Let Our Fame Be Great by Oliver Bullough Page A

French forces arrived to destroy Anapa’s fortifications. Sefer wanted the town to be the capital of his province, whereas London and Paris saw it as a threat that must not be allowed to fall back into Russian hands. Sefer threatened to send tribesmen to oppose the landing allies. The threat did not materialize, and may indeed have been empty since Sefer lacked an army, but it was not a sign of good relations between the Western powers and the Circassians.
    Longworth set out on a twelve-day trip into the hills to try and discover for himself what was happening. He came back dispirited. The social structure, and the division into nobles, freemen and slaves that had been already on the brink of collapse when he first visited two decades previously, had finally gone. The nobles of the coast, he noted, had lost all authority, and people inland were cooperating with the Russian government as and when they wanted to.
    Longworth was rapidly coming to hate Sefer. ‘He is the only man, I believe, who has the slightest control over them [the Circassians]; and that rather of a negative than an active character. He has neither the means nor the energy requisite to raise a Circassian force himself; but he is, in some measure able as he is, evidently disposed to prevent any recruitment on our part, making no secret of his objections on that score. As to his organizing anything out of this anarchy for administrative purposes, I consider such a thing as quite hopeless and out of the question.’

    In despair, Longworth tried to meet Muhammad-Emin, a puritan Muslim leader operating inland. But the Muslim leader refused to talk to him, saying any contacts had to go via the Turks. Muhammad-Emin had a low opinion of the British, having met their ambassador during a previous stay in Istanbul. The Turks, angered by the meeting, which they had not been informed about in advance, cut off his allowance and stopped him returning to the Caucasus. Longworth knew nothing of this; he just saw his plans frustrated on all sides by men who were supposed to be his allies.
    â€˜Till the troubles fomented by . . . Mohamed Emin Effendi, in the Kuban provinces, have been appeased, there is no probability of the Circassians being brought to co-operate, in any warlike operation against the common enemy,’ he wrote in an angry memo to London, in which he accused Muhammad-Emin of trying to destroy what remained of the social hierarchy. ‘While the lives and properties of a large portion of the inhabitants are at stake we cannot expect that they should take any interest in affairs of a political nature,’ wrote Longworth in September 1855.
    The whole picture at this point was confused, and it is hard to see what was really going on. But, essentially, the Turks appear to have decided to take over Circassia for good. The British and the French did not support that aim, but did not wish to block it and thus anger the Turks. The good old-fashioned Circassians, meanwhile, took the opportunity of relaxing. Ironically, in the midst of a European war, they had their first opportunity in decades for a bit of peace.
    Longworth kept firing back letters to London, but his mission was a waste of time. Circassia would always have been a sideshow compared to the Crimean battlefield, although a force advancing north from Circassia could have seriously disturbed the Russian supply lines. With the degree of dissension and argument that Longworth experienced, however, the country did not even become a sideshow. Longworth took a steamer home, and Circassia was once again forgotten about.
    The remaining papers relating to the case in the Foreign Office file are a severe anticlimax, detailing only Longworth’s attempts to regain his expenses. They do, however, reveal how much Circassia had changed since the 1830s. The Circassians might have claimed they
were resisting Russia, but the economic facts on the ground suggested something very different.
    During the