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PART 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.
They 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.
To the hostile league of Chosroes with the Avars, the Roman emperor opposed the useful and honourable alliance of the Turks.
(By “Turks", as the sequel shows, he means the Khazars).
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 a 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 Emperoras a quid pro quo?
There 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".
This 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.
PART 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 grace 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.
In 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 (Now called the Kasbek pass), or bypassed through the defile of Darband, along the Caspian shore.
This 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.
For 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 (ad 669, 673-8, 717-18), 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.
From 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.
The 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.
At 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.
The 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.
(The probable date for the conversion is around AD 740 - see below).
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.
It 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.
Thus 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.
Artamonov is of the same opinion:
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:
"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."
Marwan 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.
PART 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.
In 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:
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:
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.
(The treatment meted out to Justinian was actually regarded as an act of leniency: the general tendency of the period was to humanize the criminal law by substituting mutilation for capital punishment amputation of the hand [for thefts] or nose [fornication, etc], being the most frequent form.
Byzantine rulers were also given to the practice of blinding dangerous rivals, while magnanimously sparing their lives).
During 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 dethroned 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).
Justinian'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".
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.
The 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."
PART 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.
Alas, 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.
The 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.
The opening paragraphs of our traveller's account read (The following quotations are based on Zeki Validi Togan's German translation of the Arabic text and the English translation of extracts by Blake and Frye, both slightly paraphrased in the interest of readability):
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.
The 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 (i.e., as later passages show, the King of the Khazars).
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.
The 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 snowstorms, 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."
There 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:
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.
(Obviously the leaders of the great caravan had to avoid at all costs a conflict with the Ghuzz tribesmen).
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: "0 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.
As 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.
Accustomed 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 . . .".
When 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".
All 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."
He 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 (Rus: the Viking founders of the early Russian settlements - see below, Chapter III.) 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 . .
Among 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:
"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.
(In support of his argument, the author adduces Turkish and Arabic quotations in the original, without translation - a nasty habit common among modern experts in the field.)
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".
We 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.
PART 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.
A 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.
The 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."
Gradually Ibn Fadlan succeeded in convincing the King that the money was only delayed, (Apparently it did arrive at some time, as there is no further mention of the matter), 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.
This series of posts will insure that these free thinkers' works live on in living memory.
If only a few.
There is a reason these books are not taught in the modern skools.
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