to spread in the area among both Georgians and Armenians. As the Georgian Church began to lose influence in the area, many Chalcedonian Armenians began to join the Armenian Catholic Church. The Islamized locals began to mix with the Turkic settlers, forming the Meskhetian Turk identity, that became dominant to the west of Javakheti in Meskheti. In 1731 Nader Shah of Afsharid Iran launched an incursion into the Caucasus and during this time enslaved 6,000 Armenians from the Childir Eyalet according to Armenian Catholicos Abraham Kretatsi. Russian Empire In the first third of the 19th century, following the Russo-Persian War (1804-1813) and the Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828, Russia conquered the Southern Caucasus, and most of Georgia, along with the rest of the Caucasus, was incorporated within the Russian Empire. When the Russians conquered Javakheti it was home to 1,716 Armenians (67.7%), 639 Muslim (25.2%), and 179 Georgian families (7.1%). Many of the Muslim families chose to resettle in the Ottoman Empire following the Russian annexation of the region. The Tsarist government initiated a plan to resettle its new frontier with Iran and Turkey with Armenians who they deemed to be loyal. In total some 90,000 Armenians from the Ottoman Empire and 40,000 Armenians from Qajar Iran resettled in the Russian Caucasus, primarily the Armenian Oblast. In 1829 some 7,300 Armenian families (58,000 people) resettled in Meskheti, Javakheti, and Trialeti. Armenians moving to Trialeti were joined by Turkish-speaking Caucasus Greeks known as Urums. Armenians moving to Javakheti were joined by a number of Doukhobors, a spiritual Christian sect from Russia. In the early 20th century, a large number of Armenian refugees from the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, and Doukhobor sect members of Russian Empire, settled the region. An 1886 report found 63,799 people living in Javakheti, of which 46,384 were Armenians (72.7%), 6,674 Russians (10.5%), 6,091 Turks (9.5%), and 3,741 Georgians (5.9%). The Russian Empire Census of 1897 found 72,709 people in Javakheti, of which 52,539 were Armenians (72.3%), 6,868 were Turks (9.4%), 6,448 were Georgians, and 5,155 were Russians (7.1%). By 1916, the ethno-religious composition of the Javakheti region (Akhalkalaki Uyezd) was the following: Brief independence Following the Russian Revolution, Javakheti was incorporated into the short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia, however, it was strongly disputed by the Democratic Republic of Armenia which claimed the region on grounds of history and ethnography. Hovannisian, a notable historian on the topic