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Emperor Napoleon’s bodyguard and armour-bearer, Mameluke Roustam Raza, writes about his turbulent and rich life, how the Transcaucasian Tatars kidnapped him as a child and a sold several times. The memories of the Mameluke, son of the Artsakh Armenian Roustam Honan, are published in the book titled “The Memoirs of Roustam: Napoleon's Mamluk Imperial Bodyguard.”

Roustam Raza was born in Tiflis in 1782 to the family of an Armenian merchant, Roustam Honan. Two years after he was born, his father moved his trading house to one of the most fortified towns in Armenia, his native Aperkan. When Roustam was eleven, Transcaucasian Tatars attacked the town where he lived to kidnap children, take them to their country and make them slaves. Roustam was playing with little boys in the yard of his house. Even though he managed to flee, many of his friends were captured.

Roustam’s father, youngest in his family, had two daughters and four sons. He left for Ganja with his elder sons on trading matters, and several months later, the Persian Shah declared war on Ibrahim Khan, the deputy shah in Armenia. Father made a decision to leave Ganja, the centre of cashmere and silk trade, but Roustam remained there. On his way home, Roustam and his fellow travellers encountered Ibrahim Khan’s army, which had surrounded Ganja. When he at last reached home, he found it empty.

The Tatars had assaulted the town, driven the inhabitants into captivity and plundered the houses. Roustam’s mother and sisters had saved themselves from the Tatars by leaving for the Shushi fortress two months before. “It was getting dark, and I decided to spend the night at our home, which the soldiers had utterly robbed. They had not even left a handful of hay to put under my hand,” Roustam writes. He notes that the houses in the town were so destroyed and devastated that it would not be possible to live there.

He reached Shushi in the evening and went to the Armenian quarter, where he found many familiar people. A woman he knew was very warm to him and told him his mother was in the fortress longing and believing in his return. The life gradually settled down, the war ended and Roustam returned to Aperkan with his mother and sisters to reconstruct their house destroyed by the Transcaucasian Tatars. A year later, father called his family to the town Kazak, where he had opened a shop. After walking to Ganja, they stopped there to have a rest. Leaving his mother and sisters in a square, Roustam went to find food. When he went back to the square with the food he had bought, a man went up to him and told him that his mother and sisters were waiting for him at his house. “Alas, I did not realise that the stranger was lying to me. I followed him. We entered his house and I saw that my people were not there. I began crying and mourning over my misfortune, but the man told me, ‘Don’t you be afraid. Apparently, your mother and sister went out for something. I will fetch them.’ I sat in the shadow of a tree in the centre of the yard waiting for my mother,” he recalls.
Suddenly, a stranger went up to him and asking whether he spoke Armenian, told him in his native language to run away. “They have taken you here to sell. Your trace will be lost forever, and you will never see your family again,” he writes.
Waiting for “the wicked women” to get engaged in their conversation in “Turkic language,” which he understood perfectly, Roustam used the chance to flee from “those rascals.” Back in the market, however, he did not find his people. As he was looking for his mother, he ran into an old acquaintance of his father, who also deceived him and sold him to a childless woman. She decided he adopt him. “Later, I learnt that my mother had found out my place. She had more than once come to that house, but she was not allowed to go in. They told her, ‘There are no children at this house.’ Every time she left the house in tears,” Roustam writes. Having no way to get out of there, he agreed to become that woman’s son in the hope to get some freedom that way and run away to his native town, and maybe find his mother with the help of wandering merchants.
Eventually, however, he was sold again. After the adopting ceremony, he went on being locked up. He was not allowed to leave the house or even go close to the door. One fine day, his stepfather said that they were moving to the Caspian Sea and that they were taking Roustam with them. “I made up my mind to run away immediately after we went out of the gates, so that not to get away from the places I knew. At last, the door taking to the yard opened. What caught my eye first in the yard, were thirty saddled horses ready for the trip. Next, the door of the big barn opened. There were sixty well-dressed boys of my age inside. At seeing them, I thought: I am being sold for the fourth time,” Roustam writes.
Two days later they met a “Tatars’ gang,” which won the guards after half an hour of fighting and agreed with them on taking the Armenian boys and leaving the Georgians. “My despicable stepfather was not happy at losing fifteen of his best boys, but could do nothing about it. They took me for a Georgian and left with him,” Roustam recalls.
Getting to the “big city” at the foot of the Caucasian mountains, all the children, including Roustam, were sold. This was the fifth time.
To be continued.
Compiled from the Russian translation by G. Janikyan, I. Karumyan of the book “The Memoirs of Roustam: Napoleon's Mamluk Imperial Bodyguard.”