PART ONE
Rise and Fall of the Khazars
“In Khazaria, sheep, honey,
and Jews exist in large quantities.”
Muqaddasi, Descriptio Imperii Moslemici (tenth century).
I
RISE
1
ABOUT the
time when Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the West, the eastern confines of
Europe between the Caucasus and the Volga were ruled by a Jewish state, known
as the Khazar Empire. At the peak of its power, from the seventh to the tenth
centuries AD, it played a significant part in shaping the destinies of
mediaeval, and consequently of modern, Europe. The Byzantine Emperor and
historian, Constantine Porphyrogenitus (913-959), must have been well aware of
this when he recorded in his treatise on court protocol[1]that letters addressed to the Pope in Rome,
and similarly those to the Emperor of the West, had a gold seal worth two
solidi attached to them, whereas messages to the King of the Khazars displayed
a seal worth three solidi. This was not flattery, but Realpolitik. “In the period with which we are concerned,” wrote
Bury, “it is probable that the Khan of the Khazars was of little less
importance in view of the imperial foreign policy than Charles the Great and
his successors.”[2] lThe country of the Khazars, a people
of Turkish stock, occupied a strategic key position at the vital gateway
between the Black Sea and the Caspian, where the great eastern powers of the
period confronted each other. It acted as a buffer protecting Byzantium against
invasions by the lusty barbarian tribesmen of the northern steppes — Bulgars,
Magyars, Pechenegs, etc. — and, later, the Vikings and the Russians. But
equally, or even more important both from the point of view of Byzantine
diplomacy and of European history, is the fact that the Khazar armies
effectively blocked the Arab avalanche in its most devastating early stages,
and thus prevented the Muslim conquest of Eastern Europe. Professor Dunlop of
Columbia University, a leading authority on the history of the Khazars, has
given a concise summary of this decisive yet virtually unknown episode:
The Khazar country … lay across the natural
line of advance of the Arabs. Within a few years of the death of Muhammad (AD
632) the armies of the Caliphate, sweeping northward through the wreckage of
two empires and carrying all before them, reached the great mountain barrier of
the Caucasus. This barrier once passed, the road lay open to the lands of
eastern Europe. As it was, on the line of the Caucasus the Arabs met the forces
of an organized military power which effectively prevented them from extending
their conquests in this direction. The wars of the Arabs and the Khazars, which
lasted more than a hundred years, though little known, have thus considerable
historical importance. The Franks of Charles Martel on the field of Tours
turned the tide of Arab invasion. At about the same time the threat to Europe
in the east was hardly less acute. … The victorious Muslims were met and held
by the forces of the Khazar kingdom. … It can … scarcely be doubted that but
for the existence of the Khazars in the region north of the Caucasus,
Byzantium, the bulwark of European civilization in the east, would have found
itself outflanked by the Arabs, and the history of Christendom and Islam might
well have been very different from what we know.[3]
It is
perhaps not surprising, given these circumstances, that in 732 — after a
resounding Khazar victory over the Arabs — the future Emperor Constantine V
married a Khazar princess. In due time their son became the Emperor Leo IV,
known as Leo the Khazar. lIronically, the last battle in the war, AD 737, ended in a Khazar
defeat. But by that time the impetus of the Muslim Holy War was spent, the
Caliphate was rocked by internal dissensions, and the Arab invaders retraced
their steps across the Caucasus without having gained a permanent foothold in
the north, whereas the Khazars became more powerful than they had previously
been. lA few years
later, probably AD 740, the King, his court and the military ruling class
embraced the Jewish faith, and Judaism became the state religion of the
Khazars. No doubt their contemporaries were as astonished by this decision as
modern scholars were when they came across the evidence in the Arab, Byzantine,
Russian and Hebrew sources. One of the most recent comments is to be found in a
work by the Hungarian Marxist historian, Dr Antal Bartha. His book on The Magyar Society in the Eighth and Ninth
Centuries[4]has several chapters on the Khazars, as
during most of that period the Hungarians were ruled by them. Yet their
conversion to Judaism is discussed in a single paragraph, with obvious
embarrassment. It reads:
Our investigations cannot go into problems
pertaining to the history of ideas, but we must call the reader’s attention to
the matter of the Khazar kingdom’s state religion. It was the Jewish faith
which became the official religion of the ruling strata of society. Needless to
say, the acceptance of the Jewish faith as the state religion of an ethnically
non-Jewish people could be the subject of interesting speculations. We shall,
however, confine ourselves to the remark that this official conversion — in
defiance of Christian proselytizing by Byzantium, the Muslim influence from the
East, and in spite of the political pressure of these two powers — to a
religion which had no support from any political power, but was persecuted by
nearly all — has come as a surprise to all historians concerned with the
Khazars, and cannot be considered as accidental, but must be regarded as a sign
of the independent policy pursued by that kingdom.
Which
leaves us only slightly more bewildered than before. Yet whereas the sources
differ in minor detail, the major facts are beyond dispute. lWhat is in dispute is the fate of
the Jewish Khazars after the destruction of their empire, in the twelfth or
thirteenth century. On this problem the sources are scant, but various late
mediaeval Khazar settlements are mentioned in the Crimea, in the Ukraine, in
Hungary, Poland and Lithuania. The general picture that emerges from these
fragmentary pieces of information is that of a migration of Khazar tribes and
communities into those regions of Eastern Europe — mainly Russia and Poland —
where, at the dawn of the Modern Age, the greatest concentrations of Jews were
found. This has lead several historians to conjecture that a substantial part,
and perhaps the majority of eastern Jews — and hence of world Jewry — might be
of Khazar, and not of Semitic Origin. lThe far-reaching implications of this hypothesis may explain the great
caution exercised by historians in approaching this subject — if they do not
avoid it altogether. Thus in the 1973 edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica the article “Khazars” is signed by Dunlop,
but there is a separate section dealing with “Khazar Jews after the Fall of the
Kingdom”, signed by the editors, and written with the obvious intent to avoid
upsetting believers in the dogma of the Chosen Race:
The Turkish-speaking Karaites [a fundamentalist
Jewish sect] of the Crimea, Poland, and elsewhere have affirmed a connection
with the Khazars, which is perhaps confirmed by evidence from folklore and
anthropology as well as language. There seems to be a considerable amount of
evidence attesting to the continued presence in Europe of descendants of the
Khazars.
How
important, in quantitative terms, is that “presence” of the Caucasian sons of
Japheth in the tents of Shem? One of the most radical propounders of the
hypothesis concerning the Khazar origins of Jewry is the Professor of Mediaeval
Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, A. N. Poliak. His book Khazaria (in Hebrew) was published in
1944 in Tel Aviv, and a second edition in 1951.[5]In his introduction he writes that the facts
demand —
a new approach, both to the problem of the
relations between the Khazar Jewry and other Jewish communities, and to the
question of how far we can go in regarding this [Khazar] Jewry as the nucleus
of the large Jewish settlement in EasternEurope. … The descendants of this
settlement — those who stayed where they were, those who emigrated to the
United States and to other countries, and those who went to Israel — constitute
now the large majority of world Jewry.
This was
written before the full extent of the holocaust was known, but that does not
alter the fact that the large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of
Eastern European — and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar — origin. If so, this
would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga,
not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the
Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun,
Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should
this turn out to be the case, then the term “anti-Semitism” would become void
of meaning, based on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their
victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past,
begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.
2
“Attila
was, after all, merely the king of a kingdom of tents. His state passed away —
whereas the despised city of Constantinople remained a power. The tents
vanished, the towns remained. The Hun state was a whirlwind. …” lThus Cassel,[6]
a nineteenth-century orientalist, implying that the Khazars shared, for similar
reasons, a similar fate. Yet the Hun presence on the European scene lasted a
mere eighty years, whereas the
kingdom of the Khazars held its own for the best part of four centuries. They
too lived chiefly in tents, but they also had large urban settlements, and were
in the process of transformation from a tribe of nomadic warriors into a nation
of farmers, cattle-breeders, fishermen, vine-growers, traders and skilled
craftsmen. Soviet archaeologists have unearthed evidence for a relatively
advanced civilization which was altogether different from the “Hun whirlwind”.
They found the traces of villages extending over several miles,[7]
with houses connected by galleries to huge cattlesheds, sheep-pens and stables
(these measured 3-3½ x 10-14 metres and were supported by columns.[8]
Some remaining ox-ploughs showed remarkable craftsmanship; so did the preserved
artefacts — buckles, clasps, ornamental saddle plates. lOf particular interest were the foundations,
sunk into the ground, of houses built in a circular shape.[9]
According to the Soviet archaeologists, these were found all over the
territories inhabited by the Khazars, and were of an earlier date than their
“normal”, rectangular buildings. Obviously the round-houses symbolize the
transition from portable, dome-shaped tents to permanent dwellings, from the
nomadic to a settled, or rather semi-settled, existence. For the contemporary
Arab sources tell us that the Khazars only stayed in their towns — including
even their capital, Itil — during the winter; come spring, they packed their
tents, left their houses and sallied forth with their sheep or cattle into the
steppes, or camped in their cornfields or vineyards. lThe excavations also showed that the kingdom
was, during its later period, surrounded by an elaborate chain of
fortifications, dating from the eighth and ninth centuries, which protected its
northern frontiers facing the open steppes. These fortresses formed a rough
semi-circular arc from the Crimea (which the Khazars ruled for a time) across
the lower reaches of the Donetz and the Don to the Volga; while towards the
south they were protected by the Caucasus, to the west by the Black Sea, and to
the east by the “Khazar Sea”, the Caspian.
However, the northern chain of fortifications marked merely an inner ring,
protecting the stable core of the Khazar country; the actual boundaries of
their rule over the tribes of the north fluctuated according to the fortunes of
war. At the peak of their power they controlled or exacted tribute from some
thirty different nations and tribes inhabiting the vast territories between the
Caucasus, the Aral Sea, the Ural Mountains, the town of Kiev and the Ukrainian
steppes. The people under Khazar suzerainty included the Bulgars, Burtas,
Ghuzz, Magyars (Hungarians), the Gothic and Greek colonies of the Crimea, and
the Slavonic tribes in the north-western woodlands. Beyond these extended
dominions, Khazar armies also raided Georgia and Armenia and penetrated into
the Arab Caliphate as far as Mosul. In the words of the Soviet archaeologist M.
I. Artamonov:[10]
Until the ninth century, the Khazars had no
rivals to their supremacy in the regions north of the Black Sea and the
adjoining steppe and forest regions of the Dnieper. The Khazars were the
supreme masters of the southern half of Eastern Europe for a century and a
hall, and presented a mighty bulwark, blocking the Ural-Caspian gateway from
Asia into Europe. During this whole period, they held back the onslaught of the
nomadic tribes from the East.
Taking a
bird’s-eye view of the history of the great nomadic empires of the East, the
Khazar kingdom occupies an intermediary position in time, size, and degree of
civilization between the Hun and Avar Empires which preceded, and the Mongol
Empire that succeeded it.
3
But who
were these remarkable people — remarkable as much by their power and
achievements as by their conversion to a religion of outcasts? The descriptions
that have come down to us originate in hostile sources, and cannot be taken at
face value. “As to the Khazars,” an Arab chronicler[11]
writes, “they are to the north of the inhabited earth towards the 7th clime,
having over their heads the constellation of the Plough. Their land is cold and
wet. Accordingly their complexions are white, their eyes blue, their hair
flowing and predominantly reddish, their bodies large and their natures cold.
Their general aspect is wild.” lAfter a century of warfare, the Arab writer obviously had no great
sympathy for the Khazars. Nor had the Georgian or Armenian scribes, whose
countries, of a much older culture, had been repeatedly devastated by Khazar
horsemen. A Georgian chronicle, echoing an ancient tradition, identifies them
with the hosts of Gog and Magog — “wild men with hideous faces and the manners
of wild beasts, eaters of blood”.[12]
An Armenian writer refers to “the horrible multitude of Khazars with insolent,
broad, lashless faces and long falling hair, like women”.[13]
Lastly, the Arab geographer Istakhri, one of the main Arab sources, has this to
say:[14]
“The Khazars do not resemble the Turks. They are black-haired, and are of two
kinds, one called the Kara-Khazars, [Black Khazars] who are swarthy verging on
deep black as if they were a kind of Indian, and a white kind [Ak-Khazars], who
are strikingly handsome.” lThis is more flattering, but only adds to the confusion. For it was
customary among Turkish peoples to refer to the ruling classes or clans as
“white”, to the lower strata as “black”. Thus there is no reason to believe
that the “White Bulgars” were whiter than the “Black Bulgars”, or that the
“White Huns” (the Ephtalites) who invaded India and Persia in the fifth and
sixth centuries were of fairer skin than the other Hun tribes which invaded
Europe. Istakhri’s black-skinned Khazars — as much else in his and his
colleagues’ writings — were based on hearsay and legend; and we are none the
wiser regarding the Khazars’ physical appearance, or their ethnic Origins. lThe last question can only be
answered in a vague and general way. But it is equally frustrating to inquire
into the origins of the Huns, Alans, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Bashkirs, Burtas,
Sabirs, Uigurs, Saragurs, Onogurs, Utigurs, Kutrigurs, Tarniaks, Kotragars,
Khabars, Zabenders, Pechenegs, Ghuzz, Kumans, Kipchaks, and dozens of other
tribes or people who at one time or another in the lifetime of the Khazar
kingdom passed through the turnstiles of those migratory playgrounds. Even the
Huns, of whom we know much more, are of uncertain origin; their name is
apparently derived from the Chinese Hiung-nu,
which designates warlike nomads in general, while other nations applied the
name Hun in a similarly indiscriminate way to nomadic hordes of all kinds,
including the “White Huns” mentioned above, the Sabirs, Magyars and Khazars.
lIn the first century AD, the Chinese
drove these disagreeable Hun neighbours westward, and thus started one of those
periodic avalanches which swept for many centuries from Asia towards the West.
From the fifth century onward, many of these westward-bound tribes were called
by the generic name of “Turks”. The term is also supposed to be of Chinese
origin (apparently derived from the name of a hill) and was subsequently used
to refer to all tribes who spoke languages with certain common characteristics
— the “Turkic” language group. Thus the term Turk, in the sense in which it was
used by mediaeval writers — and often also by modern ethnologists — refers
primarily to language and not to race. In this sense the Huns and Khazars were
“Turkic” people. The Khazar
language was supposedly a Chuvash dialect of Turkish, which still survives in
the Autonomous Chuvash Soviet Republic, between the Volga and the Sura. The
Chuvash people are actually believed to be descendants of the Bulgars, who
spoke a dialect similar to the Khazars. But all these connections are rather
tenuous, based on the more or less speculative deductions of oriental
philologists. All we can say with safety is that the Khazars were a “Turkic”
tribe, who erupted from the Asian steppes, probably in the fifth century of our
era. lThe origin of
the name Khazar, and the modern derivations to which it gave rise, has also
been the subject of much ingenious speculation. Most likely the word is derived
from the Turkish root gaz, “to
wander”, and simply means “nomad”. Of greater interest to the non-specialist
are some alleged modern derivations from it: among them the Russian Cossack and
the Hungarian Huszar — both signifying martial horsemen;
and also the German Ketzer — heretic,
i.e., Jew. If these derivations are correct, they would show that the Khazars
had a considerable impact on the imagination of a variety of peoples in the
Middle Ages.
4
Some
Persian and Arab chronicles provide an attractive combination of legend and
gossip column. They may start with the Creation and end with stop-press
titbits. Thus Yakubi, a ninth-century Arab historian, traces the origin of the
Khazars back to Japheth, third son of Noah. The Japheth motive recurs
frequently in the literature, while other legends connect them with Abraham or
Alexander the Great. lOne of the earliest factual references to the Khazars occurs in a Syriac
chronicle by “Zacharia Rhetor”,
dating from the middle of the sixth century. It mentions the Khazars in a list
of people who inhabit the region of the Caucasus. Other sources indicate that
they were already much in evidence a century earlier, and intimately connected
with the Huns. In AD 448, the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II sent an embassy
to Attila which included a famed rhetorician by name of Priscus. He kept a
minute account not only of the diplomatic negotiations, but also of the court
intrigues and goings-on in Attila’s sumptuous banqueting hall — he was in fact
the perfect gossip columnist, and is still one of the main sources of
information about Hun customs and habits. But Priscus also has anecdotes to
tell about a people subject to the Huns whom he calls Akatzirs — that is, very
likely, the Ak-Khazars, or “White” Khazars (as distinct from the “Black”
Kara-Khazars). The
Byzantine Emperor, Priscus tells us, tried to win this warrior race over to his
side, but the greedy Khazar chieftain, named Karidach, considered the bribe
offered to him inadequate, and sided with the Huns. Attila defeated Karidach’s
rival chieftains, installed him as the sole ruler of the Akatzirs, and invited
him to visit his court. Karidach thanked him profusely for the invitation, and
went on to say that “it would be too hard on a mortal man to look into the face
of a god. For, as one cannot stare into the sun’s disc, even less could one
look into the face of the greatest god without suffering injury.” Attila must
have been pleased, for he confirmed Karidach in his rule. lPriscus’s chronicle confirms that
the Khazars appeared on the European scene about the middle of the fifth
century as a people under Hunnish sovereignty, and may be regarded, together
with the Magyars and other tribes, as a later offspring of Attila’s horde.
5
The
collapse of the Hun Empire after Attila’s death left a power-vacuum in Eastern
Europe, through which once more, wave after wave of nomadic hordes swept from
east to west, prominent among them the Uigurs and Avars. The Khazars during
most of this period seemed to be happily occupied with raiding the rich trans-Caucasian
regions of Georgia and Armenia, and collecting precious plunder. During the
second half of the sixth century they became the dominant force among the
tribes north of the Caucasus. A number of these tribes — the Sabirs, Saragurs,
Samandars, Balanjars, etc. — are from this date onward no longer mentioned by
name in the sources: they had been subdued or absorbed by the Khazars. The
toughest resistance, apparently, was offered by the powerful Bulgars. But they
too were crushingly defeated (circa
641), and as a result the nation split into two: some of them migrated westward
to the Danube, into the region of modern Bulgaria, others north-eastward to the
middle Volga, the latter remaining under Khazar suzerainty. We shall frequently
encounter both Danube Bulgars and Volga Bulgars in the course of this
narrative. lBut before
becoming a sovereign state, the Khazars still had to serve their apprenticeship
under another short-lived power, the so-called West Turkish Empire, or Turkut
kingdom. It was a confederation of tribes, held together by a ruler: the Kagan
or Khagan
— a title which the Khazar rulers too were subsequently to adopt. This first
Turkish state — if one may call it that — lasted for a century (circa 550-650)
and then fell apart, leaving hardly any trace. However, it was only after the
establishment of this kingdom that the name “Turk” was used to apply to a
specific nation, as distinct from other Turkic-speaking peoples like the
Khazars and Bulgars.
lThe Khazars had been under Hun
tutelage, then under Turkish tutelage. After the eclipse of the Turks in the
middle of the seventh century it was their turn to rule the “Kingdom of the
North”, as the Persians and Byzantines came to call it. According to one
tradition,[15] the great
Persian King Khusraw (Chosroes) Anushirwan (the Blessed) had three golden
guest-thrones in his palace, reserved for the Emperors of Byzantium, China and
of the Khazars. No state visits from these potentates materialized, and the
golden thrones — if they existed — must have served a purely symbolic purpose.
But whether fact or legend, the story fits in well with Emperor Constantine’s
official account of the triple gold seal assigned by the Imperial Chancery to
the ruler of the Khazars.
6
Thus during
the first few decades of the seventh century, just before the Muslim hurricane
was unleashed from Arabia, the Middle East was dominated by a triangle of
powers: Byzantium, Persia, and the West Turkish Empire. The first two of these
had been waging intermittent war against each other for a century, and both
seemed on the verge of collapse; in the sequel, Byzantium recovered, but the
Persian kingdom was soon to meet its doom, and the Khazars were actually in on
the kill. lThey were still
nominally under the suzerainty of the West Turkish kingdom, within which they
represented the strongest effective force, and to which they were soon to
succeed; accordingly, in 627, the Roman Emperor Heraclius concluded a military
alliance with the Khazars — the first of several to follow — in preparing his
decisive campaign against Persia. There are several versions of the role played
by the Khazars in that campaign which seems to have been somewhat inglorious —
but the principal facts are well established. The Khazars provided Heraclius
with 40000 horsemen under a chieftain named Ziebel, who participated in the
advance into Persia, but then — presumably fed up with the cautious strategy of
the Greeks — turned back to lay siege on Tiflis; this was unsuccessful, but the
next year they again joined forces with Heraclius, took the Georgian capital,
and returned with rich plunder. Gibbon has given a colourful description (based
on Theophanes) of the first meeting between the Roman Emperor and the Khazar
chieftain.[16]
...To the hostile league of Chosroes with the
Avars, the Roman emperor opposed the useful and honourable alliance of the
Turks.
At his liberal invitation, the horde of Chozars transported their tents from
the plains of the Volga to the mountains of Georgia; Heraclius received them in
the neighbourhood of Tiflis, and the khan with his nobles dismounted from their
horses, if we may credit the Greeks, and fell prostrate on the ground, to adore
the purple of the Caesar. Such voluntary homage and important aid were entitled
to the warmest acknowledgements; and the emperor, taking off his own diadem,
placed it on the head of the Turkish prince, whom he saluted with a tender
embrace and the appellation of son. After a sumptuous banquet, he presented
Ziebel with the plate and ornaments, the gold, the gems, and the silk, which
had been used at the Imperial table, and, with his own hand, distributed rich
jewels and earrings to his new allies. In a secret interview, he produced the
portrait of his daughter Eudocia, condescended to flatter the barbarian with
the promise of a fair and august bride, and obtained an immediate succour of
forty thousand horse…
Eudocia (or
Epiphania) was the only daughter of Heraclius by his first wife. The promise to
give her in marriage to the “Turk” indicates once more the high value set by
the Byzantine Court on the Khazar alliance. However, the marriage came to
naught because Ziebel died while Eudocia and her suite were on their way to
him. There is also an ambivalent reference in Theophanes to the effect that
Ziebel “presented his son, a beardless boy” to the Emperor — as a quid pro quo? lThere is another picturesque passage in an
Armenian chronicle, quoting the text of what might be called an Order of
Mobilization issued by the Khazar ruler for the second campaign against Persia:
it was addressed to “all tribes and peoples [under Khazar authority],
inhabitants of the mountains and the plains, living under roofs or the open
sky, having their heads shaved or wearing their hair long”.[17]
lThis gives us a first intimation of
the heterogeneous ethnic mosaic that was to compose the Khazar Empire. The
“real Khazars” who ruled it were probably always a minority — as the Austrians
were in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
7
The Persian
state never recovered from the crushing defeat inflicted on it by Emperor
Heraclius in 627. There was a revolution; the King was slain by his own son
who, in his turn, died a few months later; a child was elevated to the throne,
and after ten years of anarchy and chaos the first Arab armies to erupt on the
scene delivered the coup de grâce to
the Sassanide Empire. At about the same time, the West Turkish confederation
dissolved into its tribal components. A new triangle of powers replaced the
previous one: the Islamic Caliphate — Christian Byzantium and the newly emerged
Khazar Kingdom of the North. It fell to the latter to bear the brunt of the
Arab attack in its initial stages, and to protect the plains of Eastern Europe
from the invaders. lIn the first twenty years of the Hegira — Mohammed’s flight to Medina in
622, with which the Arab calendar starts — the Muslims had conquered Persia,
Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and surrounded the Byzantine heartland (the
present-day Turkey) in a deadly semi-circle, which extended from the
Mediterranean to the Caucasus and the southern shores of the Caspian. The
Caucasus was a formidable natural obstacle, but no more forbidding than the
Pyrenees; and it could be negotiated by the pass of Dariel
or bypassed through the defile of Darband, along the Caspian shore. lThis fortified defile, called by the
Arabs Bab al Abwab, the Gate of
Gates, was a kind of historic turnstile through which the Khazars and other
marauding tribes had from time immemorial attacked the countries of the south
and retreated again. Now it was the turn of the Arabs. Between 642 and 652 they
repeatedly broke through the Darband Gate and advanced deep into Khazaria,
attempting to capture Balanjar, the nearest town, and thus secure a foothold on
the European side of the Caucasus. They were beaten back on every occasion in
this first phase of the Arab-Khazar war; the last time in 652, in a great
battle in which both sides used artillery (catapults and ballistae). Four
thousand Arabs were killed, including their commander, Abdal-Rahman ibn-Rabiah;
the rest fled in disorder across the mountains. lFor the next thirty or forty years the Arabs
did not attempt any further incursions into the Khazar stronghold. Their main
attacks were now aimed at Byzantium. On several occasions
they laid siege to Constantinople by land and by sea; had they been able to
outflank the capital across the Caucasus and round the Black Sea, the fate of
the Roman Empire would probably have been sealed. The Khazars, in the meantime,
having subjugated the Bulgars and Magyars, completed their western expansion
into the Ukraine and the Crimea. But these were no longer haphazard raids to
amass booty and prisoners; they were wars of conquest, incorporating the
conquered people into an empire with a stable administration, ruled by the
mighty Kagan, who appointed his provincial governors to administer and levy
taxes in the conquered territories. At the beginning of the eighth century
their state was sufficiently consolidated for the Khazars to take the offensive
against the Arabs. lFrom a distance of more than a thousand years, the period of
intermittent warfare that followed (the so-called ‘second Arab war”, 722-37)
looks like a series of tedious episodes on a local scale, following the same,
repetitive pattern: the Khazar cavalry in their heavy armour breaking through
the pass of Dariel or the Gate of Darband into the Caliph’s domains to the
south; followed by Arab counter-thrusts through the same pass or the defile,
towards the Volga and back again. Looking thus through the wrong end of the
telescope, one is reminded of the old jingle about the noble Duke of York who
had ten thousand men; “he marched them up to the top of the hill. And he
marched them down again.” In fact, the Arab sources (though they often
exaggerate) speak of armies of 100000, even of 300000, men engaged on either
side — probably outnumbering the armies which decided the fate of the Western
world at the battle of Tours about the same time. lThe death-defying fanaticism which
characterized these wars is illustrated by episodes such as the suicide by fire
of a whole Khazar town as an alternative to surrender; the poisoning of the
water supply of Bab al Abwab by an Arab general; or by the traditional
exhortation which would halt the rout of a defeated Arab army and make it fight
to the last man: “To the Garden, Muslims, not the Fire” — the joys of Paradise
being assured to every Muslim soldier killed in the Holy War. lAt one stage during these fifteen
years of fighting the Khazars overran Georgia and Armenia, inflicted a total
defeat on the Arab army in the battle of Ardabil (AD 730) and advanced as far
as Mosul and Dyarbakir, more than half-way to Damascus, capital of the
Caliphate. But a freshly raised Muslim army stemmed the tide, and the Khazars
retreated homewards across the mountains. The next year Maslamah
ibn-Abd-al-Malik, most famed Arab general of his time, who had formerly
commanded the siege of Constantinople, took Balanjar and even got as far as
Samandar, another large Khazar town further north. But once more the invaders
were unable to establish a permanent garrison, and once more they were forced
to retreat across the Caucasus. The sigh of relief experienced in the Roman
Empire assumed a tangible form through another dynastic alliance, when the heir
to the throne was married to a Khazar princess, whose son was to rule Byzantium
as Leo the Khazar. lThe last Arab campaign was led by the future Caliph Marwan II, and ended
in a Pyrrhic victory. Marwan made an offer of alliance to the Khazar Kagan,
then attacked by surprise through both passes. The Khazar army, unable to
recover from the initial shock, retreated as far as the Volga. The Kagan was
forced to ask for terms; Marwan, in accordance with the routine followed in
other conquered countries, requested the Kagan’s conversion to the True Faith.
The Kagan complied, but his conversion to Islam must have been an act of
lip-service, for no more is heard of the episode in the Arab or Byzantine
sources — in contrast to the lasting effects of the establishment of Judaism as
the state religion which took place a few years later.
Content with the results achieved, Marwan bid farewell to Khazaria and marched
his army back to Transcaucasia — without leaving any garrison, governor or
administrative apparatus behind. On the contrary, a short time later he
requested terms for another alliance with the Khazars against the rebellious
tribes of the south. lIt had been a narrow escape. The reasons which prompted Marwan’s
apparent magnanimity are a matter of conjecture — as so much else in this
bizarre chapter of history. Perhaps the Arabs realized that, unlike the
relatively civilized Persians, Armenians or Georgians, these ferocious
Barbarians of the North could not be ruled by a Muslim puppet prince and a
small garrison. Yet Marwan needed every man of his army to quell major
rebellions in Syria and other parts of the Omayad Caliphate, which was in the
process of breaking up. Marwan himself was the chief commander in the civil
wars that followed, and became in 744 the last of the Omayad Caliphs (only to
be assassinated six years later when the Caliphate passed to the Abbasid
dynasty). Given this background, Marwan was simply not in a position to exhaust
his resources by further wars with the Khazars. He had to content himself with
teaching them a lesson which would deter them from further incursions across
the Caucasus. lThus the
gigantic Muslim pincer movement across the Pyrenees in the west and across the
Caucasus into Eastern Europe was halted at both ends about the same time. As
Charles Martel’s Franks saved Gaul and Western Europe, so the Khazars saved the
eastern approaches to the Volga, the Danube, and the East Roman Empire itself.
On this point at least, the Soviet archaeologist and historian, Artamonov, and
the American historian, Dunlop, are in full agreement. I have already quoted
the latter to the effect that but for the Khazars, “Byzantium, the bulwark of
European civilization to the East, would have found itself outflanked by the
Arabs”, and that history might have taken a different course. lArtamonov is of the same opinion:[18]
Khazaria was the first feudal state in Eastern
Europe, which ranked with the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Caliphate.… It was
only due to the powerful Khazar attacks, diverting the tide of the Arab armies
to the Caucasus, that Byzantium withstood them.…
Lastly, the
Professor of Russian History in the University of Oxford, Dimitry Obolensky:[19]
“The main contribution of the Khazars to world history was their success in
holding the line of the Caucasus against the northward onslaught of the Arabs.”
lMarwan was not only the last Arab
general to attack the Khazars, he was also the last Caliph to pursue an
expansionist policy devoted, at least in theory, to the ideal of making Islam
triumph all over the world. With the Abbasid caliphs the wars of conquest
ceased, the revived influence of the old Persian culture created a mellower
climate, and eventually gave rise to the splendours of Baghdad under Harun al
Rashid.
8
During the
long lull between the first and second Arab wars, the Khazars became involved
in one of the more lurid episodes of Byzantine history, characteristic of the
times, and of the role the Khazars played in it. lIn AD 685 Justinian II, Rhinotmetus, became
East Roman Emperor at the age of sixteen. Gibbon, in his inimitable way, has
drawn the youth’s portrait:[20]
His passions were strong; his understanding
was feeble; and he was intoxicated with a foolish pride.… His favourite
ministers were two beings the least susceptible of human sympathy, a eunuch and
a monk; the former corrected the emperor’s mother with a scourge, the latter
suspended the insolvent tributaries, with their heads downwards, over a slow
and smoky fire.
After ten
years of intolerable misrule there was a revolution, and the new Emperor,
Leontius, ordered Justinian’s mutilation and banishment:[21]
The amputation of his nose, perhaps of his
tongue, was imperfectly performed; the happy flexibility of the Greek language
could impose the name of Rhinotmetus (“Cut-off Nose”); and the mutilated tyrant
was banished to Chersonae in Crim-Tartary, a lonely settlement where corn, wine
and oil were imported as foreign luxuries.
lDuring
his exile in Cherson, Justinian kept plotting to regain his throne. After three
years he saw his chances improving when, back in Byzantium, Leontius was
de-throned and also had his nose cut off. Justinian escaped from Cherson into
the Khazar-ruled town of Doros in the Crimea and had a meeting with the Kagan
of the Khazars, King Busir or Bazir. The Kagan must have welcomed the
opportunity of putting his fingers into the rich pie of Byzantine dynastic
policies, for he formed an alliance with Justinian and gave him his sister in
marriage. This sister, who was baptized by the name of Theodora, and later duly
crowned, seems to have been the only decent person in this series of sordid
intrigues, and to bear genuine love for her noseless husband (who was still
only in his early thirties). The couple and their band of followers were now
moved to the town of Phanagoria (the present Taman) on the eastern shore of the
strait of Kerch, which had a Khazar governor. Here they made preparations for
the invasion of Byzantium with the aid of the Khazar armies which King Busir
had apparently promised. But the envoys of the new Emperor, Tiberias III,
persuaded Busir to change his mind, by offering him a rich reward in gold if he
delivered Justinian, dead or alive, to the Byzantines. King Busir accordingly
gave orders to two of his henchmen, named Papatzes and Balgitres, to
assassinate his brother-in-law. But faithful Theodora got wind of the plot and
warned her husband. Justinian invited Papatzes and Balgitres separately to his
quarters, and strangled each in turn with a cord. Then he took ship, sailed
across the Black Sea into the Danube estuary, and made a new alliance with a
powerful Bulgar tribe. Their king, Terbolis, proved for the time being more
reliable than the Khazar Kagan, for in 704 he provided Justinian with 15000
horsemen to attack Constantinople. The Byzantines had, after ten years, either
forgotten the darker sides of Justinian’s former rule, or else found their
present ruler even more intolerable, for they promptly rose against Tiberias
and reinstated Justinian on the throne. The Bulgar King was rewarded with “a
heap of gold coin which he measured with his Scythian whip” and went home (only
to get involved in a new war against Byzantium a few years later). lJustinian’s
second reign (704-711) proved even worse than the first; “he considered the
axe, the cord and the rack as the only instruments of royalty”.[22]
He became mentally unbalanced, obsessed with hatred against the inhabitants of
Cherson, where he had spent most of the bitter years of his exile, and sent an
expedition against the town. Some of Cherson’s leading citizens were burnt
alive, others drowned, and many prisoners taken, but this was not enough to
assuage Justinian’s lust for revenge, for he sent a second expedition with
orders to raze the city to the ground. However, this time his troops were
halted by a mighty Khazar army; whereupon Justinian’s representative in the
Crimea, a certain Bardanes, changed sides and joined the Khazars. The
demoralized Byzantine expeditionary force abjured its allegiance to Justinian
and elected Bardanes as Emperor, under the name of Philippicus. But since
Philippicus was in Khazar hands, the insurgents had to pay a heavy ransom to
the Kagan to get their new Emperor back. When the expeditionary force returned
to Constantinople, Justinian and his son were assassinated and Philippicus,
greeted as a liberator, was installed on the throne only to be deposed and
blinded a couple of years later. lThe point of this gory tale is to show the
influence which the Khazars at this stage exercised over the destinies of the
East Roman Empire — in addition to their role as defenders of the Caucasian
bulwark against the Muslims. Bardanes-Philippicus was an emperor of the
Khazars’ making, and the end of Justinian’s reign of terror was brought about
by his brother-in-law, the Kagan. To quote Dunlop: “It does not seem an
exaggeration to say that at this juncture the Khaquan was able practically to
give a new ruler to the Greek empire.”[23]
9
From the
chronological point of view, the next event to be discussed should be the
conversion of the Khazars to Judaism, around AD 740. But to see that remarkable
event in its proper perspective, one should have at least some sketchy idea of
the habits, customs and everyday life among the Khazars prior to the
conversion. lAlas, we have
no lively eyewitness reports, such as Priscus’s description of Attila’s court.
What we do have are mainly second-hand accounts and compilations by Byzantine
and Arab chroniclers, which are rather schematic and fragmentary — with two
exceptions. One is a letter, purportedly from a Khazar king, to be discussed in
Chapter 2; the other is a travelogue by an observant Arab traveller, Ibn
Fadlan, who — like Priscus — was a member of a diplomatic mission from a
civilized court to the Barbarians of the North. lThe court was that of the Caliph al Muktadir,
and the diplomatic mission travelled from Baghdad through Persia and Bukhara to
the land of the Volga Bulgars. The official pretext for this grandiose
expedition was a letter of invitation from the Bulgar king, who asked the
Caliph (a) for religious instructors to convert his people to Islam, and (b) to
build him a fortress which would enable him to defy his overlord, the King of
the Khazars. The invitation — which was no doubt prearranged by earlier
diplomatic contacts — also provided an opportunity to create goodwill among the
various Turkish tribes inhabiting territories through which the mission had to
pass, by preaching the message of the Koran and distributing huge amounts of
gold bakhshish. lThe opening paragraphs of our traveller’s account read:
This is the book of Ahmad ibn-Fadlan
ibn-al-Abbas, ibn-Rasid, ibn-Hammad, an official in the service of [General]
Muhammed ibn-Sulayman, the ambassador of [Caliph] al Muktadir to the King of
the Bulgars, in which he relates what he saw in the land of the Turks, the
Khazars, the Rus, the Bulgars, the Bashkirs and others, their varied kinds of
religion, the histories of their kings, and their conduct in many walks of
life. lThe letter of the King of the Bulgars reached the Commander of the
Faithful, al Muktadir; he asked him therein to send him someone to give him
religious instruction and acquaint him with the laws of Islam, to build him a
mosque and a pulpit so that he may carry out his mission of converting the
people all over his country; he also entreated the Caliph to build him a
fortress to defend himself against hostile kings.
Everything that the King asked for was granted by the Caliph. I was chosen to
read the Caliph’s message to the King, to hand over the gifts the Caliph sent
him, and to supervise the work of the teachers and interpreters of the
Law.…[There follow some details about the financing of the mission and names of
participants.] And so we started on Thursday the 11th Safar of the year 309
[June 21, AD 921] from the City of Peace [Baghdad, capital of the Caliphate].
The date of
the expedition, it will he noted, is much later than the events described in
the previous section. But as far as the customs and institutions of the
Khazars’ pagan neighbours are concerned, this probably makes not much
difference; and the glimpses we get of the life of these nomadic tribes convey
at least some idea of what life among the Khazars may have been during that
earlier period — before the conversion — when they adhered to a form of
Shamanism similar to that still practised by their neighbours in Ibn Fadlan’s
time. lThe progress of
the mission was slow and apparently uneventful until they reached Khwarizm, the
border province of the Caliphate south of the Sea of Aral. Here the governor in
charge of the province tried to stop them from proceeding further by arguing that
between his country and the kingdom of the Bulgars there were “a thousand
tribes of disbelievers” who were sure to kill them. In fact his attempts to
disregard the Caliph’s instructions to let the mission pass might have been due
to other motives: he realized that the mission was indirectly aimed against the
Khazars, with whom he maintained a flourishing trade and friendly relations. In
the end, however, he had to give in, and the mission was allowed to proceed to
Gurganj on the estuary of the Amu-Darya. Here they hibernated for three months,
because of the intense cold — a factor which looms large in many Arab
travellers’ tales:
The river was frozen for three months, we
looked at the landscape and thought that the gates of the cold Hell had been
opened for us. Verily I saw that the market place and the streets were totally
empty because of the cold.… Once, when I came out of the bath and got home, I
saw that my beard had frozen into a lump of ice, and I had to thaw it in front
of the fire. I stayed for some days in a house which was inside of another
house [compound?] and in which there stood a Turkish felt tent, and I lay
inside the tent wrapped in clothes and furs, but nevertheless my cheeks often
froze to the cushion.…
Around the
middle of February the thaw set in. The mission arranged to join a mighty
caravan of 5000 men and 3000 pack animals to cross the northern steppes, and
bought the necessary supplies: camels, skin boats made of camel hides for
crossing rivers, bread, millet and spiced meat for three months. The natives
warned them about the even more frightful cold in the north, and advised them
what clothes to wear:
So each of us put on a Kurtak, [camisole] over
that a woollen Kaftan, over that a buslin, [fur-lined coat] over that a burka
[fur coat]; and a fur cap, under which only the eyes could be seen; a simple
pair of underpants, and a lined pair, and over them the trousers; house shoes
of kaymuht [shagreen leather] and over these also another pair of boots; and
when one of us mounted a camel, he was unable to move because of his clothes.
Ibn Fadlan,
the fastidious Arab, liked neither the climate nor the people of Khwarizm:
They are, in respect of their language and
constitution, the most repulsive of men. Their language is like the chatter of
starlings. At a day’s journey there is a village called Ardkwa whose
inhabitants are called Kardals; their language sounds entirely like the
croaking of frogs.
They left
on March 3 and stopped for the night in a caravanserai called Zamgan — the
gateway to the territory of the Ghuzz Turks. From here onward the mission was
in foreign land, “entrusting our fate to the all-powerful and exalted God”.
During one of the frequent snow-storms, Ibn Fadlan rode next to a Turk, who
complained: “What does the Ruler want from us? He is killing us with cold. If
we knew what he wants we would give it to him.” Ibn Fadlan: “All he wants is
that you people should say: “There is no God save Allah”.” The Turk laughed:
“If we knew that it is so, we should say so.” lThere are many such incidents, which Ibn Fadlan
reports without appreciating the independence of mind which they reflect. Nor
did the envoy of the Baghdad court appreciate the nomadic tribesmen’s
fundamental contempt for authority. The following episode also occurred in the
country of the powerful Ghuzz Turks, who paid tribute to the Khazars and,
according to some sources, were closely related to them:[24]
The next morning one of the Turks met us. He
was ugly in build, dirty in appearance, contemptible in manners, base in
nature; and we were moving through a heavy rain. Then he said: “Halt.” Then the
whole caravan of 3000 animals and 5000 men halted. Then he said: “Not a single
one of you is allowed to go on.” We halted then, obeying his orders.
Then we said to him: “We are friends of the Kudarkin [Viceroy]”. He began to
laugh and said: “Who is the Kudarkin? I shit on his beard.” Then he said:
“Bread.” I gave him a few loaves of bread. He took them and said: “Continue
your journey; I have taken pity on you.”
The
democratic methods of the Ghuzz, practised when a decision had to be taken,
were even more bewildering to the representative of an authoritarian theocracy:
They are nomads and have houses of felt. They
stay for a while in one place and then move on. One can see their tents
dispersed here and there all over the place according to nomadic custom.
Although they lead a hard life, they behave like donkeys that have lost their
way. They have no religion which would link them to God, nor are they guided by
reason; they do not worship anything. Instead, they call their headmen lords;
when one of them consults his chieftain, he asks: “O lord, what shall I do in
this or that matter?” The course of action they adopt is decided by taking
counsel among themselves; but when they have decided on a measure and are ready
to carry it through, even the humblest and lowliest among them can come and
disrupt that decision.
The sexual
mores of the Ghuzz — and other tribes — were a remarkable mixture of liberalism
and savagery:
Their women wear no veils in the presence of
their men or strangers. Nor do the women cover any parts of their bodies in the
presence of people. One day we stayed at the place of a Ghuzz and were sitting
around; his wife was also present. As we conversed, the woman uncovered her
private parts and scratched them, and we all saw it. Thereupon we covered our
faces and said: “May God forgive me.” The husband laughed and said to the
interpreter: “Tell them we uncover it in your presence so that you may see and
restrain yourselves; but it cannot be attained. This is better than when it is
covered up and yet attainable.” Adultery is alien to them; yet when they
discover that someone is an adulterer they split him in two halves. This they
do by bringing together the branches of two trees, tie him to the branches and
then let both trees go, so that the man tied to them is torn in two.
He does not
say whether the same punishment was meted out to the guilty woman. Later on,
when talking about the Volga Bulgars, he describes an equally savage method of
splitting adulterers into two, applied to both men and women. Yet, he notes
with astonishment, Bulgars of both sexes swim naked in their rivers, and have
as little bodily shame as the Ghuzz. lAs for homosexuality — which in Arab countries was taken as a matter of
course — Ibn Fadlan says that it is “regarded by the Turks as a terrible sin”.
But in the only episode he relates to prove his point, the seducer of a
“beardless youth” gets away with a fine of 400 sheep. lAccustomed to the splendid baths of Baghdad,
our traveller could not get over the dirtiness of the Turks. “The Ghuzz do not
wash themselves after defacating or urinating, nor do they bathe after seminal
pollution or on other occasions. They refuse to have anything to do with water,
particularly in winter.…” lWhen the Ghuzz commander-in-chief took off his luxurious coat of brocade
to don a new coat the mission had brought him, they saw that his underclothes
were “fraying apart from dirt, for it is their custom never to take off the
garment they wear close to their bodies until it disintegrates”. Another
Turkish tribe, the Bashkirs, ‘shave their beards and eat their lice. They
search the folds of their undergarments and crack the lice with their teeth.”
When Ibn Fadlan watched a Bashkir do this, the latter remarked to him: “They
are delicious.” lAll in all, it is not an engaging picture. Our fastidious traveller’s
contempt for the barbarians was profound. But it was only aroused by their
uncleanliness and what he considered as indecent exposure of the body; the
savagery of their punishments and sacrificial rites leave him quite
indifferent. Thus he describes the Bulgars’ punishment for manslaughter with
detached interest, without his otherwise frequent expressions of indignation:
“They make for him [the delinquent] a box of birchwood, put him inside, nail
the lid on the box, put three loaves of bread and a can of water beside it, and
suspend the box between two tall poles, saying: “We have put him between heaven
and earth, that he may be exposed to the sun and the rain, and that the deity
may perhaps forgive him.” And so he remains suspended until time lets him decay
and the winds blow him away.” lHe also describes, with similar aloofness, the funeral sacrifice of hundreds
of horses and herds of other animals, and the gruesome ritual killing of a Rus
slave girl at her master’s bier. About pagan religions he has little to say.
But the Bashkirs’ phallus cult arouses his interest, for he asks through his
interpreter one of the natives the reason for his worshipping a wooden penis,
and notes down his reply: “Because I issued from something similar and know of
no other creator who made me.” He then adds that ‘some of them [the Bashkirs]
believe in twelve deities, a god for winter, another for summer, one for the
rain, one for the wind, one for the trees, one for men, one for the horse, one
for water, one for the night, one for the day, a god of death and one for the
earth; while that god who dwells in the sky is the greatest among them, but
takes counsel with the others and thus all are contented with each other’s
doings.… We have seen a group among them which worships snakes, and a group
which worships fish, and a group which worships cranes.…” lAmong the Volga Bulgars, Ibn Fadlan
found a strange custom:
When they observe a man who excels through
quickwittedness and knowledge, they say: “for this one it is more befitting to
serve our Lord.” They seize him, put a rope round his neck and hang him on a
tree where he is left until he rots away.
Commenting
on this passage, the Turkish orientalist Zeki Validi Togan, undisputed
authority on Ibn Fadlan and his times, has this to say:[25]
“There is nothing mysterious about the cruel treatment meted out by the Bulgars
to people who were overly clever. It was based on the simple, sober reasoning
of the average citizens who wanted only to lead what they considered to be a
normal life, and to avoid any risk or adventure into which the “genius” might
lead them.” He then quotes a Tartar proverb: “If you know too much, they will
hang you, and if you are too modest, they will trample on you.” He concludes
that the victim ‘should not be regarded simply as a learned person, but as an
unruly genius, one who is too clever by half”. This leads one to believe that
the custom should be regarded as a measure of social defence against change, a
punishment of non-conformists and potential innovators.
But a few lines further down he gives a different interpretation:
Ibn Fadlan describes not the simple murder of
too-clever people, but one of their pagan customs: human sacrifice, by which
the most excellent among men were offered as sacrifice to God. This ceremony
was probably not carried out by common Bulgars, but by their Tabibs, or
medicine men, i.e. their shamans, whose equivalents among the Bulgars and the
Rus also wielded power of life and death over the people, in the name of their
cult. According to Ibn Rusta, the medicine men of the Rus could put a rope
round the neck of anybody and hang him on a tree to invoke the mercy of God.
When this was done, they said: “This is an offering to God.”
Perhaps
both types of motivation were mixed together: ‘since sacrifice is a necessity,
let’s sacrifice the trouble-makers”. lWe shall see that human sacrifice was also practised by the Khazars —
including the ritual killing of the king at the end of his reign. We may assume
that many other similarities existed between the customs of the tribes
described by Ibn Fadlan and those of the Khazars. Unfortunately he was debarred
from visiting the Khazar capital and had to rely on information collected in
territories under Khazar dominion, and particularly at the Bulgar court.
10
It took the
Caliph’s mission nearly a year (from June 21, 921, to May 12, 922) to reach its
destination, the land of the Volga Bulgars. The direct route from Baghdad to
the Volga leads across the Caucasus and Khazaria — to avoid the latter, they
had to make the enormous detour round the eastern shore of the “Khazar Sea”,
the Caspian. Even so, they were constantly reminded of the proximity of the
Khazars and its potential dangers. lA characteristic episode took place during their sojourn with the Ghuzz
army chief (the one with the disreputable underwear). They were at first well
received, and given a banquet. But later the Ghuzz leaders had second thoughts
because of their relations with the Khazars. The chief assembled the leaders to
decide what to do:
The most distinguished and influential among
them was the Tarkhan; he was lame and blind and had a maimed hand. The Chief
said to them: “These are the messengers of the King of the Arabs, and I do not
feel authorized to let them proceed without consulting you.” Then the Tarkhan
spoke: “This is a matter the like of which we have never seen or heard before;
never has an ambassador of the Sultan travelled through our country since we
and our ancestors have been here. Without doubt the Sultan is deceiving us;
these people he is really sending to the Khazars, to stir them up against us.
The best will be to cut each of these messengers into two and to confiscate all
their belongings.” Another one said: “No, we should take their belongings and
let them run back naked whence they came.” Another said: “No, the Khazar king
holds hostages from us, let us send these people to ransom them.”
They argued
among themselves for seven days, while Ibn Fadlan and his people feared the
worst. In the end the Ghuzz let them go; we are not told why. Probably Ibn
Fadlan succeeded in persuading them that his mission was in fact directed against the Khazars. The Ghuzz had
earlier on fought with the Khazars against another Turkish tribe, the
Pechenegs, but more recently had shown a hostile attitude; hence the hostages
the Khazars took. lThe Khazar menace loomed large on the horizon all along the journey.
North of the Caspian they made another huge detour before reaching the Bulgar
encampment somewhere near the confluence of the Volga and the Kama. There the
King and leaders of the Bulgars were waiting for them in a state of acute
anxiety. As soon as the ceremonies and festivities were over, the King sent for
Ibn Fadlan to discuss business. He reminded Ibn Fadlan in forceful language
(“his voice sounded as if he were speaking from the bottom of a barrel”) of the
main purpose of the mission to wit, the money to be paid to him ‘so that I
shall be able to build a fortress to protect me from the Jews who subjugated
me”. Unfortunately that money — a sum of four thousand dinars — had not been
handed over to the mission, owing to some complicated matter of red tape; it
was to be sent later on. On learning this, the King — “a personality of
impressive appearance, broad and corpulent” — seemed close to despair. He
suspected the mission of having defrauded the money: ““What would you think of
a group of men who are given a sum of money destined for a people that is weak,
besieged, and oppressed, yet these men defraud the money?” I replied: “This is
forbidden, those men would be evil.” He asked: “Is this a matter of opinion or
a matter of general consent?” I replied: “A matter of general consent.”” lGradually Ibn Fadlan succeeded in
convincing the King that the money was only delayed,
but not to allay his anxieties. The King kept repeating that the whole point of
the invitation was the building of the fortress “because he was afraid of the
King of the Khazars”. And apparently he had every reason to be afraid, as Ibn
Fadlan relates:
The Bulgar King’s son was held as a hostage by
the King of the Khazars. It was reported to the King of the Khazars that the
Bulgar King had a beautiful daughter. He sent a messenger to sue for her. The
Bulgar King used pretexts to refuse his consent. The Khazar sent another
messenger and took her by force, although he was a Jew and she a Muslim; but
she died at his court. The Khazar sent another messenger and asked for the
Bulgar King’s other daughter. But in the very hour when the messenger reached
him, the Bulgar King hurriedly married her to the Prince of the Askil, who was
his subject, for fear that the Khazar would take her too by force, as he had
done with her sister. This alone was the reason which made the Bulgar King
enter into correspondence with the Caliph and ask him to have a fortress built
because he feared the King of the Khazars.
It sounds
like a refrain. Ibn Fadlan also specifies the annual tribute the Bulgar King
had to pay the Khazars: one sable fur from each household in his realm. Since
the number of Bulgar households (i.e., tents) is estimated to have been around
50000, and since Bulgar sable fur was highly valued all over the world, the
tribute was a handsome one.
11
What Ibn
Fadlan has to tell us about the Khazars is based — as already mentioned — on
intelligence collected in the course of his journey, but mainly at the Bulgar
court. Unlike the rest of his narrative, derived from vivid personal
observations, the pages on the Khazars contain second-hand, potted information,
and fall rather flat. Moreover, the sources of his information are biased, in
view of the Bulgar King’s understandable dislike of his Khazar overlord — while
the Caliphate’s resentment of a kingdom embracing a rival religion need hardly
be stressed. lThe narrative
switches abruptly from a description of the Rus court to the Khazar court:
Concerning the King of the Khazars, whose
title is Kagan, he appears in public only once every four months. They call him
the Great Kagan. His deputy is called Kagan Bek; he is the one who commands and
supplies the armies, manages the affairs of state, appears in public and leads
in war. The neighbouring kings obey his orders. He enters every day into the
presence of the Great Kagan, with deference and modesty, barefooted, carrying a
stick of wood in his hand. He makes obeisance, lights the stick, and when it
has burned down, he sits down on the throne on the King’s right. Next to him in
rank is a man called the K-nd-r Kagan, and next to that one, the Jawshyghr
Kagan. lIt is the custom of the Great Kagan not to have social intercourse
with people, and not to talk with them, and to admit nobody to his presence
except those we have mentioned. The power to bind or release, to mete out
punishment, and to govern the country belongs to his deputy, the Kagan Bek. lIt is a
further custom of the Great Kagan that when he dies a great building is built
for him, containing twenty chambers, and in each chamber a grave is dug for
him. Stones are broken until they become like powder, which is spread over the
floor and covered with pitch. Beneath the building flows a river, and this
river is large and rapid. They divert the river water over the grave and they
say that this is done so that no devil, no man, no worm and no creeping
creatures can get at him. After he has been buried, those who buried him are
decapitated, so that nobody may know in which of the chambers is his grave. The
grave is called “Paradise” and they have a saying: “He has entered Paradise”.
All the chambers are spread with silk brocade interwoven with threads of gold. lIt is the
custom of the King of the Khazars to have twenty-five wives; each of the wives
is the daughter of a king who owes him allegiance. He takes them by consent or
by force. He has sixty girls for concubines, each of them of exquisite beauty.
Ibn Fadlan
then proceeds to give a rather fanciful description of the Kagan’s harem, where
each of the eighty-five wives and concubines has a “palace of her own”, and an
attendant or eunuch who, at the King’s command, brings her to his alcove
“faster than the blinking of an eye. lAfter a few more dubious remarks about the “customs” of the Khazar Kagan
(we shall return to them later), Ibn Fadlan at last provides some factual
information about the country:
The King has a great city on the river Itil
[Volga] on both banks. On one bank live the Muslims, on the other bank the King
and his court. The Muslims are governed by one of the King’s officials who is
himself a Muslim. The law-suits of the Muslims living in the Khazar capital and
of visiting merchants from abroad are looked after by that official. Nobody
else meddles in their affairs or sits in judgment over them.
Ibn
Fadlan’s travel report, as far as it is preserved, ends with the words:
The Khazars and their King are all Jews.
The Bulgars and all their neighbours are subject to him. They treat him with
worshipful obedience. Some are of the opinion that Gog and Magog are the
Khazars.
12
I have
quoted Ibn Fadlan’s odyssey at some length, not so much because of the scant
information he provides about the Khazars themselves, but because of the light
it throws on the world which surrounded them, the stark barbarity of the people
amidst whom they lived, reflecting their own past, prior to the conversion.
For, by the time of Ibn Fadlan’s visit to the Bulgars, Khazaria was a
surprisingly modern country compared to its neighbours. lThe contrast is evidenced by the
reports of other Arab historians,
and is present on every level, from housing to the administration of justice.
The Bulgars still live exclusively in tents, including the King, although the
royal tent is “very large, holding a thousand people or more”.[26]
On the other hand, the Khazar Kagan inhabits a castle built of burnt brick, his
ladies are said to inhabit “palaces with roofs of teak”,[27]
and the Muslims have several mosques, among them “one whose minaret rises above
the royal castle”.[28]
lIn the fertile regions, their farms
and cultivated areas stretched out continuously over sixty or seventy miles.
They also had extensive vineyards. Thus Ibn Hawkal: “In Kozr [Khazaria] there
is a certain city called Asmid [Samandar] which has so many orchards and
gardens that from Darband to Serir the whole country is covered with gardens
and plantations belonging to this city. It is said that there are about forty
thousand of them. Many of these produce grapes.”[29]
lThe region north of the Caucasus was
extremely fertile. In AD 968 Ibn Hawkal met a man who had visited it after a
Russian raid: “He said there is not a pittance left for the poor in any
vineyard or garden, not a leaf on the bough.… [But] owing to the excellence of
their land and the abundance of its produce it will not take three years until
it becomes again what it was.” Caucasian wine is still a delight, consumed in
vast quantities in the Soviet Union. lHowever, the royal treasuries’ main source of income was foreign trade.
The sheer volume of the trading caravans plying their way between Central Asia
and the Volga-Ural region is indicated by Ibn Fadlan: we remember that the
caravan his mission joined at Gurganj consisted of “5000 men and 3000 pack
animals”. Making due allowance for exaggeration, it must still have been a
mighty caravan, and we do not know how many of these were at any time on the
move. Nor what goods they transported — although textiles, dried fruit, honey,
wax and spices seem to have played an important part. A second major trade
route led across the Caucasus to Armenia, Georgia, Persia and Byzantium. A
third consisted of the increasing traffic of Rus merchant fleets down the Volga
to the eastern shores of the Khazar Sea, carrying mainly precious furs much in
demand among the Muslim aristocracy, and slaves from the north, sold at the
slave market of Itil. On all these transit goods, including the slaves, the
Khazar ruler levied a tax of ten per cent. Adding to this the tribute paid by
Bulgars, Magyars, Burtas and so on, one realizes that Khazaria was a prosperous
country — but also that its prosperity depended to a large extent on its
military power, and the prestige it conveyed on its tax collectors and customs
officials. lApart from the
fertile regions of the south, with their vineyards and orchards, the country
was poor in natural resources. One Arab historian (Istakhri) says that the only
native product they exported was isinglass. This again is certainly an
exaggeration, yet the fact remains that their main commercial activity seems to
have consisted in re-exporting goods brought in from abroad. Among these goods,
honey and candle-wax particularly caught the Arab chroniclers’ imagination.
Thus Muqaddasi: “In Khazaria, sheep, honey and Jews exist in large quantities.”[30]
It is true that one source — the Darband Namah
— mentions gold or silver mines in Khazar territory, but their location has not
been ascertained. On the other hand, several of the sources mention Khazar
merchandise seen in Baghdad, and the presence of Khazar merchants in
Constantinople, Alexandria and as far afield as Samara and Fergana. lThus Khazaria was by no means
isolated from the civilized world; compared to its tribal neighbours in the
north it was a cosmopolitan country, open to all sorts of cultural and
religious influences, yet jealously defending its independence against the two
ecclesiastical world powers. We shall see that this attitude prepared the
ground for the coup de théâtre — or coup d”état — which established Judaism
as the state religion. lThe arts and crafts seem to have flourished, including haute couture. When the future Emperor
Constantine V married the Khazar Kagan’s daughter (see above, section 1), she
brought with her dowry a splendid dress which so impressed the Byzantine court
that it was adopted as a male
ceremonial robe; they called it tzitzakion,
derived from the Khazar-Turkish pet-name of the Princess, which was Chichak or
“flower” (until she was baptized Eirene). “Here,” Toynbee comments, “we have an
illuminating fragment of cultural history.”[31]
When another Khazar princess married the Muslim governor of Armenia, her
cavalcade contained, apart from attendants and slaves, ten tents mounted on
wheels, “made of the finest silk, with gold- and silver-plated doors, the
floors covered with sable furs. Twenty others carried the gold and silver
vessels and other treasures which were her dowry”.[32]
The Kagan himself travelled in a mobile tent even more luxuriously equipped,
carrying on its top a pomegranate of gold.
13
Khazar art,
like that of the Bulgars and Magyars, was mainly imitative, modelled on
Persian-Sassanide patterns. The Soviet archaeologist Bader[33]
emphasized the role of the Khazars in the spreading of Persian-style
silver-ware towards the north. Some of these finds may have been re-exported by
the Khazars, true to their role as middlemen; others were imitations made in
Khazar workshops — the ruins of which have been traced near the ancient Khazar
fortress of Sarkel.
The jewellery unearthed within the confines of the fortress was of local
manufacture.[34] The Swedish
archaeologist T. J. Arne mentions ornamental plates, clasps and buckles found
as far as Sweden, of Sassanide and Byzantine inspiration, manufactured in
Khazaria or territories under their influence.[35]
lThus the Khazars were the principal
intermediaries in the spreading of Persian and Byzantine art among the
semi-barbaric tribes of Eastern Europe. After his exhaustive survey of the
archaeological and documentary evidence (mostly from Soviet sources), Bartha
concludes:
The sack of Tiflis by the Khazars, presumably
in the spring of AD 629, is relevant to our subject.… [During the period of
occupation] the Kagan sent out inspectors to supervise the manufacture of gold,
silver, iron and copper products. Similarly the bazaars, trade in general, even
the fisheries, were under their control.… [Thus] in the course of their
incessant Caucasian campaigns during the seventh century, the Khazars made
contact with a culture which had grown out of the Persian Sassanide tradition.
Accordingly, the products of this culture spread to the people of the steppes
not only by trade, but by means of plunder and even by taxation.... All the
tracks that we have assiduously followed in the hope of discovering the origins
of Magyar art in the tenth century have led us back to Khazar territory.[36]
The last
remark of the Hungarian scholar refers to the spectacular archaeological finds
known as the “Treasure of Nagyszentmiklos” (see frontispiece). The treasure,
consisting of twentythree gold vessels, dating from the tenth century, was
found in 1791 in the vicinity of the village of that name.
Bartha points out that the figure of the “victorious Prince” dragging a
prisoner along by his hair, and the mythological scene at the back of the
golden jar, as well as the design of other ornamental objects, show close
affinities with the finds in Novi Pazar in Bulgaria and in Khazar Sarkel. As
both Magyars and Bulgars were under Khazar suzerainty for protracted periods,
this is not very surprising, and the warrior, together with the rest of the
treasure, gives us at least some idea of the arts practised within the Khazar
Empire (the Persian and Byzantine influence is predominant, as one would
expect). lOne school of Hungarian
archaeologists maintains that the tenth century gold- and silversmiths working
in Hungary were actually Khazars.[37]
As we shall see later on (see III, 7, 8), when the Magyars migrated to Hungary
in 896 they were led by a dissident Khazar tribe, known as the Kabars, who
settled with them in their new home. The Kabar-Khazars were known as skilled
gold and silversmiths; the (originally more primitive) Magyars only acquired
these skills in their new country. Thus the theory of the Khazar origin of at
least some of the archaeological finds in Hungary is not implausible — as will
become clearer in the light of the Magyar-Khazar nexus discussed later on.
14
Whether the
warrior on the golden jar is of Magyar or Khazar origin, he helps us to
visualise the appearance of a cavalryman of that period, perhaps belonging to
an elite regiment. Masudi says that in the Khazar army ‘seven thousand of them
ride with the King, archers with breast plates, helmets, and coats of mail.
Some are lancers, equipped and armed like the Muslims.… None of the kings in
this part of the world has a regular standing army except the King of the
Khazars.” And Ibn Hawkal: “This king has twelve thousand soldiers in his
service, of whom when one dies, another person is immediately chosen in his
place.” lHere we have
