Declaration of Circassian Independence, Addressed to the Courts of Europe (1836) 

In 1834, British diplomat and writer David Urquhart traveled to Circassia and witnessed firsthand the Circassian resistance against Russian imperial expansion. Back in England, he published The Portfolio; or, A Collection of State Papers Illustrative of the History of Our Times (London: James Ridgway and Sons, 1836) — a volume intended to alert British readers and policymakers to what Russia was doing in the Caucasus. One of its most remarkable documents is the Declaration of Circassian Independence, Addressed to the Courts of Europe. Its opening is blunt: the Circassians were not Russian subjects — they were at war with Russia, and had been fighting alone for years. 

The Declaration's central argument is both legally sharp and strategically far-sighted. It categorically rejects the treaties between Russia and the Ottoman Empire that claimed to transfer sovereignty over Circassian lands — agreements made without the Circassians' knowledge or consent. The text points to a simple proof: Russian troops dared not move beyond the range of their own fortress guns, and Russian envoys had recently been forced to negotiate not for Circassian surrender but for the safe passage of 20,000 of their own soldiers surrounded by Circassian fighters. 

The Declaration also issues a warning to Europe: the Russian forces currently tied down in the Caucasus would, if Circassia fell, be free to advance against Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and beyond. The mountains of Circassia, it states, are not merely a homeland — they are a barrier protecting the entire region, and their fall would open a door that no one could close. 

The Declaration's most powerful passages speak directly to England and France. The Circassians make no grand claims: they acknowledge that they have no artillery, no navy, no wealth. But they assert, with measured dignity, that they are a peaceful people when left in peace, that they have been fighting Russia for forty years, and that they have beaten her. What they cannot accept is Europe's silence — the humiliation of finding their country erased from European maps, their sovereignty traded away in treaties they never knew existed, their people dismissed in Russian propaganda as savages and bandits. 

The Declaration is one of the earliest formal expressions of a collective Circassian political identity on the international stage — and it already documents, three decades before the mass deportations of 1864, the full machinery of destruction: military encirclement, coastal blockade, the extermination of villages, the assassination of noble families, the taking of children as hostages. Europe did not answer. But the document endures as proof that the Circassians named what was being done to them — and demanded, clearly and without apology, that the world take notice.