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PART 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.
The 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.
It 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.
PART 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.
The contrast is evidenced by the reports of other Arab historians, (The following pages are based on the works of Istakhri, al- Masudi, Ibn Rusta and Ibn HawkaI [see Appendix II].), 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".
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", and the Muslims have several mosques, among them "one whose minaret rises above the royal castle".
In 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."
The region north of the Caucasus was extremely fertile.
In AD 968 Ibn Hawka I met a man who had visited it after a Russian raid: "Fie 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.
However, 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.
Apart 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."
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.
Thus 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 theatre - or coup d'tat - which established Judaism as the state religion.
The 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."
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".
The Kagan himself travelled in a mobile tent even more luxuriously equipped, carrying on its top a pomegranate of gold.
PART 13
Khazar art, like that of the Bulgars and Magyars, was mainly imitative, modelled on Persian-Sassanide patterns.
The Soviet archaeologist Bader 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.
(Unfortunately, Sarkel, the most important Khazar archaeological site has been flooded by the reservoir of a newly built hydro-electric station).
The jewellery unearthed within the confines of the fortress was of local manufacture.
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.
Thus 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 ofTiflis 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.
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 twenty three gold vessels, dating from the tenth century, was found in 1791 in the vicinity of the village of that name.
(It now belongs to Rumania and is called Sinnicolaul Mare).
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).
(The interested reader will find an excellent collection of photographs in Gyula Laszlo's The Art of the Migration Period [although his historical comments have to be treated with caution]).
One school of Hungarian archaeologists maintains that the tenth century gold-and silversmiths working in Hungary were actually Khazars.
As we shall see later on (see ill, 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.
PART 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 (Istakhri has 12000), 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."
Here we have another important clue to the Khazar dominance: a permanent professional army, with a Praetorian Guard which, in peacetime, effectively controlled the ethnic patchwork, and in times of war served as a hard core for the armed horde, which, as we have seen, may have swollen at times to a hundred thousand or more.
(According to Masudi, the "Royal Army" consisted of Muslims who "immigrated from the neighbourhood of Kwarizm.
Long ago, after the appearance of Islam, there was war and pestilence in their territory, and they repaired to the Khazar king , . .
When the king of the Khazars is at war with the Muslims, they have a separate place in his army and do not fight the people of their own faith" [Quoted by Dunlop (1954), p, 206].
That the army "consisted" of Muslims is of course an exaggeration, contradicted by Masudi himself a few lines later, where he speaks of the Muslim contingent having a "separate place" in the Khazar army.
Also, Ibn Hawkal says that "the king has in his train 4000 Muslims and this king has 2000 soldiers in his service".
The Kwarizmians probably formed a kind of Swiss Guard within the army, and their compatriots" talk of "hostages" [see above, section 10] may refer to them, Vice versa, the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus had a corps d' elite of Khazar guardsmen stationed at the gates of his palace.
This was a privilege dearly bought: "These guards were so well remunerated that they had to purchase their posts for considerable sums, on which their salaries represented an annuity varying from about 2.25 to 4 per cent."
[Constantine, De Ceremoniis, pp. 692-3].
For example, "a Khazar who received 7.4s. had paid for enrollment 302.8s."
[Bury, p, 228n])
PART 15
The capital of this motley empire was at first probably the fortress of Balanjar in the northern foothills of the Caucasus; after the Arab raids in the eighth century it was transferred to Samandar, on the western shore of the Caspian; and lastly to Itil in the estuary of the Volga.
We have several descriptions of Itil, which are fairly consistent with each other.
It was a twin city, built on both sides of the river.
The eastern half was called Khazaran, the western half Itil; (The town was in different periods also mentioned under different names, e.g., al-Bayada, "The White City") the two were connected by a pontoon bridge.
The western half was surrounded by a fortified wall, built of brick; it contained the palaces and courts of the Kagan and the Bek, the habitations of their attendants (Masudi places these buildings on an island, close to the west bank, or a peninsula.) and of the "pure-bred Khazars".
The wall had four gates, one of them facing the river.
Across the river, on the east bank, lived "the Muslims and idol worshippers"; this part also housed the mosques, markets, baths and other public amenities.
Several Arab writers were impressed by the number of mosques in the Muslim quarter and the height of the principal minaret.
They also kept stressing the autonomy enjoyed by the Muslim courts and clergy. Here is what al-Masudi, known as "the Herodotus among the Arabs", has to say on this subject in his oft-quoted work Meadows of Gold Mines and Precious Stones:
The custom in the Khazar capital is to have seven judges.
Of these two are for the Muslims, two are for the Khazars, judging according to the Torah (Mosaic law), two for the Christians, judging according to the Gospel and one for the Saqualibah, Rus and other pagans, judging according to pagan law .. .
In his [the Khazar King's] city are many Muslims, merchants and craftsmen, who have come to his country because of his justice and the security which he offers.
They have a principal mosque and a minaret which rises above the royal castle, and other mosques there besides, with schools where the children learn the Koran.
In reading these lines by the foremost Arab historian, written in the first half of the tenth century, (Supposedly between AD 943 and 947), one is tempted to take a perhaps too idyllic view of life in the Khazar kingdom.
Thus we read in the article "Khazars" in the : "In a time when fanaticism, ignorance and anarchy reigned in Western Europe, the Kingdom of the Khazars could boast of its just and broad-minded administration."
Jewish Encyclopaedia, published 1901-6.
In the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1971, the article on the Khazars by Dunlop is of exemplary objectivity).
This, as we have seen, is partly true; but only partly.
There is no evidence of the Khazars engaging in religious persecution, either before or after the conversion to Judaism.
In this respect they may be called more tolerant and enlightened than the East Roman Empire, or Islam in its early stages.
On the other hand, they seem to have preserved some barbaric rituals from their tribal past.
We have heard Ibn Fadlan on the killings of the royal gravediggers.
He also has something to say about another archaic custom regicide:
"The period of the king's rule is forty years.
If he exceeds this time by a single day, his subjects and attendants kill him, saying "His reasoning is already dimmed, and his insight confused"."
Istakhri has a different version of it:
When they wish to enthrone this Kagan, they put a silken cord round his neck and tighten it until he begins to choke.
Then they ask him: "How long doest thou intend to rule?"
If he does not die before that year, he is killed when he reaches it.
Bury 39 is doubtful whether to believe this kind of Arab traveller's lore, and one would indeed be inclined to dismiss it, if ritual regicide had not been such a widespread phenomenon among primitive (and not-so-primitive) people.
Frazer laid great emphasis on the connection between the concept of the King's divinity, and the sacred obligation to kill him after a fixed period, or when his vitality is on the wane, so that the divine power may find a more youthful and vigorous incarnation.
(Frazer wrote a special treatise on these lines on "The Killing of the Khazar Kings" [Folklore, XXVIII, 1917]).
It speaks in Istakhri's favour that the bizarre ceremony of "choking" the future King has been reported in existence apparently not so long ago among another people, the Kok-Turks.
Zeki Validi quotes a French anthropologist, Stjulien, writing in 1864:
When the new Chief has been elected, his officers and attendants . . . make him mount his horse.
They tighten a ribbon of silk round his neck, without quite strangling him; then they loosen the ribbon and ask him with great insistence:
“For how many years canst thou be our Khan?"
The king, in his troubled mind, being unable to name a figure, his subjects decide, on the strength of the words that have escaped him, whether his rule will be long or brief.
We do not know whether the Khazar rite of slaying the King (if it ever existed) fell into abeyance when they adopted Judaism, in which case the Arab writers were confusing past with present practices as they did all the time, compiling earlier travellers' reports, and attributing them to contemporaries.
However that may be, the point to be retained, and which seems beyond dispute, is the divine role attributed to the Kagan, regardless whether or not it implied his ultimate sacrifice.
We have heard before that he was venerated, but virtually kept in seclusion, cut off from the people, until he was buried with enormous ceremony.
The affairs of state, including leadership of the army, were managed by the Bek (sometimes also called the Kagan Bek), who wielded all effective power.
On this point Arab sources and modern historians are in agreement, and the latter usually describe the Khazar system of government as a "double kingship", the Kagan representing divine, the Bek secular, power.
The Khazar double kingship has been compared - quite mistakenly, it Seems - with the Spartan dyarchy and with the superficially similar dual leadership among various Turkish tribes.
However, the two kings of Sparta, descendants of two leading families, wielded equal power; and as for the dual leadership among nomadic tribes, (Alfdldi has suggested that the two leaders were the commanders of the two wings of the horde [quoted by Dunlop, p. 159, n, 123]), there is no evidence of a basic division of functions as among the Khazars.
A more valid comparison is the system of government in Japan, from the Middle Ages to 1867, where secular power was concentrated in the hands of the shogun, while the Mikado was worshipped from afar as a divine figurehead.
Cassel has suggested an attractive analogy between the Khazar system of government and the game of chess.
The double kingship is represented on the chess-board by the King (the Kagan) and the Queen (the Bek).
The King is kept in seclusion, protected by his attendants, has little power and can only move one short step at a time, The Queen, by contrast, is the most powerful presence on the board, which she dominates.
Yet the Queen may be lost and the game still continued, whereas the fall of the King is the ultimate disaster which instantly brings the contest to an end.
The double kingship thus seems to indicate a categorical distinction between the sacred and the profane in the mentality of the Khazars.
The divine attributes of the Kagan are much in evidence in the following passage from Ibn Hawkal (Ibn Hawkal, another much-travelled Arab geographer and historian, wrote his Oriental Geography around AD 977.
The passage here quoted is virtually a copy of what Istakhri wrote forty years earlier, but contains less obscurities, so I have followed Ouseley's translation [1800] of Ibn Hawkal):
The Khacan must be always of the Imperial race [Istakhri: " ... of a family of notables"].
No one is allowed to approach him but on business of importance: then they prostrate themselves before him, and rub their faces on the ground, until he gives orders for their approaching him, and speaking.
When a Khacan . . . dies, whoever passes near his tomb must go on foot, and pay his respects at the grave: and when he is departing, must not mount on horseback, as long as the tomb is within view.
So absolute is the authority of this sovereign, and so implicitly are his commands obeyed, that if it seemed expedient to him that one of his nobles should die, and if he said to him, "Go and kill yourself," the man would immediately go to his house, and kill himself accordingly.
The succession to the Khacanship being thus established in the same family [Istakhri: “in a family of notables who possess neither power nor riches"]; when the turn of the inheritance arrives to any individual of it, he is confirmed in the dignity, though he possesses not a single dirhem [coin].
And I have heard from persons worthy of belief, that a certain young man used to sit in a little shop at the public marketplace, selling petty articles [Istakhri: 'selling bread"]; and that the people used to say, "When the present Khacan shall have departed, this man will succeed to the throne" [Istakhri: "There is no man worthier of the Khaganate than he"].
But the young man was a Mussulman, and they give the Khacanship only to Jews.
The Khacan has a throne and pavilion of gold: these are not allowed to any other person.
The palace of the Khacan is loftier than the other edifices.
The passage about the virtuous young man selling bread, or whatever it is, in the bazaar sounds rather like a tale about Harun al Rashid.
If he was heir to the golden throne reserved for jews, why then was he brought up as a poor Muslim?
If we are to make any sense at all of the story, we must assume that the Kagan was chosen on the strength of his noble virtues, but chosen among members of the "Imperial Race" or "family of notables".
This is in fact the view of Artamonov and Zeki Validi.
Artamonov holds that the Khazars and other Turkish people were ruled by descendants of the Turkut dynasty, the erstwhile sovereigns of the defunct Turk Empire (cf. above, section 3).
Zeki Validi suggests that the "Imperial Race" or "family of notables", to which the Kagan must belong, refers to the ancient dynasty of the Asena, mentioned in Chinese sources, a kind of desert aristocracy, from which Turkish and Mongol rulers traditionally claimed descent.
This sounds fairly plausible and goes some way towards reconciling the contradictory values implied in the narrative just quoted: the noble youth without a dirhem to his name - and the pomp and circumstance surrounding the golden throne.
We are witnessing the overlap of two traditions, like the optical interference of two wave-patterns on a screen: the asceticism of a tribe of hard-living desert nomads, and the glitter of a royal court prospering on its commerce and crafts, and striving to outshine its rivals in Baghdad and Constantinople.
After all, the creeds professed by those sumptuous courts had also been inspired by ascetic desert prophets in the past.
All this does not explain the startling division of divine and secular power, apparently unique in that period and region.
As Bury wrote:
"We have no information at what time the active authority of the Chagan was exchanged for his divine nullity, or why he was exalted to a position resembling that of the Emperor of Japan, in which his existence, and not his government, was considered essential to the prosperity of the State."
A speculative answer to this question has recently been proposed by Artamonov. He sug¬ gests that the acceptance of Judaism as the state religion was the result of a coup d'etat, which at the same time reduced the Kagan, descendant of a pagan dynasty whose allegiance to Mosaic law could not really be trusted, to a mere figurehead.
This is a hypothesis as good as any other - and with as little evidence to support it.
Yet it seems probable that the two events - the adoption of Judaism and the establishment of the double kingship - were somehow connected.
(Before the conversion the Kagan was still reported to play an active role as, for instance, in his dealings with Justinian.
To complicate matters further, the Arab sources sometimes refer to the "Kagan" when they clearly mean the "Bek" (as "kagan" was the generic term for "ruler" among many tribes), and they also use different names for the Bek, as the following list shows [after Minorsky, Hudud al Alam, p, 451:
Const. Porphyr. Ibn Rusta Masudi Istakhri Ibn Hawkal Gardezi
Khaqan
Khazar Khaqan Khaqan Malik Khazar Khaqan Khazar Khazar Khaqan
Bek
Aysha
Malik
Khaqan Khazar* Malik Khazar or Bek Abshad
- The order of the rulers appears to have been changed]
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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Perhaps, they followed a kind of tengri belief.
Religions are invented by old men that want to get laid, imo.
Such strange customs that seem to have yet created a stability and absence of wars of succession that so define feudalism in the West. The similarity of the Kagan and the Kagan Bek do very much resemble the king and queen in chess. The ritual murder of the Kagan seems unlikely, though, as the Kagan would know he was under sentence of death, and his seclusion would make his departure facile prior to his demise.
Thanks!