Ep. 3 — Mapping a Nation: The Circassian Tribes from the Middle Ages to 1864

Shapsugh. Abzakh. Natukhai. Bjedugh. Temirgoy. Ubykh. Kabarday. This episode is the full atlas of the Circassian nation: every major tribe, the river valley it held, and the story behind its name. We work through the accounts of the travellers who mapped them, including Güldenstädt, Pallas, Klaproth and Bell, along with the errors they made and why those errors still matter. We unpack the great Kabardian split of 1759 between Greater and Lesser Kabarda, the position of the Ubykh as the bridge between Adyghe and Abkhaz, and the tribes who carried the heaviest weight in the final years of the war with the Russian Empire. If you have ever wondered how one nation carried so many names, this is the map.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Imagine a nation that changed its own name. Not once, but again and again across a thousand years. And every single time, historians nearly lost track of who they were even talking about.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Last episode, we went back to the dawn of history, the Miat Confederation. Twenty-five ancient tribes, pirates the Romans feared, and that incredible shift from Nart, meaning gift of the mother, to Adagi, the people of the father. Today we pick up centuries later, the Middle Ages through the end of the 19th century, when names like Zik and Abask gave way to Kashak, Ubik, and finally the name the world knows, Circassian.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

This is the Circasion Encyclopedia, an ongoing series digging into that history, episode by episode, based on the work of Dr. M.K. Mamzer Bassage. I'm Satanay.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

I'm Aslan. Let's find out who they became.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Imagine a civilization that has to endure like over 330 separate invasions across centuries.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Wow. 330.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Yeah, over 330. I mean, they fought off the Roman Crimean Khans, they pushed back the Ottoman Turks, and then they clashed with the expanding Russian czarist forces. Right. And after all of that, one of their ancient tribes was actually reduced to exactly 21 surviving individuals.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Wait, 21 people, not 21,000, just 21 individual people.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Exactly, 21 individuals. It is just incredibly heavy. And uh today's deep dive is based entirely on this amazing source, Dr. Mohamed Keramser's book, The Historical Encyclopedia of the Circassian Nation. And we are really exploring the, you know, the complex, shifting, and ultimately tragic history of the Circassian people from the Middle Ages all the way to the late 19th century. Right. We're basically charting how a society survives when the entire geopolitical map is trying to erase it.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yeah. And I think, you know, if you've ever looked at a historical map and just assumed that borders are fixed and tribal identities are these permanent fixtures, this history is going to completely shatter that illusion for you.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Oh, totally.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Because we're looking at this hyper-fluid landscape where an entire nation's constituent tribes just morphed, they merged and completely rebranded themselves across centuries simply to survive.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Right. And the source material hands us a really fascinating lens to view this through. The author actually divides the history into three distinct stages.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Aaron Powell Okay, so like a timeline.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Exactly. And um, before we can even look at how the Circassians evolved internally, we have to look at that first stage, which is how they were perceived during the Middle Ages by Arab, Byzantine, and Roman historians.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

Aaron Powell Right, because that's our outside perspective.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Yeah. And during this era, the nation was composed of tribes with names like the Zik, the Abbash, the Adami, and the Kashak.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Aaron Ross Powell Which, you know, naturally raises the question of how these outsiders were even encountering these tribes in the first place. I mean, in the 10th century, information doesn't just flow freely across borders.

SPEAKER_00 3:03

Aaron Powell No, it definitely doesn't. It flowed through trade. Ah, okay. Specifically through massive commercial hubs. So there was this Arab historian, Al-Masudi, and he wrote an extensive account in 949 A.D. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

That is early.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Yeah, super early. And he documented the Kashak tribe, sometimes they're called the Kasak, and his observations came entirely from seeing them frequent the bustling markets in Trabzon on the Black Sea coast.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

Oh, so he's just watching them trade.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Exactly. And his description of them is almost overwhelmingly glowing. Like he notes that they had hewed to paganism at the time, but what really fascinated him was their physical and social presence. Okay. He literally wrote that there was no other people in the world who could match them in physical elegance, bodily proportion, and um moral completeness.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

Aaron Ross Powell Wait, moral completeness? Yeah. That is an incredibly heavy phrase for a tenth century historian to use. I mean, it implies that he wasn't just impressed by their trading goods or their physical stature, but by their actual internal code of conduct.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

He's observing a cohesive social fabric that commands respect, even from a completely different cultural vantage point.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

He really is. He elaborated on that too, describing their clear complexions and the striking beauty of their people. But, you know, the way they lived was just as striking as how they looked.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

How so?

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Well, take the Zeke tribe. The encyclopedia notes, they lived entirely without walled or fortified cities.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

In the Middle Ages.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Yeah, no walls at all.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

That requires a staggering level of either geographical protection or just absolute martial confidence. I mean, if you don't have walls, you are essentially declaring to the world that your people are the walls.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

That's a great way to put it. Their largest city, which functioned as their central gathering place, was built in a small open valley in the heart of their lands. It was called Kurimus, which actually maps to modern-day Timriuk. And they just relied on the natural topography and their own defensive capabilities rather than hiding behind stone.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

But wait, the text mentions that certain pre-Christian tribes like the Zeke essentially disappear from the historical record after the Middle Ages.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

But realistically, entire populations don't just vanish overnight without some kind of cataclysmic event. So were they wiped out by one of those early invasions, or is this just like a record-keeping illusion?

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Aaron Ross Powell That is the crucial distinction that Dr. Mamzer makes. They didn't go extinct. Okay. What actually happened is that they underwent immense structural changes. So they gained new titles, they migrated to different valleys, or they just merged entirely with other tribes.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

Oh, I see. So think of it less like a disappearing act and more like um corporate mergers during a hostile takeover.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

Yeah, that's exactly it.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

To survive external pressures, these smaller tribes had to liquidate their independent identities and fold their populations into the larger, stronger tribes just to keep the overarching culture solvent. The human capital survived. They just kind of retired the brand name. It's like the characters didn't leave the play, they just changed their costumes and stage names based on who was writing the script.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

I love that analogy. And you know, the Romans, Byzantines, the Arabs, they were constantly trying to pin these static labels on a people who actively used fluidity as a survival mechanism. Right. And that dynamic of outsiders imposing labels becomes incredibly aggressive as we move into the second stage, which is the 14th century, stretching all the way to 1864.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Aaron Ross Powell Right. The geopolitical landscape totally shifts here.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

It really does. The era of casual trade observations ends, and the era of mapmakers, foreign intelligence agents, and military taxonomists begins.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Yeah. During this period, the nation became broadly categorized by outsiders into three main peoples. You had the Adi, the Abakaz, who are also known as the Abaza, and the Ubiq.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

The Ubik Act is a really interesting outlier in that trio, don't they? Yeah. They seemed to bridge a gap between the other two.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

They did, yeah. Geographically and linguistically, they were this transitional group between the Adagay and the Abkhaz. Okay. They settled along the Black Sea coast in a highly specific environment. Their territory was built near hills that were really rich with iron mines, right alongside the Mesmargia forest. And that forest contained these intense mineral and sulfur springs that they used for healing.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Aaron Ross Powell Well, I mean, a region with abundant iron for weapons and tools plus natural healing springs. It makes complete sense why European powers would suddenly be very interested in categorizing and controlling that specific geography. But who was actually doing the intelligence gathering on the ground for them?

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Aaron Ross Powell So you had a huge influx of European consuls and spies embedded in the region. There were French consuls operating out of Crimea, like Azirio Glavani in 1724, and then M. de Pessinel the following year.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Okay, so the French are there early.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Yeah. And then later, as the Russian Empire really expanded its ambitions, they started sending in military intelligence. General Torneau is a prime example of this. In 1839, he entered Circassian lands on this covert spying mission to map the 14 or so distinct tribal regions.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Aaron Ross Powell But how does an embedded spy map out fourteen tribal territories in a mountainous region where outsiders are like immediately treated with suspicion?

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Aaron Ross Powell Well, it actually didn't go well for him initially.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

I can imagine. Wait, two years.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Two whole years. But he actually used that time to gather intelligence. Even while he was detained, he just listened to local gossip. He observed the movements of goods and fighters from his window, and he interviewed literally whoever he could.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

That is wild.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

Yeah. And he eventually compiled all of this into a massive secret report for the Russian military.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Aaron Ross Powell So the official historical record of the 19th century is essentially being drafted by foreign agents who are either trapped in a house or just observing from a coastal consulate.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Pretty much.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

Well, I mean, that explains the sheer volume of linguistic butchering in the historical documents.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Aaron Ross Powell Oh, the spelling errors alone literally altered history. So Glovanie, the French consul, he was trying to record the name of the Bijedog tribe. Okay. But he wrote it down in his official reports as the Bizedou.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Bizdo.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

Yeah. He completely failed to understand that the final K sound the locals were using was just a grammatical plural marker, so he just chopped off the end of their name.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Wow. He essentially renamed an entire society just because he didn't grasp the local syntax.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Exactly. And the Russians did the exact same thing with the Kimergoy tribe. They either misheard or mistranslated the first letter and permanently recorded them as the Timergoy.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

It's incredibly ironic. You have these European empires obsessing over locking these people into rigid, manageable categories on a map, but they don't even know what to call them.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

But I'm curious, if you look past the faulty European maps, how did the tribes actually govern themselves internally during this time?

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Aaron Powell That brings us to our third stage of the discussion. Their internal governance was highly sophisticated, but it was uh it was anything but uniform. The encyclopedia highlights how diverse the political thought was within the nation by contrasting two very different systems. So, on one hand, tribes like the Bizadug and the Cogardians operated on a strict feudal system.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

So, like lords and peasants.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Exactly. They had clear nobility classes, and every village was governed by a prince or a nobleman who held definitive, top-down authority.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Got it. A traditional aristocratic hierarchy. That would be very recognizable to the European spies.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Right. It made sense to them. But right next door, you had tribes like the Shepsug and the Abzak who completely rejected that model. Really? Yeah, they had absolutely no princes and no nobility class whatsoever.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

You'd think that would lead to total decentralization, maybe even chaos, especially with hostile empires encroaching. I mean, how does an egalitarian commune maintain order, let alone mount a military defense?

SPEAKER_00 11:02

They utilized a system called the Tamad, and this was a council of elders who derived their authority purely from wisdom, life experience, and communal respect.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

Yeah, rather than bloodline or landownership. The chief of a village was simply an elder chosen for his insight. And even in times of war, they didn't hand power over to a single dictatorial general. Wow. Military commands and strategies were communal, they were debated and decided upon based on the advice of the Tamad.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

That requires an astonishing level of cultural cohesion. I mean, to organize a military mobilization through a decentralized elder council means your society relies on extreme individual competency and guerrilla style cooperation rather than, you know, standing armies marching in neat lines.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

It's a completely different philosophy of existence.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

And that philosophy of existence was literally written into their names. When Circassian writers and researchers like Mortogo analyzed the etymology of these tribal names, they found that the ascenities were inextricably linked to the physical geography they inhabited and their specific communal traits.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Oh, that's fascinating. Let's look at the mechanics of that. How exactly does the environment dictate the name?

SPEAKER_00 12:11

So take the Abzak tribe. Their territory was located high in the mountains, specifically positioned below the lands occupied by the Abaza people.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

In the Circassian Ajaq language, the suffix K means below or down. So the name Abzak translates literally to the group that lives below the lands of the Abaza.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Oh wow. They literally turned their geographic coordinates into their permanent identity.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Yeah. And then you have the Shapsug, the tribe without princes. Their name has multiple debated etymologies, but they all paint this really vivid picture of their environment.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

What are the translations?

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Some researchers translate the root words to mean owners of horses, which points to their cavalry skills. Others break it down to mean slim or handsome young men. Okay. But one of the most fascinating translations looks at the linguistic roots for cold and burned. This suggests their name means the people from a region with frost so severe it actually burns the skin.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

The people of the skin burning frost. That is amazing. That doesn't just tell you where they live, it tells you how tough they are. It's almost like an evolutionary badge of honor.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

It really is. The Notquai tribe is another great example. Breaking down their root words na, meaning I, and koa, meaning blue, you get the blue-eyed ones or those with piercing eyes. And the blzedug, one of the tribes ruled by princes, has a name that translates in some accounts to the one who took the cup.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

The one who took the cup. That sounds like a reference to like an ancient political victory or a legendary feast that became the cornerstone of their aristocratic identity.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

Right. Another translation for the blizzard traces it to the Bized tree, which was renowned in their specific region for its sturdy, really reliable wood. So they were the gatherer of wood from the bized tree.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

It's just incredible. Their names are literal, geographic markers, physical descriptions, or historical inside jokes passed down for centuries.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

But you know, this hyper-specific, fiercely independent tribal structure leads to kind of a dark realization. When your identity is tied entirely to a specific valley, a specific tree, or a specific elder council, does that incredibly fragmented structure make you fundamentally vulnerable to an industrialized empire that just wants to swallow the whole map?

SPEAKER_00 14:30

And that vulnerability is the tragedy at the core of the third stage of this history. Right? You have this fierce localized independence colliding headfirst with the massive organized expansion of the Russian czarist forces. And this wasn't just a border dispute. It was the Russian-Caucasian War, which was an industrialized campaign of displacement and genocide that officially ended in 1864.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

When an industrialized military engine meets a decentralized tribal society, the math is usually horrifying. What does the encyclopedia record regarding the sheer scale of the population collapse here?

SPEAKER_00 15:05

The factual population drops are genuinely difficult to comprehend. Just to give you a sense of the scale for the listener before the war escalated to its peak, the Ubzac tribe, the ones living below the Abaza, they had a population of around 200,000 people.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

200,000?

SPEAKER_00 15:18

After the war, the forced migrations and the systemic raids, only 16,000 remained in their homeland.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

Good God. That is over a 90% eradication of a single tribe's presence in their native geography.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

It gets worse. The Notquai, the tribe of the piercing blue eyes, suffered even more severely. They started with 100,000 members. By the end of the conflict, a mere 400 individuals remained in their ancestral territory. Right. And then you have the Zayn tribe, which we mentioned at the start. They had endured over 330 invasions, and by 1883 they were reduced to just 21 individuals.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Aaron Powell Just I can't even wrap my head around that. How does a society functionally respond when the destruction reaches that magnitude?

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Well, survival required unimaginable sacrifices and a total upending of their traditional way of life. The primary mechanism for survival was massive forced migration, mostly across the Black Sea to the Ottoman Empire, which is modern-day Turkey. But for those who refused to leave or just couldn't, survival meant completely abandoning the valleys and rivers that literally defined their names. Tribes like the Abzak fled into the densest forests and the steepest mountain ravines. They intentionally chose the most inhospitable, brutal terrain possible because it was the only way to avoid the sudden sweeping cavalry and artillery raids of the Russian military.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

So they basically had to leverage the skin-burning frosts and the sheer cliffs against the invaders, effectively turning their harsh geography into their only remaining fortress.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Exactly. And the final most heartbreaking survival mechanism was the complete dissolution of identity. Oh. We talked about how tribes in the Middle Ages merged to survive. Well, in 1864, they had to do it again on a much, much more desperate scale. Right. Formerly distinct tribes with centuries of history, like the Kegok and the Adala, realized they no longer had the numbers to exist. So they completely abandoned their independent names, their specific customs, and folded whatever survivors they had left entirely into the remnants of the not quite tribe.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Aaron Ross Powell That is the ultimate paradox of their history, isn't it? To save the Circassian people, they had to willingly erase their own hyper-local identities.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

I mean, when your population is decimated by 90%, just breathing is an act of defiance.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

And it makes you realize that studying these names, debating whether Shapsug means owners of horses or people of the burning frost isn't just historical trivia. It is the act of preservation of a human record that an empire spent decades trying to wipe off the face of the earth.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Beautifully said. And that really brings us to the legacy they leave behind today. We started this journey looking at the ancient Kashak, who commanded the respect of Erat historians in the markets of Trabzon for their physical and moral elegance. Right. We navigated through the 19th century watching European spies and consuls misunderstand and mislabel the Adi peoples based on their own imperial arrogance. And then we confronted the catastrophic reality of 1864, where the survivors had to abandon their valleys, merge their bloodlines, and cling to their elders and dialects in modern-day Adaia just to keep the cultural flame from extinguishing entirely.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

It really forces you to rethink how you interact with geography. Beneath those current borders are invisible layers of history. The merged tribes, the butchered translations of French consuls, and the lost dialects of mountain communes that govern themselves without kings.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

And it leaves you with this fundamental question for you to mull over. When an entire nation's constituent tribes are named after the specific rivers they fish, the sturdy local trees they gather, or the exact mountain slopes they live beneath. What happens to the soul of that identity when they are forcibly exiled from that precise geography?

SPEAKER_01 19:16

Does the name become a ghost haunting a foreign land? Or does it become the seed for a completely new beginning? And that's where we leave it for today. But the story is a lot bigger than one episode.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

This show is an ongoing series, episode by episode, working through the Circassian Encyclopedia and shedding light on parts of this history most people never get to hear.

SPEAKER_01 19:37

So if this pulled you in, go deeper. Head to profmkmamser.com. That's P-R-O-F M K M A M S E R dot com for the full encyclopedia and everything behind today's episode.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

And if you're enjoying the show, follow us wherever you're listening, drop a rating, and send this episode to one person who needs to hear this history.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

This has been the Circassian Encyclopedia.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

I'm Sotine.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

And I'm Aslan. We'll see you next time.