City in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F. Hamm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1994). The Making of the Georgian Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ronald Grigor Suny

Pioneers, The; Or, The Sources of the Susquehanna, romance by Cooper, published in 1823. It is the fourth in plot sequence of the Leather‐Stocking Tales.

During the decade after the Revolutionary War, Judge MarmadukeTemple, a retired Quaker merchant, is the leading landowner of Otsego County on the New York frontier, having acquired the estate of the Loyalist father of his friend Edward Effingham. While hunting deer he accidentally shoots Oliver Edwards, young companion of Natty Bumppo (Leather‐Stocking), a veteran frontiersman. The judge and his daughter Elizabeth befriend the young man, who becomes their overseer, although persisting in his mysterious association with Bumppo and old chief Chingachgook (John Mohegan), who is rumored to be his father. Elizabeth and her friend Louisa Grant, the rector's daughter, disdain the company of the supposed half‐breed. After Bumppo is released from jail, following his arrest for shooting deer out of season, Elizabeth visits him and is trapped by a forest fire. She is saved by Edwards, but Chingachgook dies after his rescue by Bumppo. Elizabeth and Edwards now admit their love, and his identity is made known when a searching party discovers demented old Major Effingham, and it is revealed that Edwards is his grandson, that Bumppo had been an employee of his family, and that Chingachgook had adopted them into his tribe. The young couple is betrothed and given half of the judge's estate.

Tiflis see Tbilisi , Georgia.