Andreas, Please take time to translate the Bouttin entry. The translation here is terrible. I have not spoken or written French for 50+ years but I do know that the last sentence should read, "It is one of our collection's best blades." No doubt your French is better than mine, so please favor us with a more meaningful translation.
On the issue of using former European blades in Caucasian shashkas, there are some gaps in logic when assuming that these were converted to shashkas in the 17th-18th C.
Basically, we don't know when these shashkas were made. The blades could have been repurposed, such that a guarded hilt was replaced by the guardless shashka hilt at a later time. High quality blades such as these would have been passed down within families and could have been updated/modified at any time.
Ian
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