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story unintentionally suggests.1 The Jewish influence in Khazaria was due to the encouragement given by the Chagans to Hebrew merchants. Of the Jewish port of Tamatarkha more will be said presently; and we may notice the Jewish population at Jundār, a town in the Caucasus, which was governed in the ninth century by a relation of the Chagan, who is said to have prayed impartially with the Moslems on Friday, with the Jews on Saturday, and with the Christians on Sunday.3

Somewhat later in the eighth century a princess of the Khazars married the Saracen governor of Armenia, and there was peace on the southern frontier till the reign of Harun alRashid In A.D. 798 another marriage alliance was arranged between a daughter of the Chagan and one of the powerful family of the Barmecides. The lady died in Albania on the way to her bridal, and the officers who were in charge of her reported to her father their suspicion that she had been poisoned. The suggestion infuriated the Chagan, and in the following year the Khazars invaded Armenia, by the Gates of Derbend, and returned with an immense booty in captives.5 Then Harun's son, Mamun, carried his arms victoriously into the land of the Khazars.

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§ 2. The Subjects and Neighbours of the Khazars

The Khazars had never succeeded in extending their lordship over their neighbours the ALANS, whose territory extended from the Caucasus to the banks of the river Kuban and was bounded on the west by the Euxine. The Alans, who

1 The Jewish rabbi who disputes is already on the spot. The Letter of Joseph gives the date as about 340 years before his own time (c. A.D. 960). 340 is clearly corrupt, and if we read 240 with Westberg (op. cit. ii. 34), we get c. A.D. 720 as the date.

2 In the ninth century, Ibn Khurdadhbah mentions that Jewish merchants from Spain used to come regularly overland, through the country of the Slavs, to the capital of the Khazars (Chamlich). Marquart, op. cit. 24.

3 Ibn Rusta and Gurdizi, 190; Marquart, op. cit. 20.

4 Baladhuri (Marquart, op. cit. 37). 5 Marquart, ib. 5.

6 The authority is Mukaddasi, who says that Mamun required the Chagan to embrace Islam (Marquart, ib. 3). Mamun governed Khurasan, under his father, from A.D. 799. He was also in Khurasan, as Caliph, between A.D. 813 and 818. Marquart does not decide the date of the campaign in Khazaria. It is natural to suppose that it was the reply to the Khazar invasion of A.D. 799, and to assign it to the earlier period; but cp. Marquart, 476,

have survived to the present day under the name of the Ossetians, were a mainly pastoral people; their army consisted in cavalry; and they had a fortress, which was virtually impregnable, at the so-called Alan-gate of the Caucasus or Pass of Dariel.1 We are told that the habitations of the people were so close together that when a cock crowed in one place he was answered by all the cocks in the rest of the kingdom. At some time before the tenth century the king adopted Christianity, but the mass of his subjects remained heathen.2 He received his Christianity from Constantinople, and the Emperors appropriated to him the special title of exusiastes.3 Between the Alans and the Khazars were the habitations of the SARIRS, a heathen people whose name does not come into the annals of Byzantium.1

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North of the Alans, between the rivers Kuban and Don, the territory of the Khazars extended to the shores of the Maeotic lake, and at the mouth of that water they possessed the important town of Tamatarkha, the modern Taman, which had arisen close to the ancient Phanagoria, over against the city of Bosporos on the other side of the straits. The commercial importance of Tamatarkha, which had a large Jewish population, will claim our attention presently. Bosporos itself, the ancient Pantikapaion, was under the control of the Khazars, and the Tetraxite Goths, who occupied the greater part of the Crimea, were subject to their sway. The Gothic capital, Doras, had been taken by the Khazars before A.D. 787, and in the following years the Goths, under the leadership of their bishop, had made an attempt to throw off the yoke of their powerful neighbours."

1 For descriptions of the Alans, see Gurdizi and Ibn Rusta, 193-194, and Masudi (Sprenger), 434 sqq. Cp. Marquart, op. cit. 164 sqq. The King's title was baghāyar (İbn R.) or karkundaj (Mas.). Arabic writers call the Alans Nandar, or Tulash (?), with the second part of which Marquart connects the Georgian name Owsi (= Old Russian Yasi), whence the modern Ossetian.

2 That the Alans were still pagans in the ninth century is shown by Kulakovski, Viz. Vrem. v. 1 sqq. (1898). 3 Constantine, Cer. 688. a spiritual son of the Emperors (πνευματικὸν ἡμῶν τέκνον).

He was

4 Of the Sarirs an account is preserved by Ibn Rusta and Gurdizi (187 sqq.), derived from their common ninthcentury source.

5 This country had been the habitation of the Utigurs - the Taλaιà Βουλγαρία of Theophanes and Nicephorus. Cp. Marquart, op. cit. 503. After the sixth century we hear nothing more of this people, but their descendants may have still been there, though of no political importance.

6 Shestakov, Pamiatniki, 35 sq. Vit. Joann. ep. Gotthiae, 191. The bishop. John was taken prisoner, but succeeded in escaping to Amastris.

North of the Don and extending to the banks of the Dnieper were the tents and hunting-grounds of the MAGYARS or Hungarians.1 The continuous history of this Finnish people, who lived by hunting and fishing,2 begins in the ninth century, and if we think we can recognise it under other names in the days of Attila and the early migrations, our conclusions are more or less speculative. It is, however, highly probable that the Magyars had lived or wandered for centuries in the regions of the Volga, had bowed to the sway of the great Hun, and had been affected by the manners of their Turkish neigh- ) bours. They spoke a tongue closely akin to those of the Finns, the Ostyaks, the Voguls, and the Samoyeds, but it is likely that even before the ninth century it had been modified, in its vocabulary, by Turkish influence.1 A branch of the people penetrated in the eighth century south of the Caucasus, and settled on the river Cyrus, east of Tiflis and west of Partav, where they were known to the Armenians by the name of Sevordik or "Black children." "5 These Black Hungarians, in the ninth century, destroyed the town of Shamkor, and the governor of Armenia repeopled it with Khazars who had been converted to Islam (A.D. 854-855).o

On the northern shore of the Sea of Azov, and extending towards the Dnieper, was the land of the Inner or BLACK BULGARIANS, which thus lay between the Magyars and the

1 For criticism of the Arabic sources (Gurdizi, etc.) see Westberg, op. cit. 20 sqq., Beitr. i. 24 sqq. Marquart, (op. cit. 30-31, 516) places the Hungarians between the Don and the Kuban, but his interpretation has been refuted by Westberg.

2 Regino, s.a. 889, p. 132, ed. Kurze. This is an insertion of Regino in his general description which is transcribed from Justinus, ii. 1-3.

3 Marquart finds their ancestors in the Akatzirs (cp. Priscus, fr. 8 in F.H.G. iv. 89; Jordanes, Get. c. 5) and the Unigurs (op. cit. 40 sqq.); but see the important work of K. Némäti, Nagy-Magyarország ismeretlen történelmi okmánya (1911), where the passage in the Origines of Isidore of Seville (ix. 2, § 66, in Migne, P.L. 82, 334) is fully discussed. He likewise identifies them with the Unigurs.

4 Cp. Marquart, 53. The basis of the Hungarian language was Ugrian,

but it was profoundly modified by Turkish. The well-known able attempt of Vámbéry to prove that it was originally a Turkish tongue (in his A magyarok eredete) has not convinced me, nor has it persuaded Marquart, who has pertinent observations on the subject (49).

5 Constantine, Cer. 687 eis ToÙS Y ἄρχοντας τῶν Σερβατιών (leg. Σεβορτίων, Marquart) τῶν λεγομένων μαῦρα παιδία. Hence Marquart explains Σαβάρτοι ǎopaλo, said in De adm. imp. 169 to be the old name of the Hungarians, as "the lower Sevordik" (op. cit. 39-40); -ordik, children, he considers only an Armenian transformation by popular etymology of Orgik = Ugrians. See also W. Pécz in B.Z. vii. 201-202, 618-619.

6 For this we have the good authority of Baladhuri, who calls the Sevordik Savardi. Marquart, ib. 36.

7 See above, p. 337.

Goths. The lower Dnieper seems to have formed the western boundary of the Khazar Empire, but their influence extended up that river, over some of the Eastern Slavs. The Slavs round Kiev1 paid at one time tribute to the Chagan, who perhaps ensured them against the depredations of the Magyars.

On the central Volga was the extensive territory of the BURDAS, who were subject to the Khazars, and formed a barrier against the Outer Bulgarians, their northern neighbours, whose dominion lay on the Volga and its tributary the Kama, including the modern province of Kasan.3

If the Burdas served the Khazars as a barrier against the northern Bulgarians, they were also useful in helping to hold the PATZINAKS in check. This savage people possessed a wide dominion between the Volga and the Ural; their neighbours were, to the north-west the Burdās, to the north the Kipchaks, to the east the Uzes, to the south-west the Khazars. It would seem that some of their hordes pressed early in the ninth century, west of the Volga, into the basin of the Don, and became the formidable neighbours of the most easterly Slavonic tribes.*

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§ 3. The Russians and their Commerce

Such, in the early part of the ninth century, was the general chart of the Turkish Empire of the Khazars, their clients, and their neighbours. Before we consider the import of this primitive world for the foreign policy of the Roman Empire, it is necessary to glance at yet another people, which was destined in the future to form the dominant state in the region of the Euxine and which, though its home still lay beyond

1 The Poliane; see below, p. 412. Constantine, De adm. imp. 75, mentions that Kiev was called Sambatas (which has not been satisfactorily explained; cp. Westberg, K. anal. ii. 12; Marquart, 198). The capital of the Slavs, called Jirbab or Hruab by Ibn Rusta (179), Jiraut by Gurdizi (178), is probably Kiev, and Westberg (ib. 24) would read in the texts Chuyab.

2 Ibn Rusta and Gurdizi, 158 sqq. For the orthography see Westberg, K. anal. ii. 14. He distinguishes the Burdas from the Mordvins, and shows that the river Burdas means the central course of the Volga, not a

tributary (ib. 19, and i. 385). Cp. Masudi (Sprenger) 412, and see Marquart, xxxiii. and 336.

3 From their chief town, Bulgar, the Bulgarians could sail down the Volga to Itil in less than three weeks (Ibn Fadhlan, 202).

4 For the boundaries of the Patzinaks according to the early Arabic source of the ninth century, see Westberg, K. anal. ii. 16 sqq., Beitr. i.212-213. The Patzinaks or Pechenegs were known to the Slavs as the Polovtsi, the name they bear in the Chronicle of Pseudo-Nestor.

the horizon of Constantinople and Itil, was already known to those cities by the ways of commerce. The RUSSIANS or Rūs were Scandinavians of Eastern Sweden who, crossing the Baltic and sailing into the Gulf of Finland, had settled on Lake Ilmen, where they founded the island town, known as Novgorod, the Holmgard of Icelandic Saga, at the point where the river Volkhov issues from the northern waters of the lake. They were active traders, and they monopolized all the traffic of north-eastern Europe with the great capitals of the south, Constantinople, Baghdad, and Itil. Their chief wares were the skins of the castor and the black fox, swords, and

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men. The Slavs were their natural prey; they used to }

plunder them in river expeditions, and often carry them off, to be transported and sold in southern lands. Many of the Slavs used to purchase immunity by entering into their service. The Russians did not till the soil, and consequently had no property in land; when a son was born, his father, with a drawn sword in his hand, addressed the infant: "I leave thee no inheritance; thou shalt have only what thou winnest by this sword." They were, in fact, a settlement of

1 The following account of the Russians and their commerce is derived from the early Arabic source and from the somewhat later book of Ibn Khurdadhbah, as elucidated by Westberg, K. anal. ii. 23 sqq. and i. 372 sqq. As for the Scandinavian (Swedish) origin of the Russians (Rus 'Pus), the evidence is overwhelming, and it is now admitted by all competent investigators. The theory that they were Slavs-of which Ilovaiski was the ablest exponent-was crushingly refuted by Pogodin, Kunik, and Thomsen. The Norman " "Varangian" question which raged in Russia at one time is no longer sub iudice. For a full examination of the data, the English reader should consult Thomsen's Ancient Russia (see Bibliography, ii. 5). The theory propounded by Vasil'evski, in his old age, that the Russians were (Crimean) Goths, and that 'Pús is a corruption of ταυ-ροσ-κύθαι, may be mentioned as a curiosity.

or

2 The general disposition of the Slavonic tribes, as the Russians found them, seems to have been as follows: the Krivichi (Kpißirsal, Constantine,

De adm. imp. 79), south of Novgorod, towards Smolensk; the Viatichi, on the river Oka, south of Moscow; the Radimishchi, on the river Sozh', east of the Dnieper; the Siever, on the river Desna, which joins the Dnieper north of Kiev; the Poliane ("plainmen "), probably west of Kiev; the Drievliane ("men of the woods"; Aepßrevivo, Const. op. cit. 166), perhaps north of the Poliane; the Dregovichi (Δρουγουβῖται, ib. 79), between the rivers Pripet and Düna ; also the Tiver'tsi, on the Dniester (whom Schafarik, ii. 133, finds in Constantine, ib., reading των Τεβερβιάνων for TV TE B.); their neighbours the Uglichi (identified by Schafarik with Constantine's Ovλrivo, ib. 166); the Bujani, so called from their habitation on the river Bug. Schafarik (ii. 113) explains Constantine's Δεν ξανῖνοι (loc. cit.) as Luchane, whom he considers a portion of the Krivitsi. The localities of these tribes are mainly determined by the data in Pseudo-Nestor. further Schafarik, ii. sect. 28, and cp. the relevant articles in Leger's Index to his Chronique de Nestor.

See

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