The traveller, who has studied the Cossacks and the mountaineers of the Caucasus, can never admit the doctrine that would make but one nation of these two. Our notions on this subject are corroborated in every point by physiological observations. In the first place, considerations founded on religion and language, are not so lightly to be rejected as Clarke and Lesur assert. The conversion of the Cossacks would not certainly have been passed over unnoticed in the history of the Lower Empire; the Byzantine writers would have been sure to record such a triumph of their creed; but they say not a word about it; and every one knows perfectly well in what manner Christianity was categorically introduced into Russia. Moreover, if the Cossacks had been nothing but Circassians at the beginning of the thirteenth century, it would be hard to account for their ready adoption of a foreign language and religion, at a time when that language and that religion were, if not proscribed, at least much discredited under the Tatar sway. The last Russian expeditions into the Caucasus, towards the sources of the Kouban, have, it is true, given birth to new historical ideas as to that part of Asia. Thus, there have been discovered two churches in a perfect state of preservation, the origin of which is evidently Genoese or Venetian, and we can scarcely fail to recognise in the Circassians some traces of Christianity in the profound respect they bear to the cross. But, on the other hand, nothing indicates that this people was ever Christian; on the contrary, every thing proves that its primitive religion, if its religious notions may be so called, has undergone no alteration. Those Christian edifices, too, which we have alluded to, belong to a later period than the inroads of the Tatar hordes, consequently they can only testify in favour of our views.
No chronicle speaks of the emigration of a Tcherkess people in the middle ages. The only tradition relating to any thing of the kind, is that of a strong tribe from the Caucasus, which, after occupying the plains of the Danube, is said to have settled at last in Pannonia. Every one is aware that mountain tribes are the least migratory of all, and the most attached to their native soil; it is, therefore, natural to suppose that the Circassians, so proud of their independence and so often ineffectually attacked, did not receive the warriors of Genghis Khan as friends, or take part in their sanguinary expeditions.[15] Hence M. Schnitzler appears to me to propound a more than questionable fact when he alleges, following Karamsin, that the Circassians entered Russia with Batou Khan, and so formed by degrees that new people, which, to borrow the language of this statician, on the breaking up of the Tatar rule and the dispersion of the clouds, which till then had hung over their country, appears to us as Russian and Christian, but with Circassian features, with Tatar manners and customs, and hating the Muscovites.
How can we assign such an origin to the Don Cossacks when there exists neither among them, nor among their supposed brethren, any tradition of so modern a fact? Besides, if the Cossacks had really come from the Caucasus, would they not have retained some neighbourly relations with the mountaineers? Is it not a singular notion to take Circassians, the most indomitable of all men, and the most attached to their hereditary usages and manners, to subject them to the Tatars for more than 300 years, and then to transform them at once, and without transition, into a people speaking pure unmixed Sclavonic, and professing the Greek religion? This is certainly one of the most curious of metamorphoses; before it could happen there must have been a combination of circumstances exactly the reverse of those which have really existed. The Circassians, one would think, would have been much more disposed to adopt the religion of the victors, than of the vanquished, the more so as islamism having already at that period made considerable progress in Eastern Caucasus, would give them a much stronger bias towards the Tatars, than towards the wandering hordes of the Polovtzis, from which we derive the Cossacks.