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Part 1 RISE AND FALL OF THE KHAZARS
Rise
"In Khazaria, sheep, honey, and Jews exist in large quantities."
Muqaddasi, Descriptio Imperii Moslemici (tenth century).
PART 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 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."
The 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.
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.
Ironically, 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.
A 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 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.
What 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.
The 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.
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 Eastern Europe . . .
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.
"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 ..."
Thus Cassell, 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, (From circa 372, when the Huns first started to move westward from the steppes north of the Caspian, to the death of Attila in 453), 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, with houses connected by galleries to huge cattle sheds, sheep-pens and stables (these measured 3-31/2 X 10-14 metres and were supported by columns.
Some remaining ox-ploughs showed remarkable craftsmanship; so did the preserved artifacts - buckles, clasps, ornamental saddle plates.
Of particular interest were the foundations, sunk into the ground, of houses built in a circular shape.
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.
The 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 semicircular 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.
("To this day, the Muslims, recalling the Arab terror of the Khazar raids, still call the Caspian, a sea as shifting as the nomads, and washing to their steppe-land parts, Bahr-ul-Khazar "the Khazar Sea"."
(W. E. 0. Allen, A History of the Georgian People, London 1952).)
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:
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.
PART 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 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."
After 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".
An Armenian writer refers to "the horrible multitude of Khazars with insolent, broad, lashless faces and long falling hair, like women".
Lastly, the Arab geographer Istakhri, one of the main Arab sources, has this to say:
"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 ."
This 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 lowerstrata 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.
The 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.
(It is amusing to note that while the British in World War I used the term "Hun" in the same pejorative sense, in my native Hungary schoolchildren were taught to look up to "our glorious Hun forefathers" with patriotic pride.
An exclusive rowing club in Budapest was called "Hunnia", and Attila is still a popular first name).
In 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.
(But not the Magyars, whose language belongs to the Finno-Ugrian language group).
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.
The 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; (Huszaris probably derived via the Serbo-Croat from Greek references to Khazars), 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 M iddle Ages.
PART 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.
One of the earliest factual references to the Khazars occurs in a Syriac chronicle by "Zacharia Rhetor", (It was actually written by an anonymous compiler and named after an earlier Greek historian whose work is summarized in the compilation), 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 "Akatzirs" are also mentioned as a nation of warriors by Jordanes, the great Goth historian, a century later, and the so- called "Geographer of Ravenna" expressly identifies them with the Khazars.
This is accepted by most modern authorities.
[A notable exception was Marquart, but see Dunlop's refutation of his views, op. cit., pp. 7f.J Cassel, for instance, points out that Priscus's pronunciation and spelling follows the Armenian and Georgian: Khazir).
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.
Priscus'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.
PART 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.
But 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 (Or Kaqan or Khaqan or Chagan, etc.
Orientalists have strong idiosyncrasies about spelling [see Appendix I], I shall stick to Kagan as the least offensive to Western eyes.
The h in Khazar, however, is general usage), - 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.
(This, however, did not prevent the name "Turk" still being applied indiscriminately to any nomadic tribe of the steppes as a euphemism for Barbarian, or a synonym for "Hun".
It led to much confusion in the interpretation of ancient sources).
The 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, 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.
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