Khazars

• 1. Introduction

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  The Khazars were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who, in the late 6th century, built a trading empire across the steppes of what is now southern Russia, southern Ukraine, and western Kazakhstan. For roughly three centuries, from around 650 to 965, they held the lands from the Volga-Don steppes to eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus. They commanded the western edge of the Silk Road. They stood as a crossroads between China, the Middle East, and Kievan Rus'.

  No record survives in the Khazar language. The state was multilingual and polyethnic, so even its origins stay uncertain. Their native faith is thought to have been Tengrism, the worship of the sky god Tengri. Yet their population held pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims at once. At some point the ruling elite did something rare among steppe peoples. They converted to Rabbinic Judaism. How a Turkic warrior aristocracy came to that choice, how it governed a realm of two dozen tribes, and why a 19th-century myth attached itself to its name are the questions that follow. The Fars-Nama, written around 1100, preserves a telling legend. The Sasanian emperor Khosrau I supposedly set three thrones beside his own, one for the King of China, one for the King of Byzantium, and one for the King of the Khazars.

• 2. Roots In The Steppe

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  Priscus recorded Oghuric-speaking peoples living in the western Eurasian Steppe as early as 463. The Saragurs, Oghurs, Onogurs, and Bulgars had once belonged to the Tiele confederation. Driven west by the Sabirs, who themselves fled the Pannonian Avars, they flowed into the Volga-Caspian-Pontic zone from around the 4th century. They appear to stem from Mongolia and South Siberia, scattered in the wake of the collapsing Hunnic-Xiongnu polities.

  In 552 a tribal federation led by Turks overthrew the Rouran Khaganate and founded the First Turkic Khaganate, whose self-designation was Tur(u)k. Their armies had penetrated the Volga by 549, ejecting the Avars, who fled to the sanctuary of the Pannonian Basin. By 568 these Goktürks were probing for an alliance with Byzantium against the Sasanian Empire. The ruling family of the later Khazar confederation may have descended from the Ashina tribe, though the scholar Constantin Zuckerman treats that role with skepticism. Peter Golden notes that Chinese and Arabic reports are nearly identical, and he conjectures their leader may have been Irbis Seguy, who lost power or was killed around 651.

  A succession dispute followed the death of Taspar Qaghan and split the leadership. By the first decades of the 7th century, Tong Yabghu Qaghan had stabilised the Western division. After his death the Western Turkic Qaganate dissolved under pressure from Tang dynasty armies and split into two federations of five tribes each, known together as the Ten Arrows, the On Oq. To the west, Old Great Bulgaria arose under Kubrat. The Bulgars and Khazars then fought for supremacy on the western steppe. With Khazar ascendancy, the Bulgars either submitted or, under Kubrat's son Asparukh, moved west across the Danube around 679 to found the First Bulgarian Empire in the Balkans.

• 3. The Sacred King

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  The greater Khazar king ruled by qut, the heavenly mandate to rule, yet he barely ruled at all in the daily sense. Khazaria developed a diarchy typical among Turkic nomads, splitting power between a khagan-bek and a khagan. Arabic sources call the khagan-bek an isa. He managed and commanded the military. The greater king's role was sacral and remote, recruited from the Khazar house of notables.

  The initiation of that greater king was brutal. In the ritual he was nearly strangled until he declared the number of years he wished to reign. On the expiration of that span, the nobles would ritually kill him. Ahmad ibn Fadlan wrote of a maximum limit on a king's reign. If a khagan had ruled at least forty years, his courtiers judged his reasoning impaired by age and executed him. The deputy ruler approached the reclusive king barefoot, prostrate in the dust, lighting a piece of wood as a purifying fire and waiting to be summoned.

  Royal burial demanded its own elaborate care. At one period travellers had to dismount, bow before the ruler's tomb, and walk away on foot. Later the burial place was hidden entirely, a palatial structure called Paradise built over it and then concealed under rerouted river water to keep out evil spirits and later generations. Such a qoruq, a taboo royal ground, was typical of inner Asian peoples. Both the isa and the khagan converted to Rabbinic Judaism sometime in the 8th century, while the Persian traveller Ahmad ibn Rustah reports the rest probably kept the traditional religion.

• 4. Trade And Tribute

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  The hallmark of the Khazar economy was the import and export of foreign wares, and the revenue from taxing their transit. Historians call this stretch the Pax Khazarica, a period when the state became an international trading hub that let Western Eurasian merchants cross in safety. The realm also produced isinglass, and it built a self-sufficient domestic economy called the Saltovo, blending pastoralism, agriculture, the Volga's fishing stocks, and craft manufacture.

  The Khazar slave trade fed the Muslim market of the Abbasid Caliphate, one of its two great suppliers alongside the Iranian Samanid amirs. Captives taken in Viking raids on places like Ireland could be carried to Hedeby or Branno in Scandinavia, then sent via the Volga trade route to be sold for Arab silver dirhams and silk. Such goods have been found at Birka, Wollin, and Dublin. Through the 8th and 9th centuries this route ran through the Khazar Kaghanate, until the 10th century, when it shifted to Volga Bulgaria, Khwarazm, and the Samanid trade.

  A large irrigated greenbelt drew on channels from the Volga outside the capital. Meadows and vineyards stretched for some 20 farsakhs, about 60 miles. Tribute came from 25 to 30 tribes, levied as a sable skin, a squirrel pelt, a sword, or a dirham per hearth or ploughshare, or as hides, wax, honey, and livestock depending on the zone. Trade disputes went before a commercial tribunal in Atil of seven judges, two for each of the monotheistic communities and one for the pagans. By the 940s a shift in Islamic routes may have cut Khazar revenue by as much as 80 percent, crippling its ability to pay for its own defence.

• 5. Armies And Castes

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  When the bek sent out troops, they would not retreat under any circumstances; if defeated, the survivors were executed. At the height of empire the Khazars ran a centralised fiscal administration with a standing army of some 7,000-12,000 men, which could be doubled or tripled by inducting reserves from noble retinues. Other figures put the permanent army as high as one hundred thousand. They drew tribute from 25 to 30 nations across the territory between the Caucasus, the Aral Sea, the Ural Mountains, and the Ukrainian steppes.

  A Khwarazmian guard corps called the Arsiyah protected the Qagans. Unlike many local powers, the Khazars also hired mercenary soldiers, the junud murtaziqa named by al-Masudi. Armies were led by the khagan-bek and commanded by officers called tarkhans. Settlements were run by administrators known as tuduns, sometimes appointed even for a town nominally inside another polity's sphere, as with Byzantine settlements in southern Crimea.

  The 10th-century geographer al-Istakhri described a striking division between White Khazars and Black Khazars. He claimed the White Khazars were handsome with reddish hair, white skin, and blue eyes, while the Black Khazars were swarthy, verging on deep black as if they were some kind of Indian. Mainstream scholars hold that Istakhri was confused by names, since many Turkic nations had a political division between a white ruling caste and a black class of commoners. Studies of skulls excavated at Sarkel revealed individuals of Slavic, other European, and a few Mongolian types. Genetic studies of nine skeletons from elite military burial mounds in the modern Rostov region, published in 2019 and 2021, found mixed origins, with East Asian features dominating at about 70 percent in the early Khazars, and no genetic connection to Ashkenazi Jews.

• 6. Marriages With Byzantium

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  In 695 the deposed emperor Justinian II, nicknamed the slit-nosed after his mutilation, was exiled to Cherson in Crimea, where a Khazar tudun presided. He escaped into Khazar territory around 704 or 705 and won asylum from khagan Busir Glavan, who gave him his sister in marriage. She took the name Theodora. When the usurper Tiberius III bribed Busir to kill Justinian, Theodora warned him, and Justinian fled, murdering two Khazar officials as he went. He regained the throne with the help of the Bulgarian Khan Tervel, then sent for Theodora and crowned her Augusta.

  Leo III made a similar alliance against the Muslim Arabs. He married his son, the future Constantine V, to the daughter of khagan Bihar in 732, a princess called Tzitzak, who on converting to Christianity took the name Irene. Their son, the future Leo IV, bore the nickname the Khazar. The dynastic link to the Byzantine throne ended with the unpopular Constantine VI.

  Byzantine policy toward the steppe was to keep its peoples fighting among themselves. The Byzantines called Khazaria Tourkia and by the 9th century called the Khazars Turks. Khazar and Farghanian mercenaries served in the imperial Hetaireia bodyguard after its formation in 840, a position that could be openly purchased for seven pounds of gold. Around 900 the alliance broke. Byzantium began encouraging the Alans to attack Khazaria and weaken its hold on Crimea and the Caucasus, while courting the rising Rus' it hoped to convert.

• 7. Wars With The Caliphate

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  By 640 Muslim forces had reached Armenia, and in 642 they launched their first raid across the Caucasus under Abd ar-Rahman ibn Rabiah. In 652 Arab forces advanced on the Khazar capital Balanjar but were defeated with heavy losses, both sides using catapults according to al-Tabari. The First Muslim Civil War then stayed the Arab hand until the early 8th century.

  The conflict escalated in 722 when 30,000 Khazars invaded Armenia and inflicted a crushing defeat. Caliph Yazid II sent 25,000 troops north, recovered Derbent, and stormed Balanjar, killing or enslaving most of its inhabitants. In 724 the general al-Jarrah ibn Abdallah al-Hakami beat the Khazars in a long battle between the rivers Cyrus and Araxes, then took Tiflis. A prince named Barjik struck back, invading Iranian Azerbaijan in 730 and killing al-Jarrah at Ardabil. Barjik was defeated and killed the next year at Mosul, where he had directed his forces from a throne mounted with al-Jarrah's severed head.

  In 737 Marwan ibn Muhammad entered Khazar territory under the guise of seeking a truce, then launched a surprise attack. The Qaghan fled north and the Khazars surrendered. The Qagan accepted terms including conversion to Islam, but internal Umayyad instability and Byzantine support undid the agreement within three years. Some argue the Khazar turn to Judaism, perhaps as early as 740, was in part a re-assertion of independence from both Byzantium and the Caliphate. Warfare ceased for more than two decades after 737. In 762-764 the Khazar general Ras Tarkhan devastated Albania, Armenia, and Iberia and captured Tiflis, after a Khazar bride sent to an Abbasid noble died and her attendants returned convinced she had been poisoned.

• 8. The Conversion And Its Myth

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  King Bulan, the conversion stories say, drove out the sorcerers and received angelic visitations urging him to find the true religion. With his vizier he travelled to the desert mountains of Warsan by a seashore, to a cave on the plain of Tiyul where Jews used to keep the Sabbath, and there he was circumcised. He then convened a royal debate among exponents of the three Abrahamic religions and chose Judaism. Many scholars place this around 740. The details mix Judaic and Turkic threads, for a Turkic origin myth tells of an ancestral cave where the Ashina were conceived from a human ancestor and a wolf.

  Numismatic evidence points to the same era. Coins dated 837 or 838 bear the inscriptions Land of the Khazars and Moses is the messenger of God, echoing the Islamic coin phrase. Christian of Stavelot, writing in the 860s or 870s, referred to the Gazari as circumcised and observing all the laws of Judaism. Between 954 and 961 Hasdai ibn Shaprut of Muslim Spain wrote to the ruler of Khazaria and received a reply from King Joseph, an exchange known as the Khazar Correspondence. Hasdai hoped to find a place on earth where harassed Israel could rule itself, and wrote he would forsake his office and family to emigrate there if it proved true.

  The state did not survive to enjoy that reputation. By 969 Sviatoslav I of Kiev and his allies conquered the capital Atil, after Sarkel fell in 965. A visitor wrote soon after that the vineyards and gardens were razed, with not a grape or raisin left, and not even alms for the poor. By the 13th century the word Khazar was last used by people in the North Caucasus believed to practice Judaism. The late 19th century then produced the Khazar myth, the theory that the core of today's Ashkenazi Jews descend from a Khazarian Jewish diaspora that migrated into France and Germany. Linguistic and genetic studies have not supported it, and most scholars view it with considerable skepticism, while the theory is sometimes tied to antisemitism. One trace of the empire endures in plain speech. In Oghuz Turkic languages, the Caspian Sea is still called the Khazar Sea.