Abkhazian

The Abkhaz are a Northwest Caucasian people of the Black Sea coast, whose language is closest to Abaza and whose ancestors Greek and Roman writers called the Heniochi and Abasgoi. Byzantine influence made Christianity dominant in the sixth century, and in 780 their princes founded the Kingdom of Abkhazia, which passed by dynastic union to Bagrat III in 978 and became the nucleus of a unified Georgia.

When Georgian unity collapsed in the 1450s and 1460s, the Sharvashidze house ruled an independent Abkhazia. Ottoman suzerainty reached the coast in the sixteenth century, and over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries much of the population, including its ruling family, turned to Sunni Islam.

In 1810 Prince Sefer Ali-Bey accepted Russian protection, and from the 1810s to the 1830s Abkhazia was drawn into the Caucasian War, with Russian garrisons, mountain resistance and the first waves of Muslim emigration to the Ottoman Empire shaping its society.