Life of Schamyl | Page 3

vales.
Accordingly, the independence of most of these mountain tribes has
been maintained from the earliest times to the present against all the
attempts of their enemies of the plains. They have lived for generations,
the memory of man runneth not to the end of, in the enjoyment of a
large degree of natural liberty, in obedience to ancient laws and usages,
in the respect of age, virtue, and superiority in arms, and now furnish

the only specimen left of tribes of men still living in all the simplicity,
and retaining, along with the practice of some of the semi-barbarous
vices, all the heroism of the so-called age of gold.
Georgia, which lies on the southern declivities of the Caucasus, was
nominally converted to Christianity in the days of Constantine the
Great, when its heroic queen Thamar ruled over one of the most
powerful empires of western Asia; but beautiful on these mountain tops
as were the feet of those who brought the glad tidings and published
peace, the doctrines of the cross made but little impression on the
benighted minds of these worshippers in the temple of nature. Nor
though Russia early endeavored to introduce the peaceful soldiers of
the church into the fastnesses where she could not penetrate with her
secular dragoons, the native heart continued to hold to the simple
religious rites handed down by tradition from the fathers, and finally
relinquished them only within the last hundred years in exchange for
the doctrines of the Prophet, which, though introduced a couple of
centuries before, at the point of the spears of the Crimean Khans, were
then first made plain and acceptable by missionaries from Turkey.
For subsistence the Caucasian tribes have always relied mainly on
pasturage and agriculture, also on the chase, on rapine and the spoils of
war, and on the exchange of their natural products and slaves for the
salt, gunpowder, and manufactured goods of foreigners. So constant for
centuries has been their attachment to the mountains that they have
never emigrated to the plains, the life of which they despise. Only the
harems of Constantinople have an attraction for their females; and a
few restless youth, wandering at different times into foreign parts, have
furnished bodyguards to the sultans of Turkey and the Khans of the
Crimea; have served under the name of Mamelukes in Egypt, where
Mehemet Ali could not control but only massacre them; and latterly
have graced the parade days of the Russian capital, where, treated like
pet lions, their fiery spirit of independence and impatience of discipline
have been but mildly restrained by the Czar, and where such is their
haughty, imposing bearing, that whenever the vulgar crowd in the
streets gives way for the coming of any one, it has become almost a
proverb to say, it is either a general officer in the army or a Circassian.

III.
THE WAR WITH RUSSIA.
The contest between the Circassians and the Russians may be said to
have originated as far back as the middle ages. For it was in the tenth
century that the grand duke Swätoslaff, overrunning a portion of the
Bosphoric territories, came into collision with the inhabitants of the
Caucasus; and in the sixteenth, the Russians under the grand duke
Wassiljewitsch made their appearance on the Caspian, on the western
coast of which they established garrisons as far south as Tarku. In the
latter century also the Kabardian princes, whose territory consisting of
open valleys was less defended by nature against the inroads of
enemies, bowed their necks for a time in submission; and Georgia, on
the Asiatic slope, took in the person of her king Alexander the oath of
vassalage to the Muscovite, obtaining a master where she had asked
only for a protector. But occupied during the next two hundred years
with affairs at the north, the Russian princes lost their possessions and
most of their influence in the Caucasus; and it was not until 1722 that
the far-seeing ambition of the great Peter brought him to the "Albanian
gates" of Derbend, and even within sight of the sacred fires of the
promontory of Apsheron.
It was permitted to this most gifted of the czars to behold these
mountains and get a glimpse of the fair Asiatic vales beyond, but not to
possess them. In leaving, however, to his successors the legacy of his
boundless ambition, he pointed with his dying hand to the peaks of
Elbrus and Kasbek; and ever since his race, extending itself on all sides,
has not ceased to press onward in this pathway to ward the rising of the
sun.
Especially within the last quarter of a century has Russia occupied
herself in earnest with the conquest of the Caucasus. During that period
she has maintained there constantly a large force,