History Main / CircassianBeauty

* "Litterature/TheSadowOfTheVulture" by Creator/RobertEHoward features Roxelana, the wife of UsefulNotes/SuleimanTheMagnificent and empress of the Ottoman Empire (see RealLife below), her sister, the equally fiery-haired and beautiful Red Soyna of Rogatino.

* The UsefulNotes/OttomanEmpire certainly did acquire a lot of slaves, including harem women, from the Caucasus, especially between the 1770s and the 1860s. Hence, this trope started out with some TruthInTelevision. Perhaps the most notable example (despite not being Circassian, or even from the Caucasus) being Hurrem Sultan, also known by the nickname Roxelana, initially a Ruthenian slave in the harem of sultan UsefulNotes/SuleimanTheMagnificent, the Sultan would fall deeply in love with her, eventually taking her as his legal wife and empress of the Ottoman Empire. Most depictions of her portray her in ottoman fashion, yet as a delicate, white-skinned, red-headed lady.

* In the Italian fantasy movie ''Ursus, Terror of the Kirghiz'', the main characters are a band of Kirghiz nomads living under the Pax Mongolica. The English dub, apparently figuring that Kirghiz people were a little too unfamiliar to American audiences, changed them to Circassians (despite the somewhat similiar names, the two peoples are unrelated), banking on the positive connotations carried by this trope - and also changing the title character into {{Hercules}} for [[DolledUpInstallment better name recognition]][[note]]His actor, Reg Park, had played Hercules in three previous films, so it wasn't totally out of left field, although Hercules has nothing to do with Circassia[[/note]]. However, the film's heroine and main love interest is specifically said ''not'' to be an example of this trope, as she was adopted into the Circassian/Kirghiz band. For most of the movie they believe her true parentage is Roma, but at the end they learn that, despite her blonde hair, [[spoiler: she is a daughter of UsefulNotes/GenghisKhan himself!]]

-->--'''Creator/{{Voltaire}}''', ''Letters on the English'' (1734)

* The UsefulNotes/OttomanEmpire certainly did acquire a lot of slaves, including harem women, from the Caucasus, especially between the 1770s and the 1860s. Hence, this trope started out with some TruthInTelevision.
** Perhaps the most notable example (despite not being Circassian, or even from the Caucasus) being Hurrem Sultan, also known by the nickname Roxelana, initially a Ruthenian slave in the harem of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sultan would fall deeply in love with her, eventually taking her as his legal wife and empress of the Ottoman Empire. Most depictions of her portray her in ottoman fashion, yet as a delicate, white-skinned, red-headed lady.

The term Circassian Beauty refers to the romanticized portrayal of women from UsefulNotes/TheCaucasus: breathtakingly beautiful and feminine, slender-waisted and pale-skinned, with rosy cheeks and [[InnocentBlueEyes lustrous, big blue eyes]]. She embodies ideals of womanly purity and virtue, but also sexuality; she is [[ButNotTooWhite alluringly exotic]], [[ButNotTooForeign yet familiar]]. A mainstay of {{Orientalism}}, the Circassian Beauty not only signified an idealized representation of womanhood in the European imagination, but -- more significantly -- a device through which ideas about the [[ArabianNightsDays Near East]] were projected.

* The 1851 story ''The Circassian Slave'' by Maturin Murray Ballou tells the tale of Komel, a beautiful and idealistic Adyghe woman who is [[MadeASlave sold into slavery]], a scheme cooked up by one of her fellow countrymen [[IfICantHaveYou after she rejects his advances]]. Komel follows the trope to the letter; in Constantinople, she is taken to the slave market and sold to the palace. She becomes the Sultan's favorite, but resists his affections to stay true to her lover, Aphiz. Komel eventually manages to escape with his help, and the couple [[EarnYourHappyEnding earns their happy ending]] by the final chapter.

* ''A Night In the Moorish Harem'' has Circassian harem girl Anna, who is described as very tall and slender despite being 19 years old, with skin as white as alabaster and hair being of the palest blonde. She used to be a princess that was taken captive during one of the Caucasian campaigns, sold to slavery and ended up on the harem in Morocco.

** Perhaps the most notable example (despite not being circassian, or even from the caucasus) being Hurrem Sultan, also known by the nickname Roxelana, initially a Ruthenian slave in the harem of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sultan would fall deeply in love with her, eventually taking her as his legal wife and empress of the Ottoman Empire. Most depictions of her portray her in ottoman fashion, yet as delicate, white skinned, red headed lady.

* ''Literature/{{Temeraire}}'': In ''Black Powder War'', Captain Laurence, Temeraire, and their crew are treated to a banquet by a vizier of the Ottoman Empire, with scantily-clad Circassian {{belly dancer}}s for entertainment. Laurence is [[NotDistractedByTheSexy annoyed rather than captivated]] because he's an uptight British gentleman, and also because he's there to check on an important deal Britain made with the Ottomans (which the latter seem to have reneged on), and knows this is a blatant attempt to distract him from pursuing the issue.

** Perhaps the most notable example (despite not being circassian, or even from the caucasus) being Hurrem Sultan, also known by the nickname Roxelana, initially a Ruthenian slave in the harem of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sultan would fall in love with her, eventually taking her as his legal wife and empress of the Ottoman Empire. Most depictions of her portray her in ottoman fashion, yet as delicate red headed lady.

* Nina, the title character of the Soviet comedy ''Кавказская пленница''[[note]]"Prisoner of the Caucasus" -- but feminine, unlike the Pushkin example below[[/note]], relies partly on this trope for her characterization. She's a very modern girl, though, and she takes [[PityTheKidnapper great exception]] to [[spoiler:a local Party official's bride-kidnapping plot]].

-> ''The Circassians are poor, and their daughters are beautiful, and indeed it is in them they chiefly trade. They furnish with those beauties the seraglio of the Turkish Sultan, of the Persian Sophy, and of all of those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious merchandise. These maidens are very honorably and virtuously instructed how to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of a very polite and effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed.''

-->-- '''Creator/{{Voltaire}}''', ''Letters on the English'' (1734)

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, so-called "Circassian Beauties" would become a staple of sideshow attractions across America -- [[FakeNationality local performers]] billed as [[SexSlave Sex Slaves]] freed from the eastern markets and the purest form of the white race, identifiable by their "exotic" Afro-like hairstyles which in truth bore little resemblance to anything out of the Caucasus. In a cruel twist of irony, this coincided with the very real oppression of actual Circassians, who were [[ThePurge massacred and forcibly exiled]] by Imperial Russia in a genocide beginning in 1864.[[note]]Many Circassians thus ended up in the Arab World, and today live as semi-Arabized minorities in various countries. They are particularly prominent in UsefulNotes/{{Jordan}}, where their women married into the upper classes and their men won places in the government and military through loyal service to the House of Hashem.[[/note]]

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, so-called "Circassian Beauties" would become a staple of sideshow attractions across America - [[FakeNationality local performers]] billed as [[SexSlave Sex Slaves]] freed from the eastern markets and the purest form of the white race, identifiable by their "exotic" Afro-like hairstyles which in truth bore little resemblance to anything out of the Caucasus. In a cruel twist of irony, this coincided with the very real oppression of actual Circassians, who were [[ThePurge massacred and forcibly exiled]] by Imperial Russia in a genocide beginning in 1864.[[note]]Many Circassians thus ended up in the Arab World, and today live as semi-Arabized minorities in various countries. They are particularly prominent in UsefulNotes/{{Jordan}}, where their women married into the upper classes and their men won places in the government and military through loyal service to the House of Hashem.[[/note]]

Note that in context of the trope, "Circassian" may refer either to the people also known as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassians Adyghe]], or more broadly, to indigenous Caucasian highlanders. This latter category includes the Adyghe as well as peoples such as Georgians, Chechens, Ossets, and Avars. In English, "Circassian" was originally a catch-all term for "mountaineer" or "highlander" (equivalent to Russian ''gorets''), a definition that did not begin to narrow until around the mid-nineteenth century.

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* Nina, the title character of the Soviet comedy ''Кавказская пленница''[[note]]"Prisoner of the Caucasus"--but feminine, unlike the Pushkin example below[[/note]], relies partly on this trope for her characterization. She's a very modern girl, though, and she takes [[PityTheKidnapper great exception]] to [[spoiler:a local Party official's bride-kidnapping plot]].

* ''A Night In the Moorish Harem'' has Circassian harem girl Anna, who is described as very tall and slender despite being 19-years old, with skin as white as alabaster and hair being of the palest blonde. She used to be a princess that was taken captive during one of the Caucasian campaigns, sold to slavery and ended up on the harem in Morocco.

* Princess Caraboo (Mary Baker), who posed as an exotic foreigner in Bristol, England in the 18-teens, was deemed to be possibly Circassian by a Prof. Wilkinson, a folklorist/linguist (played by Creator/JohnLithgow in the 1994 film) who'd spent a good many years there. He cited "her countenance, her complexion and her manners" as supporting his theory, although he also acknowledged that her dress and her method of writing did not resemble what he'd seen when he was there.

* While it likely predated the eighteenth century, [[Creator/{{Voltaire}} Voltaire's]] 1734 ''Letters on the English'' may have first helped popularize the trope in western Europe. In his [[https://www.bartleby.com/34/2/11.htmlhttps://www.bartleby.com/34/2/11.html eleventh letter]], the author primarily discusses Circassian inoculation practices against smallpox, but also takes a paragraph to extol the beauty, virtue, and sexual talents of their maidens.

* Circassia in ''VideoGame/EuropaUniversalis'' IV has a national idea called "Adyghe Beauty", which decreases presitge decay for the country.

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* ''A Night In the Moorish Harem'' has Circassian harem girl Anna, who is described as very tall and slender despite being 19-years old, with skin as white as alabaster and hair being of the palest blonde. She used to be a princess that was taken captive during one of the Caucasian campaigns, sold to slavery and ended up on the titular harem in Morocco.

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* Samuel Jackson Pratt's 1781 play ''The Fair Circassian'' features an attempted coup by the brother of the Persian King, of which the affections of the Circassian [[DamselInDistress Lady Almeida]] are key. In contrast to most western depictions, Almeida is not a slave, but fits the trope in all other respects: she is gorgeous, ladylike, virtuous, and an object of desire, [[AndNowYouMustMarryMe forced into marriage]] by the play's antagonist.

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Today, the Circassian Beauty is largely a [[DiscreditedTrope discredited]], ForgottenTrope -- the product of bygone orientalist fantasies and refuted scientific theories. Nevertheless, the legacy of the trope persists through racial terminology, which despite discreditation by modern science, has not faded from popular usage.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, so-called "Circassian Beauties" would become a staple of sideshow attractions across America - [[FakeNationality local performers]] billed as [[SexSlave Sex Slaves]] freed from the eastern markets and the purest form of the white race, identifiable by their "exotic" Afro-like hairstyles which in truth bore little resemblance to anything out of the Caucasus. In a cruel twist of irony, this coincided with the very real oppression of actual Circassians, who were [[ThePurge massacred and forcibly exiled]] by Imperial Russia in a genocide beginning in 1864.

The allure of the Circassian Beauty reached far beyond popular literature, however; it too exerted its influence on the Enlightenment-era [[ScienceMarchesOn "science" of racial classification]]. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, one of the most influential taxonomists of the period, first used "Caucasian" to describe the "white" variety of man. Blumenbach declared the peoples of the Caucasus (specifically Georgians) as the "most beautiful of mankind" and theorized they were most primordial, uncorrupted form of humanity, from which the lesser, more degenerate races derived.

* Princess Caraboo (Mary Baker), who posed as an exotic foreigner in Bristol, England, in the 18-teens, was deemed to be possibly Circassian by a Prof. Wilkinson, a folklorist/linguist (played by Creator/JohnLithgow in the 1994 film) who'd spent a good many years there. He cited "her countenance, her complexion and her manners" as supporting his theory, although acknowledging that her dress and her method of writing did not resemble what he'd seen when he was there.

The trope takes a somewhat different (though no less orientalist) form in RussianLiterature, where the Caucasus is more likely to feature as a setting. In the romantic imagination, the Caucasus was [[WildWilderness an untamed land on the edge of civilization]], where men could find adventure and freedom (think of it as the American Old West); it was a perilously enticing frontier, home to exotic customs, fierce mountain clans, marauding raiders, and of course, bewitchingly beautiful women. In these stories, the Circassian Beauty appears as a member of a rugged yet [[NobleSavage noble mountaineer clan]], and often the protagonist's ill-fated LoveInterest.

Note that in context of the trope, "Circassian" may refer either to the people also known as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassians Adyghe]], or more broadly, to indigenous Caucasian highlanders. This latter category includes the Adyghe as well as peoples such as Georgians, Chechens, Ossets, and Avars. In English, "Circassian" was originally a catch-all term for "mountaineer" or highlander" (equivalent to Russian ''gorets''), a definition that did not begin to narrow until around the mid-nineteenth century.

The trope takes a somewhat different (though no less orientalist) form in RussianLiterature, where the Caucasus is more likely to feature as a setting. In the romantic imagination, the Caucasus was [[WildWilderness an untamed land on the edge of civilization]], where men could find adventure and freedom; it was a perilously enticing frontier, home to exotic customs, fierce mountain clans, marauding raiders, and of course, bewitchingly beautiful women. In these stories, the Circassian Beauty appears as a member of a rugged yet [[NobleSavage noble mountaineer clan]], and often the protagonist's ill-fated LoveInterest.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, so-called "Circassian Beauties" would become a staple of sideshow attractions across America - [[FakeNationality local performers]] billed as [[SexSlave Sex Slaves]] freed from the eastern markets and the purest form of the white race, identifiable by their "exotic" Afro-like hairstyles which in truth bore little resemblance to anything out of the Caucasus. In a cruel twist of irony, this coincided with the very real oppression of actual Circassians, who were massacred and forcibly exiled by Imperial Russia in a genocide beginning in 1864.