2. Khazars Book, historical section
The Persian word for road is rab; the verb "to know" is don; those who knew the roads were Rahdonites. This was the name given to the Jewish merchants who seized the monopoly of the Silk Road. 2 of 4
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Rakhdonites
(This story leads to the build-up of Western Capital, and the further development of the ideology of Capitalism.)
In the middle of the eighth century throughout the Eurasian continent events changed the world in ways that no one could have foreseen. The demoralized Frankish power was squeezed into a steel hoop by Charles Martell, whose son Pepin the Short deprived the "lazy kings" of the Merovingian dynasty of the throne in 751.
In the same year the Arabs met the Chinese in the Talas River valley and defeated them by a head. Two other Chinese armies, one in Manchuria and the other in Yunnan, were defeated by local tribal militias, and the dream of Chinese hegemony over Asia, which had been the guiding idea of Tang Empire policy, evaporated.
Six years before, in 745, the second Turkic kaganate had fallen, and its bogatyrs (medieval Russian heroic warriors), were killed in battles or were killed while fleeing. In its place arose the Uigur Khaganate, not at all aggressive and open to the cultural influences of Iran, but not of China.
But the biggest shift was the ascendancy of the Abbasids in Baghdad and the beginning of the collapse of the Caliphate, for this opened up roads from the West to the East to those enterprising merchants who explored these roads. The Persian word for road is rab; the root of the verb "to know" is don; those who knew the roads were rahdonites. This was the name given to the Jewish merchants who seized the monopoly of the caravan trade between China and Europe. [278-279]
The trade was fabulously profitable because they traded not in consumer goods needed by the population, but in luxury goods. Translated into 20th-century terms, this trade corresponded to currency trading and the resale of drugs. Only such super-profits covered the cost of transportation and maintenance of the route, where domes were built over springs and ponds, milestones were placed to indicate the direction of the road, and caravanserais were built for overnight stays or daytime stays on especially hot days.
From the Red Sea to China there were about 200-day marches, and even more around the northern shore of the Caspian Sea. But the northern route was also used, because in the Abbasid Caliphate uprisings were an uncommon occurrence, and the Khazars strictly monitored the safety of the steppe roads. Therefore, the importance of Itil (Khazar city), as a staging post on the long route was growing. Resting on the Volga was not only convenient, but also pleasant.
The fact that the traveling Jews of the 8th century are called by the Persian word rahdonits shows that the basis of this trading company was formed by the natives of the Babylonian, i.e. the Iranian community, who escaped from the caliph Abd al-Melin in 690. In 723 Jews from Byzantium were added to them, but as long as constant wars were taking place on the borders of Sogd and the Caliphate, China and the Turku Kaganate, trade encountered obstacles. When these wars ceased and China, after the revolt of An Lushan (756-763), lay in ruins and sold silk cheaply, the Jewish rahdonites turned around. They founded not only the eastern route, along which silk in exchange for gold, but also the northern route - from Iran to the Kama, along which furs flowed in exchange for silver. Khazaria was just at the crossroads of these routes. This is where emigrants from Iran and Byzantium rushed.
Tyurkut khans of the Ashin dynasty, in accordance with their religious tolerance and complacency typical of the steppe people, believed that their kingdom gets the industrious and intelligent subjects, which are easy to use for diplomatic and economic assignments. Wealthy Jews gave the Khazar Khans and beks luxurious gifts, and beautiful Jewish women filled up the Khan's harems. So there was a Jewish-Khazar chimera.
For the Jewish-Khazarites it was probably unfortunate only that Bulan's attempt to achieve hegemony in the political life of Khazaria was crushed by Arab courage, and military power remained in the hands of the Turkic-Khazar nobility, with whom it was not always easy to get along. [280-281]
The process described took the second half of the eighth century. During this time the Khazars transferred military operations against the Arabs to Transcaucasia and in revenge for the destruction of Semender and Belenjer they devastated Azerbaijan. There is no information about the participation in these operations of Jews, both old, Bulan's comrades-in-arms, and new, Rakh-Donites (radonites).
Not succeeding in military affairs, the Khazar Jews made up for their losses with love. At the end of VIII century between Terek and Volga there were many children of mixed Jewish-Khazar marriages. However, their fate was different depending on who was the father of the child and who was the mother. And here's why.
All Eurasian tribes considered the child a member of the father's lineage. A legitimate child had a share in the clan property, the right to protection, mutual assistance and participation in clan cults. Kin was an element of ethnicity and culture; hence, membership in the clan determined ethnicity; the mother's origin was not taken into account.
For Jews, ethnicity coincided with community membership. The right to be a member of the community, and therefore to be a Jew, was determined by being descended from a Jewish woman. In the second century B.C. this rule made it possible to include Semitic related tribes such as the Idumeans, Amalekites, Moabites, but in the Middle Ages it led to the isolation of Jewish ethnic groups, especially in Europe and Eurasia, where marriages with Jewish women were forbidden by the Christian and Muslim religions. In Khazaria, there were no such restrictions.
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It turned out that the son of a Khazar and a Jewess had all the rights of his father and the all capabilities of his mother. That is, he was taught by Jewish rabbis, the community helped him make a career or take part in commerce, his father's clan protected him from enemies and insured him against poverty in case of misfortune.
But the son of a Jewish man and a Khazar woman was a stranger to everyone. He had no rights to inherit his father's share of the family property, could not study the Talmud in a Jewish spiritual school, received no support from anyone but his parents, and even that was restricted by clan customs and religious, Jewish laws. These poor people had no place in life. So, they lived on the outskirts of Khazaria, in the Crimea, and practiced Karaism, which did not require the study of the Talmud, and to read the Pentateuch they could be taught by loving, but powerless against the dictates of the law, their fathers. Their descendants formed a tiny ethnos of the Crimean Karaites, whose anthropological traits combine Turkic and Middle Eastern types [1, p.184-285; cf. corrected interpretation: 26]. Their sympathies [281-282] were addressed to the natives: Khazars, Bulgars, Goths, Alans, and not to their cousins who were making a "career and fortune" in rich Itil.
The Judean community in Itil not only accumulated great wealth, but also included the khans of the Turkic Ashina dynasty. The Turks retained the custom of polygamy, married beautiful Jewish women, and their children, while remaining kings, became members of the Jewish community. They studied Torah and Talmud, communicated with relatives of their mothers and married off on their advice to their countrywomen from among the rich brides. So gradually there was a separation of the Khazar nobility and the people, who lived quietly in a luxurious oasis in the Volga delta, not taking part in the affairs of the state, which no longer concerned them. But there remained the old tribal aristocracy; with it the matter was more complicated. The solution did not come until the ninth century.
It could be noted that for the persistent ethnos of the Khazars, the Turkic begs and tarhans were as alien as the Judean merchants. Indeed, the Khazars received from the Ashin dynasty only one benefit - protection from external enemies and security, and this is quickly forgotten as it becomes habitual. Therefore, the social point - the dislike of the common people for the aristocracy, not even their own, but those foreigners who came here, and took part in the Khazarian society. Jews were outside of this antagonism, because they lived in isolated colonies, and had little contact with local residents.
However, the nature of Turkic-Khazar and Judeo-Khazar relations was diametrically opposite. The Turks rewarded the Khazars with children, who grew up as Khazars with increased passionarity. The Jews extracted children from the Khazar ethnos, either as full-fledged Jews (Jewish mother), or as bastards (Jewish father), which depleted the ethnic system, and thus led to its simplification. With direct observation it seemed that it was just a chain of coincidences, but in fact it was a directed process, which over 80 years (counting from Bulan) had very tangible results: a population of people who spoke Khazar, who had relatives from the Khazars and Turks, adapted to the landscape, but were not Khazars ethnically and culturally, appeared in the country. For foreigners who wrote about Khazaria from external cursory impressions, it seemed that these people were Khazars of the Jewish faith, but neither Jews nor real Khazars were mistaken about this for a moment. [282- 283]
If proof is not required in regard to the Khazars, medieval Jews recorded that they consider their Khazar co-religionists as descendants of the tribe of Simon and the half tribe of Manasseh, dwelling "in the country of Kozraim, far from Jerusalem... They are countless and they take tribute from 25 states, and on the part of the Ishmaelites tribute is paid to them because of the fear they inspire and their courage. [5, с. 84].
The cited text describes the situation not in the 8th century, but in the 10th centuries, and very accurately. In the first decade of the ninth century the events occurred when the combination of the two super-ethnoses transformed the zone of ethnic contact into a socio-cultural, and not just ethnic chimera. (Chimera is a mix of unlike peoples, most often with non-complimentary tensions.)
And thunder rang out…
In that decade, when patrician Nicephorus ascended the throne in Constantinople (31. X. 802), and Khalifa Harun ar-Rashid executed his best aides and true friends - Barmekids (27.1. 803). In the Khazar Kaganate a certain influential Jew, Obadiah, took power into his own hands, turned the Khan of the Ashin dynasty (by his father, Hun) into a puppet and made rabbinic Judaism the state religion of the Khazars.
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The circumstances under which this is not so much religious, as a state religion took place. The coup d'état covered by a multitude of legends1 which all, without exception, appear to have been invented for the sole purpose of concealing the true state of affairs from the people and history. It is not even known who Obadiah was. Apparently, he did not belong to the number of local Jews, the descendants of Mazdak's companions, illiterate and brave warriors - Karaites like Bulan.
It is said of Obadiah: "He was a righteous and a just man. He corrected (renewed) the kingdom and strengthened the assemblies (synagogues) and houses of scholars (schools) and gathered a lot of wise men of Israel, giving them a lot of silver and gold, and they explained to him the 24 books (scriptures) Mishka, Talmud and the whole order of prayer adopted by the Chazzans. He feared God and loved the law and commandments" [38, p. 80, 97]. Already from this alone it is evident that Obadiah was neither a Karaites nor a Hazara2. [283-284]
No, this characterization shows that Obadiah was an intelligent man who had connections in the Jewish diaspora. For the "wise men of Israel" he did not spare the Khazar "silver and gold", so that only these wise men were agreed to be welcome in Itil. And if we compare with this fact the well-known fact that a political coup requires money and organization, it is clear with what circles Obadia was connected.
It was not the Khazars and not the Khazar Jews who benefited from the change of power, but the visiting Jews and the world Jewish community as a whole. And if so, then they organized the coup, while maintaining the legitimate principle. The rightful khan of the Ashina clan became a Jew, i.e., he accepted his mother's faith and was accepted into the community. All state posts were distributed among the Jews, and Obadiah himself took the title "peh" (bek), translated in Arabic as "malik," i.e., king.
This means that he headed the government under the nominal khan (Kagan), who from that time was in custody and released to the people once a year. (The rightful ruler appeared to assure people that he still ruled, which he did not.) And for the people of Khazaria significance of the coup was defined by King Joseph, head of the Jewish community of Itil, writing: "And from that day, when our ancestors have come under the cover of Shekhinah (the presence of God)3, he has conquered all our enemies and overthrown all the peoples and tribes that lived around us, so that none has stood before us until this day (about 960 AD - LG). All of them serve and pay tribute to us - kings of Edom (pagans) and kings of Ishmael (Muslims). [38, с.80,97]. Yes, the case was profitable.
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And now let us digress for a moment from the description of the course of history to try to understand its meaning. Obadiah's coup is not at all an ordinary phenomenon, moreover, it is exceptional. It does not fit into the normal pattern of ethnogenesis, neither Türkic-Khazars, nor Jewish. The Türkic-Khazars were at the end of the inertial phase of the Hunno-Syanbi steppe super-ethnos, which included Ugric, Hionites, Dinlins, Kumans, and developed a certain stereotype of behavior and worldview, id est culture. The Jews were younger. They had just passed the phase of fracture and division of the ethnic "field”. Being the same age as the Byzantines and Slavic-Russians, [284-285] Jews differed from them in the fact that they mastered not a natural but a man-made landscape - cities from Chang'an to Toulouse and caravan routes. The inevitable relationship between the landscape and the ethnos was slightly distorted, and this was enough to turn the ethnic system into a rigid, or rather semi-rigid one. This meant that the ethnos turned into a social layer, without which the coup of Obadiah and the subsequent prosperity of Judeo-Khazaria would have been unthinkable.
Rigid systems, however, are automatically excluded from natural self-development. Their activity grows due to constant encounters with the environment, and it is even greater than that of natural ethnoses, but such systems have no "age". Therefore, their appearance among natural ethnogenesis deforms or, more precisely, distorts the usual course of ethnogenesis of the region, i.e. creates "zigzags" not foreseen by either nature or science. But this makes the problem worthy of special attention.
We should not assume that the creation of chimeras is an exceptional phenomenon and that the Jews played a unique role here. No, similar consequences arise wherever inorganic contacts arise at the super-ethnic level. Thus, in the 3rd century B.C. the descendants of the Diadochs and Epigones settled in the cities of Bactria and Syria, and the heirs of the heroes of Turan, the Parthians, became the dominant class in a tattered Iran.
Both the Macedonian dynasties, the Ptolemies and Seleucids, and the Parthian shahs, the Arshakids, remained for three centuries outsiders to their subjects. The antipathy to the Macedonians then spread to the Romans. Therefore, before the passionate explosion of the first and second centuries, the population of Syria and Egypt was an ethnic chimera. We could give a few more equally striking examples, but we have no time... We need to go back to the Lower Volga.
note1. M.I.Artamonov's assumption that Obadia belonged to the Khazar nobility of the Judean confession contradicts all the facts cited by M.I.Artamonov himself [see: 3, p. 280ff].
2. For a critical analysis of the Khazar "conversion" versions see: 3, с. 268-273
3. The philosophical interpretation of the term goes back to Philo of Alexandria. In the Talmud Shekhinah is identified with a deity. Dressed in dark robes, she wanders the earth, lamenting the Temple in Jerusalem and the woe of her children scattered among the nations. Josephus was referring to the mythological rather than the philosophical meaning of the word Shechinah.
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Reprisal
No one was going to convert the population of Khazaria to Judaism. The Jewish sages kept the covenant of Jehovah for the chosen people, who now received all the accrued benefits associated with leadership positions.
The coup, victim of which was patrimonial aristocracy of all ethnoses which were a part Khazar Khaganate and coexisting with the Turkic dynasty, has caused a civil war where on the side of the rebels the Magyar have acted, and on the side [285-286] of the Jews - hired for money, the Pechenegian. The information about this war between the people and government is contained in Constantine Porphyrogenitus: "When they had a separation from their power and intestine war broke out, the first power has won, and some of them (rebels) were slain, others fled and settled with Turks (here - Hungarians. - LG) in the (present) Pechenegian land (downstream of Dnieper. - LG) concluded mutual friendship and were called Habar"1 .
This war was merciless because, according to the Babylonian Talmud, "a non-Jew who does evil to a Jew, inflicts it on the Lord Himself, and thus committing an insult to the Majesty, deserves death" (from the tractate Sanhedrin, without specifying the leaf or column).
For the early Middle Ages total war of annihilation was an unaccustomed innovation. It was supposed, having broken the resistance of the enemy, to impose taxes and burdens on the defeated, often by military service in auxiliary units. But the extermination of all the people on the other side of the front was an echo of antiquity. For example, in Joshua's conquest of Canaan it was forbidden to take women and children prisoners and thereby keep them alive. Even the killing of domestic animals belonging to the enemy was prescribed. Obadiah revived a forgotten antiquity.
After this war, the beginning and end of which defies precise dating, Khazaria has changed its appearance. From a systemic integrity, it became an unnatural combination of an amorphous mass of subjects with the ruling class, alien to the people by blood and religion. There is no reason to call this situation feudalism. Yes, and whether ethno-social chimera can belong to any formation? And the fact that Obadiah acted as a representative of the Khazar government (in captivity) does not mean that he was concerned about the fate of the people and the state. He simply used the right to disinformation, which, however, was prescribed to outsiders by his religion, towards which he was honest.
The Jews must have benefited greatly from the principle of legitimacy. Their power was called "first," and hence it was considered legitimate, as in the case of Mazdak. Anyway in the 20s [286-287] of the IX century the new order in Khazaria won a complete victory, with a small loss of the territories subordinated to the pagan Khagans.
Crimean Gothia, an Orthodox country, fell away from Khazaria and joined Byzantium. Khazar Muslims suffered greatly, who could not be helped by the Caliph of Baghdad, because his forces were constrained by the rebellion of Babek, i.e. the Hurramites, the last Mazdakites. The Khazar Jews abandoned their former allies in distress, but thanks to this they established diplomatic contact with the Baghdad Caliphate, which ensured themselves a highly profitable trade on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
The decisive word in this ruthless war should have been said by the Khazar population of the Terek, Don and Volga delta valleys, but they kept silent. The inertness of the persistent ethnos condemned to death its beks, tarkhans and eltebers, and to defeat its allies, the Magyars, who fled beyond the Dnieper to the country of Leveda [3, p. 341]. There, in the neighborhood of another pagan and powerful Kaganate, the runaways found some security. In 834 Judeans built a fortress Sarkel for protection from the western enemies, who were not only steppe Magyars, but also the Russian Kaganate in Kyiv [27]. The garrison of the fortress consisted of Pechenegs or, maybe, gooks [3, p.328].
The passivity of the Khazars saved them from cruel executions, but painfully affected the fate of their children and grandchildren. In the VIII century Ashin khans were guided in politics, foreign and domestic, by the interests of their subjects. The Jewish kings did not set themselves such goals. They suppressed the internal enemies of Judaism, not just the enemies of Khazaria. By eliminating the ecclesiastical organization of the Khazar Christians, they banned its restoration. In 854 Khazar Muslims were forced to emigrate to Transcaucasia [Ibid., p. 329].
Increasing the number of tribute-paying subjects was in the interests of the new government. That is why the Dnieper River became the western border of Khazaria in the second half of the IX century. The Slavic tribes: Northerners, Vyatichi and Radimichi became the Khazar tributaries; Tivers and Ulics, who lived in the lower reaches of Bug and Dniester to the mouth of Danube, were apparently allies of the Khazar king in the uninterrupted war with the Magyars; it is clear from the fact that, according to the chronicles, Oleg captured without a fight the Northerners and Radimichi in 884-885, but "he fought against Ulics and Tivers". And if soon so, then the natural allies of Ulyachs.
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1. Cited from 3, p. 324, for here is a comparative analysis of the connotations of the three parallel translations. They were [287-288] Khazars, as enemies of the prince of Kiev. But the Polans, contrary to the direct testimony of the chronicler, did not pay tribute to the Khazar king in the IX century [27]. The Russian Khagans Dir and Askold, the direct descendants of Kiev, and not the konungs who escaped from Rurik sat in Kiev [8, p. 172]. In this case, as in most other cases, the data of historical analysis are preferable to the information from an authentic source.
Chimera on the Volga
If the eighth century Khazaria could be called an ethnic chimera, then in the ninth and tenth centuries it became a sociopolitical chimera. Christians did not take part in the civil war, avoided reprisals, and continued to enjoy the patronage of overseas co-religionists. But the pagan natives had no one to rely on. They, it is true, were able to march under foreign banners, but the new rulers did not need their help.
Khazar Jews hired a fighting force. At first they used the Pechenegs against the Magyars, but in the second half of the IX century they quarreled with them and entered into an alliance with the Oguzes. In about 889 the Oguzes suppressed the Pechenegs, and they moved to the banks of the Dnieper, where they continued the war with the Magyars, not forgetting the Khazars. In 915 the Pechenegs for the first time appeared on the Rus border, but about that we shall speak ahead. Oguzes, too, did not remain long in friendship with the Khazar Judeans, and they had to look for another source of military power. It was found in the southeast coast of the Caspian Sea.
Muslims willingly hired for service in Khazaria, stipulating only that they would not be sent to fight against Muslims. The permanent corps of the mercenary guard in Itil in the X century consisted of 7 thousand Muslim soldiers [44, p.194]. It was enough to subdue both Kaganate suburbs and their own people, and even for external wars on a small scale. The Judean Khazaria in the IX c. did not wage wars of conquest in the Transcaucasia, but, nevertheless, the administrative system described here was expensive, much more expensive than the Turkic one. And for everything they had to pay for, the Khazars themselves, who became in their own country subjugated subjects without rights in a government ethnically alien to them, alien in its religion and alien in its objectives.
One could argue that the budget of the Khazar Kaganate is unknown. That is so, but the budget of the Baghdad Caliphate is known, where in 869 for the annual salary and rations of 70 thousand hired Turks and Berbers [45, vol. II, p.213] was 2 million [288-289] gold dinars, which was equal to two years sum of kharaj1 (taxes) [Ibid, p.216]. Such were the prices for soldiers in the IX century, and Khazaria was smaller and poorer than the Caliphate.
Paying a large salary to the soldiers, the Khazar government presented them with an original requirement: the troops were forbidden to suffer a defeat. Failure to comply with the combat mission, that is, fleeing from the enemy, was punishable by death. The exception was made only for the leader and his deputy, who were not mercenaries, but Jews. But their belongings, wives and children were to be confiscated, and they were to be given away by the king in front of them, to his cronies. If they had no extenuating circumstances, they were also executed [37, p. 147].
Obviously, soldiers, especially privates, could not always be to blame for the failure of the operation. Therefore, it is unfair to deprive them of the opportunity to prove their innocence. But if we look at the matter differently, a rigid logic emerges: soldiers are not their own, they are paid, and for this money they give their lives to the owners; therefore, the owner can dispose of the sold life as a purchased item, and since supply exceeds demand, it was more practical to use the "purchase" to the limit, with maximum benefit for themselves. So Muslim mercenaries were not seen as people, or rather, not as individuals, but only as an investment that was supposed to bring profit.
From the point of view of the Eurasian nomads, Slavs, Byzantines, Arabs and even Germans, this attitude was unacceptable even to war horses and hunting dogs. Nevertheless, there were hunters to earn, and sometimes the "Khazar" army increased to 12 thousand riders. It is clear that the government of Khazaria received the funds to pay for the soldiers not from rahdonits, who were traveling from China to Spain or from Iran to the Great Perm. With an increase in duties, the merchants would change the routes of the caravans. Consequently, the costs were covered by tribute from "Edom and the Ishmaelites," that is, the Khazars paid for their own enslavement. It is because the transit trade was the meaning of life for the Jewish community in Khazaria, and in accordance with this principle, Muslim merchants and their accompanying geographers were treated in Itil with extremely polite treatment, led to a one-sided opinion, formulated in a juvenile paper of V. V. Grigoriev: "An unusual phenomenon in the Middle Ages was the Khazar people. Surrounded by wild and [289-290] nomadic tribes, it had all the advantages of educated countries: a well-ordered government, extensive, flourishing trade and a permanent army. When lawlessness, fanaticism and profound ignorance disputed each other's dominion over Western Europe, the power of the Khazars was famous for justice and tolerance, and those persecuted for their faith flocked to it from everywhere. As a striking example it shone on the dark horizon of Europe and went out without leaving any trace of its existence. [13, с. 66].
1 Kharaj is a state tax.
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Indeed, the city of Itil amazed travelers with its size. Situated on both banks of the Akhtuba, Itil spread out for 8-10 km along the left bank and on a beautiful green island in the floodplain, where the palace of the king was located. The Judean population of the city numbered 4 thousand men, and in addition, there were Khazars, who practiced Judaism, obviously the children of mixed marriages. Other Khazars were Christians, Muslims or practiced the faith of their fathers [31, pp. 140-143].
Synagogues, mosques, churches, huge bazaars full of cheap mutton, various fish, beautiful watermelons, children of both sexes sold into slavery, ships descending the Volga, and caravans approaching the city from the east and west - all this made a strong impression on eyewitnesses, and their descriptions have amused historians of the 19th century.
And yet Istahri and Ibn-Haukal report: "Khazars produce nothing and take out nothing but fish glue" [Ibid. [ibid, p. 141], but for the people such trade brought little income because of the striking cheapness of fish. The hard work of Khazar fishermen was paid minimally.
The tolerance of the Khazar Kaganate was forced, for it provided income from the transit trade. But as soon as anyone touched the interests of foreign Jewish communities, the Khazar tsar (not the Kagan) responded with reprisals. In 922-923, Muslims destroyed a synagogue in the city of Dar al-Babunaj1. For that, the Khazar tsar destroyed the minaret in Itil and executed the innocent muezzins, saying: "If I was not afraid that no synagogue would remain in the countries of Islam, I would certainly destroy the mosque" [Ibid.]
But Muslim merchants bought from him slaves - Pechenegian and Slavic young men, paid him duties, overpaid for products in a marketplace and served as intermediaries [290-291] in employment of fierce and well-trained horsemen and arrows. Peace with them was a profitable war, even a victorious one.
Among the enthusiastic reviews of contemporaries about the Khazar orders there are also those that cooled the fervor of enthusiasm. Khazars in April went to their fields and melons, and in the Autum they brought the harvest to Itil to pay taxes for the upkeep of the Kagan and, consequently, his cronies. For them, they also caught red fish "tastier than fat lamb and chicken meat" in the Volga. In front of the rulers Khazars were obliged to bow down, and the saddest thing is that the children of Khazar idolaters were sold in slave markets in the countries of Islam, and neither Jews nor Christians were sold into slavery by their co-religionists [31, p. 148]. Apparently, the local population of Khazaria, deprived even of the organization provided by the confessional community, was completely defenseless before the formidable tax collectors, strangers by blood and religion.
That's where the funds to pay the Khorezmian and Gurgan warriors, who kept those who fed them in subjugation, came from. And they lived in hospitable Itil together with wives and children [Ibid, p.156].
Except for Muslim guards, nominally guarding the kagan, the tsar-Judean had 4 thousand husbands [Ibid, p.164] in the retinue. Those also had wives and children, who neither fished, nor worked in the fields, scorching in the summer sun. Б. B.N. Zakhoder believes that "the exploited Khazar population was in a much more difficult situation than the peasantry in the Muslim East. [Ibid, p. 144]. In addition, Muslim peasants frequently revolted to moderate the arbitrariness of officials, while in Khazaria there was not a single rebellion! And not because the Khazars were so happy.
Khazars cannot be blamed, as their situation was not only difficult, but also hopeless. Any rebellion by them against the government, which had a regular army, was doomed. It was easy to hide in the channels and thickets of the delta from outsiders, but not from their own, who knew the location of the villages and fisheries. Potential Khazar leaders either died in the war with Obadia or fled to the Hungarians. As a monument to the ruthless massacre of the government with its own subjects are the ruins of the Khazar castle on the right bank of the Don near the village Tsimlyanskoye. This castle, in the opinion of the discoverer, was destroyed because its owner took part in the fight against the Judaization of Khazaria [50, p. 63].
The reprisals of the Itilian government against the rebels were in [291-292] the first half of the IX century so radical, that the correlation of the forces between the incoming government and the defeated people became evident to both. This situation hid from the superficial gaze of Arab travelers all the more easily that the children of mixed Jewish-Khazar marriages and even the Jews themselves in the 10th century began to call themselves Khazars. That is why the Arab geographers distinguished "black" and "white" Khazars as two different ethnic groups living together in one state (see above). That is why it is necessary to introduce two terms: "Judeo-Khazars," and "Turkic-Khazars. Then the ethnonym "Khazars" was preserved for the descendants of Cossacks.
Looking ahead, we should note that in the 11th century descendants of the Turko-Khazars (native aborigines) have abandoned their ethnic name, and began to call themselves first in Slavic brodnik, and then in Türkic Jews, but only until the end of the 11th century, when the ethnos disappeared from the historical scene.
1 The place of this city is not established [see: 31, p.161].
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Usually, the monuments outlive the people. However, from the Khazar-pagans remained only a poor burial in the delta of the Volga, and from the Khazar-Christians and Muslims remained nothing. It's very strange!
And where is the art?
In fact, why is nothing left from the Khazars, whereas Hun burial mounds are full of masterpieces [52], Turkic and Cuman "stone sculptures" were discovered in great numbers, Uigur frescos decorate the Hermitage and Berlin Museum galleries, and even from the ancient Ugrian bas-reliefs with images of soldiers and prisoners of war have survived? Khazar vessels lack ornamentation [19], the discovered Khazar fortresses of the time were built carelessly [7, p. 12-13], and there are no images of people at all. Is it lawful, or just that archaeological searches were unsuccessful?
No, - archaeologists did work in good faith. But items of fine art from stable materials were not present in Khazaria in the IX-X centuries, and could not be, although the Khazars were not inferior to their steppe and mountain neighbors. After all, you can produce cultural monuments only if there is a customer who can pay for the work of an artist. In Khazaria the government could pay, but it consisted of people who denied the fine arts in principle. [292-293]
The ancient Jews, contemporaries of Moses, valued fine art no less than their neighbors. They cast a golden calf (Apis) or a copper serpent as an image of the deity they wanted to pray to. Moses punished them severely for this, for on Mount Sinai he was told: "You shall not cast gods" (Exodus 34:17). His followers did the same, and finally weaned the Jews off of making anything. The art was reserved, for the Tabernacle and later the Temple had to be decorated, but it became non-figurative, being replaced by symbols and geometric ornamentation. In short, ancient Jewish art became the prototype of abstractionism.
Abstract art was difficult to instill even in the Jews. They could still picture Baal and Astarte and worshiped understandable and beautiful images of the deity. But by the beginning of the new era their taste had been established. Any pictures and statues shocked them. Therefore, they had no painters of their own, and if they appeared, they were engaged only in calligraphy.
Khazars, pure of heart, did not understand abstract art, and they had no opportunity or desire to be interested in the complex problems of abstractionism in the situation described above. Their own art could not find a buyer, because the Khazars were poor and decorating requires some abundance. They did not erect grave monuments; they simply placed the dead on the tops of the hillocks of the Baer Hills, where they were covered with steppe dust; they worshiped in sacred groves, not in temples2. And those Khazars who converted to Christianity or Islam were forced to pray in the same shacks in which they lived. It is true that there was a stone mosque in Itil, but it was intended for foreigner traders. When the Byzantine engineer Petrona Kamatyr, building in 834 the fortress Sarkel, wanted to build a stone church for the Don Khazars, it was not allowed of him. Stone columns and capitals he brought were left in the steppe, where they were found by M.I. Artamonov in 1935. But then synagogues had to be built, at least in large settlements. Yes, of course! Why they did not survive, the reader will understand when he turns a few more pages. [293-294]
So, the methodology of wide territorial coverage that we applied justified itself. While only the subject, Khazaria, was studied, it was possible to construct any hypotheses to explain the lack of monuments. But when in the synchronous review the borders of the "white (blank) spot" were marked, then the assumptions about savagery of Khazars and their prosperity reasonably fell away, although the latter conclusion was made by a brilliant orientalist V.V. Grigoriev based on many eastern sources [13].
В. V.V. Grigoriev worked at the level of his time: he studied the sources, i.e. words, rather than deeds, which have their own internal logic of formation. Therefore, it did not even occur to him that the Khazars themselves might have more thorough judgments than those that could be reported by Arabs and Persians with a very superficial observation of the Khazars. True, the Khazar opinions have not been preserved in written sources, because the Khazars were not able to write. However, their behavior clearly showed their attitude to the notorious "dual power", but in order to understand this, we must examine not only the written sources, but the history of events. In the state, which was called the Khazar Kaganate, in the IX-X centuries, the Khazars were the most oppressed minority. Compared with the Khazars, the Alans, Burtases, Savirs and Oguzes were almost free tribes, Khorezmian mercenaries - the other Khazars, however, professed a religion similar to that of the Turks (Magyar - L. G.) [59, 17] 131.
1. A vase from the Szentmiklos hoard. Museum of Art History. Vienna.
2. "Their supreme head professes the Hebrew faith, and of the same faith do both Isha (king) and the commanders and nobles who are under him, while the other Khazars profess a religion similar to that of the Turks (Magyars - LG.)" [59. [59, с. 17.]
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And most importantly, for Muslims the Arabs were "their own," for Christians the Greeks, for Jews the Jews of all the big cities, from Canton to Grenada and from Baghdad to Lyons and Mainz, but the native Khazars had no one. No one thought it necessary to intercede for them, and they felt relatively peaceful only on the hillocks and in the reeds of the delta.
Itil was indeed a magnificent city. Though its palaces were made of wood, felt and clay, it was filled with silk and sables, wine, mutton and sturgeon, beautiful dancers and obliging brats. But all this was not for the Khazars, but for the trading Rakhdonites, resting on the Volga after a long journey through the desert, from China, or through the mountains, from Provence. And the fact that the powerless kagan was a distant relative of the khans of Ashin, who had once married Jewish beauties, it did not matter, for the state was ruled by "peh" or, more precisely, by the Malik (king). He and his advisers were noble Jews, masters [294-295] of a multi-story state, and co-members of the most profitable trading enterprises. But he represented not so much Khazaria as his scattered and fabulously rich super-ethnos.
"Dual power" in Khazaria was a grandiose deception of the people, who were shown a legitimate khan once a year, who had already become a Jew, so that the rest of the time, the head of the Jewish community squeezed out of the Khazars and the surrounding peoples, funds for mercenaries, who were used to suppress the very same Khazars. And the Khazars paid ... and there was no way out.
The Khazar tragedy is described by us, but not explained. Unclear are the reasons why a small Jewish community, devoid of sincere friends, hated by neighbors, not supported by their subjects, dominated the international trade and led a good half of the disparate Jewish communities for a hundred and fifty years. Without sincere companions and allies, such an undertaking is not feasible. So, the Judean Khazaria had such allies.
Friends of renewed Khazaria
The government of Obadiah and Hanukkah, along with the throne, inherited a dangerous tradition of international relations and influences. Turkic khans of the Ashina dynasty and their Karaite ally Bulan did not understand the complex economic problems. They simply defended their people from the Muslims attacking from the south, and from the Pechenegs attacking from the east, from the Trans-Ural. A natural ally of the Khazars in the 8th century was Byzantium, which also fought the Arabs and Asparuhans, who fled from the Khazars. Therefore, the spread of Orthodoxy among the Alans and Khazars met no resistance. In the mid VIII century there was a Khazar-Khorezmian (Doros) metropolis, to which seven bishop's Churches were subordinated [55, p. 229]. Cultural contacts were a consequence of the political alliance1.
The Turkic-Khazars did not maintain relations with the Far East and the Far West. On the borders of China until 745 there were [295-296] persistent, bloody wars between the Türkic Kaganate and the Tang empire. Then the revolt of An Lushan in 756-763 drained China, and Tibet and Uiguria followed. There was nothing attractive in the Far East at this time.
It was no better in the West, where the Merovingian Frankish power and the Lombard kingdom were rotting alive, and in Britain the Angles and Saxons were slaughtering the Celts. But there the situation had changed by 800, for Charlemagne, having conquered the Saxons and Lombards, had assumed the imperial crown. The last years of his reign coincided with the coup of Obadiah, when the two empires, which had arisen, came into friendly contact, which was reflected in the fact that Charles, by a special decree, allowed the Jews to live according to their customs [9, vol. V, p. 342]. The Jews were active during this period, and they were the most active of all.
The southern ethnic groups were the most active at that time. The growth of the Arab conquerors' descendants exploded the Abbasid caliphate from within, but its fragments proved more terrifying to its neighbors than the cumbersome centralized socio-political system. For the Berbers and Tuaregs of Africa, the Turks of Central Asia, and the highlanders of the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush, Islam ceased to be a symbol of oppression and robbery, because it became possible to use a variety of Shia movements as banners for fighting against Sunni Baghdad.
The Africans, who broke away from the Caliphate, captured Sicily and invaded Italy, where they suppressed the Lombards and defeated the army of Louis II of France, and in 840, the African fleet entered the mouth of the Tiber and almost conquered Rome. In the same year the Muslim Persians, the Samanids, conquered Isfijab (today Sayram, near Chimkent), and the Baghdad caliphs spent their energies and resources on the Moslems who were the most important of all.
1. Yakut testifies that Khazars were Christians and Muslims, and partially pagans; only a few professed Judaism [see: 3, p. 280]. Dimashki points out that Khazar warriors were Muslims and townspeople were Jews [see ibid], but he seems to be referring only to the population of the capital.
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As subterranean magma flows out of the tectonic fractures of the earth's crust through cracks, so at the turn of two super-ethnoses and two great cultures arose movements that had seemed to be forgotten and buried: the Hurramites in Azerbaijan and the Peacobites (Pavlikians) in Asia Minor. There was no organized connection or common political orientation between the two. Some were simply staunch Mazdakites, others tried to resurrect some of the principles of the Markeonites, the Gnostics. But both of them, in their ideological principles and ultimate [296-297] aims, went back to the ancient doctrine of the Manicheans: the division of the world into black and white and the desire to achieve, through bloody excision, the victory of the light beginning, which they considered themselves to be. How should the Khazar government respond to this? The Hurramites were descendants of the Mazdakites, allies of the Khazar Jews in 494-529, and the Arabs were persecutors of the Jews in 690; the Greeks had forced the Jews to renounce their faith as early as 723. It would seem that it was payback time. But the government of Obadia and Hanukkah (Khazar) preferred trade with Baghdad and the help of Byzantine engineers in building Sarkel, to loyalty to historical traditions and former friendships, which the Turkic-Khazars would never give up. Now the system of values has changed: profit has taken the place of loyalty and valor. And the most profitable situation for the Jews was the war of the Greeks against their enemies, the Bulgarians and Arabs.
Theophilus succeeded in regaining the city of Samosata in 837, but Caliph Mutasim defeated the Byzantine army at Dazimon, and in 838 took the largest city of the empire after Constantinople, Amoria (in the center of Anatolia). The war proceeded with incredible bitterness, with the Hurramites allied with the Greeks, and the Pavlikians1 assisting [297-298] the Arabs. The Bulgarians of khan Persian struck at the rear of Byzantium, breaking into Macedonia, while the Khazars, once enemies of the Bulgarians and friends of the Greeks, did nothing. The Khans of Ashin would never leave their friends in trouble.
Let us turn to Byzantium. There, in 843, the passionate upheaval that led to the tragedy of iconoclasm (destroying icons), ended. It cost Byzantium dearly. The Bulgarian Khan Krum in 813 reached the walls of Constantinople. Spanish Arab-Berber pirates in 826 seized Crete and made that island a base for raids on the islands and coasts of the Aegean. In 827 the Berbers of Atlas invaded Sicily and then transferred their conquests to southern Italy. The Bulgarians devastated Macedonia. And in Constantinople the emperor was busy destroying icons and persecuting monks. But all things come to an end, and by 843 this passions began to fade.
The reduction of passional tension did Byzantium good. The establishment of peace between the secular power and the church, achieved at the Council of Constantinople in 843, made it possible to channel the enormous forces of the system in a certain direction. In 860 St. Cyril converted a group of the Khazars to Orthodoxy, and in 864 he and his brother Methodius introduced Orthodoxy to Moravia. The Bulgarian king Boris was baptized in 864-865, and finally the long and fierce war with the Pavlikians in 872 ended in victory for the Byzantines.
But everything had to be paid for, even the salvation of one's own country. And the price was very high. Byzantium was the recognized center of Christian culture until the middle of the ninth century. This recognition did not mean political supremacy over the other Christian states of the East and West, but it gave them the assurance that they were their own and that in case of danger they had to help against Muslim infidels. Even if these duties were not always carried out, they still mattered, especially in those areas of southern Italy where African Muslims, the warlike Berbers, who engaged in the slave trade and looting, had invaded.
Even during the violent years of iconoclasm, the popes were involved in Byzantine ecclesiastical affairs, supporting the defenders of icons as much as they could. In fact, the independence from Constantinople given to the Roman throne by the Carolingians did not prevent the existence of a super-ethnic unity: the Greeks were at home in Rome and Paris, and the Franks in Thessalonica and Ephesus. The theology here and there was one: semi-Pelagianism, i.e., orthodoxy. [298-299]
But in 858 the patriarch of Constantinople was Photius, who was not recognized by Pope Nicholas I.
1. When it comes to the religious doctrine of the Paulicians, their distinction from the Manicheans, their similarity to the ancient Gnostics, and their extremely negative attitude toward Mazdakism and Judaism are conspicuous. But the theological subtleties which agitated the minds of the theologians were alien and incomprehensible to the masses whose task was war against Byzantium. To oppose themselves to Orthodoxy, it was enough to recognize that matter is not a creation of God, but an eternally evil beginning. This thesis is akin to the Manichaeans and Cathars, but the origin of the doctrine from the lost treatise of Marcion left an indelible mark on their ideology.
The Pauline Christians, like the Manichaeans, cannot be considered Christians, even though they did not reject the Gospel. They called the cross a symbol of damnation because Christ was crucified on it, did not accept icons and rites, did not recognize the sacraments of baptism and communion, and regarded all material things as evil. Consistent, the Peacledonians actively fought against church and authority, parishioners and subjects, making it their business to sell captive young men and women to the Arabs. At the same time, there were many priests and nuns, as well as professional soldiers who led their cohesive, disciplined troops. Even the spiritual leaders could not restrain these sectarians from atrocities. Life took its toll when the slogan of the struggle was the denial of life. And one should not blame Marcion for these murders, who in theology was a philologist and who showed a fundamental difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The ideological basis of the anti-systems could have been based on a different concept.
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The controversy was followed by the excommunication of Photius in 863, not recognized in the East. In 867 the Council of Constantinople anathematized the Latin pope, declaring his interference in the affairs of the Eastern Church illegal. Thus a schism of the churches arose.
It is not necessary to suppose that the intransigence of Photius and Nicholas, or the dispute over filioque, or the claim of the popes to jurisdiction in Illyria and Sicily were the cause of the schism. All these trifles were quickly settled. The usurper Basil I of Macedonia deposed Photius, and the obstinate pope Nicholas I died in the same year, 867. The theological dispute was put aside and forgotten for a time. Sicily was taken over by the Berbers, Illyria by the Hungarians. The official reconciliation of the Byzantine church with the papal throne around 900 changed nothing.
The ecclesiastical schism was not only important in itself. It became a symbol of the separation of the West, where ethnogenesis exploded in the ninth century, from the orthodox East. The Franks and Latins became strangers to the Greeks. They followed a new, original path of development. The ethnoses which emerged in this century on the shores of the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay (between Spain and France on the Atlantic), discovered unprecedented forms of sociability and perception of nature and history, and preferred them to the former, not because they were better, but because they were their own. The inertia of a common Christian culture still long seduced the souls of contemporaries who stubbornly refused to notice the sad reality.
So, Byzantium was transformed from the empire with pretensions for a leading role in the legacy of Rome into a small kingdom in Asia Minor, where the emperor was an Armenian, who attracted his countrymen to the service. And since the Armenians were used to heroically defend their freedom and faith against the Muslims, the friends of the latter, the Jews, became enemies of Byzantium.
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Now we can summarize the observations. Judeo-Khazaria was in friendship with all the imperial regimes: the late Tang, the Carolingians and their successors in Germany - the Saxon Otgonians, the Abbasids - and in enmity with all the medieval nationalities: the Armenians, the Georgians, the Shiites of the Caliphate, because they represented the interests of conquered tribes, the Pechenegs, the Turfan Uighurs and Slavs, that is, the Kiev Khaganate.
And this is no accident. Here takes place the social proximity of despotic regimes, opposed by the course of history to the natural processes of formation of ethnic [299-300] diversity. The struggle between these two principles was the leading antagonistic contradiction of the VIII-X centuries. And here again the Judeo-Khazars were lucky. A new partner came into play - the Vikings, recruited from the Scandinavian Vikings.
Four Khaganates
At the beginning of the ninth century, the fearsome Vikings, brigands from Scandinavia, appeared on the shores of the North Sea, new peoples began to stand out within Western Europe, and the first, unsuccessful attempt at reconquista - a reverse conquest of the Iberian Peninsula - took place in Asturias. If we connect these areas with the synchronous appearance of the emerged activity with an imaginary line (or better a strip), then we will get the axis of a new passionary push, fully manifested during the IX century.
In that century, the state of the Eastern Europe was characterized by Ludovic the German in his letter to Basil the Macedonian (871) as a coexistence of four kaghanates1 : Avar2, Norman (i.e. Russian), Khazar, and Bulgarian (on the Danube, because Ludovic did not know the Great Bulgar). These Khaganates, as well as the three empires (including the Caliphate), were the legacy of the past passionate shocks. They had to withstand the blow of a new outbreak of ethnogenesis. Therefore, before moving on to the story of the main tragedy of the beginning epoch, let's consider the faces of its protagonists and weigh their capabilities and aspirations.
The importance of the Avar Kaganate, robbed by the Franks and constrained by the Slavs, was minimal. Still, it was a barrier that restrained the aggression of the German feudal lords on the border of the Middle Danube.
The position of the Bulgarian Kaganate was immeasurably better, because the first Bulgarian khans Asparuh and Krum did not strain relations with their Slavic subjects, but rather united with them against the Greeks. Gradually Bulgarians have involved in the European policy, that supporting [300-301] Moravian Slavs against Germans (863), that sending auxiliary armies to Louis German against feudal lords (8bZ) - Bulgarian prince Boris interfered only with his pagan religion, and he has replaced it with orthodox (864). This made Bulgaria an adversary of the papacy and the German kingdom, but the alliance with the Byzantine Empire was also soon broken. In 894 Boris' successor, Simeon, began a war with the Greeks, which exhausted both sides, with no tangible results for Bulgaria.
1 Kagan (Turk.) - sovereign sovereign. Literally: "great" in Sioux-Dakota language (wakan) [see: 36, p. 16; 28, pp. 123-125].
2 Ludovic was referring to the remnants of the genuine Avar ethnos (obok), which survived the defeat by the Franks in 795. These Avars continued to live in Pannonia under the rule of their own Kagan as late as the middle of the ninth century. [9, vol. V, p. 432].
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The Magyars, who retreated from the Khazars and their hired Pechenegs to the lower reaches of Dnieper in 822-826, caused much trouble to Bulgars. However, the Pechenegs were uncomfortable allies for the Khazars and about 890 the Khazar government made peace with the Magyars and Greeks against the Pechenegs and Bulgarians. The latter were victorious over the Khazars, but suffered great damage from the Magyars, who crossed the Danube in 893 and took many prisoners.
Simeon, the Bulgarian king, responded with such a blow that the Magyars left their country and went beyond the Carpathians, to the upper reaches of the Tisza, where they absorbed the rest of the Avars into their horde. The Pechenegs took the lower reaches of Dnieper, and the lower reaches of Dniester were taken by the Slavic tribes - the Tiberians and Ulichi.
In such an alignment of political forces, the Khazars won. They made peace with the Magyars, directing their militant energy against the peoples of Western Europe, where the last Carolingians were least concerned about the safety of their peasants and feudal lords were usually dissatisfied with the imperial regime. The Khazar government was able to make the Tiberians and Ulics its allies, thus securing an important trade route for Jewish merchants from Itil to Toulouse. Finally, in 913 Khazars with the help of Oguzes defeated those Pechenegs, who lived on Yaik and Emba and controlled the section of the caravan route from Itil to China.
The last unresolved problem for the Khazar government was Russian Khaganate with a center in Kiev. War with Russ was inevitable, and complete victory boded incalculable benefits for the Itil setellement, but, of course, not for the enslaved Khazars.
Much less is known about the origin and ancient history of this fourth, Russian Kaganate. Literature of the question is immense, but, fortunately, the critical summary of the facts, observations, texts and opinions which covers a history of the question, reflecting a modern [301-302] scientific point of view and excluding fantastic concept of normalism of Russ [8] has been recently made.
Conclusions of this research in which 623 works are used, are reduced to the following:
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At the beginning of AD on the banks of the Middle Dnieper, in the forest and forest-steppe zones lived the Venedes, the ancestors of the Slavs. By the 4 c. they were divided into the Sklavins and Ants. Ants is the Greek name for the union of tribes on the right bank of the Dnieper, but these tribes called themselves - Polyans, and then they were called "Rus"1. In the IX century, the power in the Russian city of Kiev was seized by an alien - Viking konung Helgi (Oleg), who had no relation to the local Russes. "Vikings" is not an ethnic name, but a professional name; that is how gangs of pirates of different ethnic composition were called in the IX-X centuries. Russ, though not Slavs, but the old inhabitants of the right bank of the Dnieper, spread in the VI-VIII centuries on the left bank, where they were built Chernigov and Pereyaslavl. This territory in the specific period was called "Rus" or "Russian land" (in the narrow sense), in contrast to the Russian state (in the broad sense), which included Novgorod, Suzdal, Ryazan, Polotsk, Smolensk, Galicia, Volyn, Tmutarakan, the lower reaches of Dniester and Bug and some non-Slavic lands with Baltic and Finnish populations.
This generalization of the anti-Normanist conceptions is the best approximation of the historical reality, and we accept it as a basis for further analysis. There are only some objections, of which two should be noted.
The first: the comparison of the 4th c. Rothmon described by Jordan [33] with Roxolans is a tribute to the traditional autochthonism [8, p.161]. The ethnonym "Ros" and the prefix "goh" are not identical. "Rox" is a Greek rendering of the Persian word "ravsh/raush" - shine (Alexander's wife Roxana had a Persian name Raushanak - "shining"). Russomons - ancestors of Russ did not have any attitude to Alans as well as to Normans - Vikings. And here is why.
Famous place annals: " Сице bo bo boьь with it names varjazi Russ is that friends name Svis (Swedish), friends also Urmanian (Norman, i.e. Norwegian), Anjglian (Jutlandian), friends Gote (Goth), so and si " [42, volume I, page. 18], wonderfully commented [302-303] by D.S.Lihachev, but in confirmation of his conclusion one can add that by the 12th century chronicler could not mean the island Gotland, populated at his time by Swedes and abandoned by Goths in the middle of the II century, i.e., a thousand years before he wrote this text. Goths here are Crimean or Black Sea Goths - Tetraxites, well known to the Russian reader of the 12th -13th centuries, mentioned in "The Tale of Igor's Campaign". And if so, the assignment of Rus to this ethnic group has only a paleo-ethnographic sense: the Rossomons, like the Goths, are the fragments of the Great Migration of Peoples, stuck in Eastern Europe, and their name "Vikings" shows the profession of Rurik, who came from the Dnieper Rus tribe, already partially mixed with the Slavs, but still retaining some features of ancient northern culture in the 9th century.
In about 800-809 AD the second resettlement of Slavs from the banks of Elba to the East took place. A.A. Shakhmatov suggested that the Slavs fled from Charlemagne's Franks. This version is difficult to accept. The successes of Charles and his barons were greatly exaggerated by chroniclers and subsequent historians.
1. "...Polanian, I nowadays call Russia" [42, vol. 1, p. 21]. The author explains that Rus is a new historical phenomenon, which replaced the disintegrated tribal union of Polans [8, p. 163-164].
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The Franks failed to gain a foothold neither on the Ebro, nor on the Tisza, nor on the right bank of the Elbe. Therefore, for the resettlement of Slavs to a country with a very different climate, where winter frost and summer heat prevail (January isotherm is below zero), one should look for other motives.
Passionary impulse which appeared in Scandinavia in the beginning of IX century and in Western Europe about 841, had an incubation period. In the range of this shock was the northern part of Germany and, therefore, the banks of the Elbe. If this is so, we are faced with a normal passionary migration, because of which the Vyatichi and Radimichi changed their place of habitation.
Both branches of the eastern Slavs in the 8th century were on the rise of the passionate tension. The scarcity of sources makes us resort to chronological interpolation, but this method yields results. The descendants of the 4th c. Ants, who defeated Goths together with Rossomons and Huns, by the beginning of the 9th century have their own "Kaganate", i.e. a sovereign state with a center in Kiev, and a king named Dir. If we consider that the rise of this branch of Slavs is comparable to the passionary push, which caused the Great Migration of the peoples, and the creation of Byzantium out of the confessional communities of the Asia Minor, then in the eighth century falls into the acmatic phase, and in the ninth century into the torsion phase, and is as it happened.
The high level of passionarity gave Slavs an advantage over eastern Balts (Jatvyags, Golyad) and Finno-Utras (Merya, Muroma, Vse) and entailed a merge of Slavic tribes [303-304] into a single Old Russian ethnos, realized at the end of X century. But Slavs and Khazars in VIII century did not yet encounter each other and did not represent a danger to each other.
Second: it is indisputable that the relations between the Russian and Khazar Khaganates were not "idyllic", but the destruction of a number of Polyan settlements in the VIII century was not the work of the Khazars. In the VIII century, the Khazars were bogged down in war with the Arabs, and on the border of the Don they gained a foothold only in 834, and then the war really began.
If dating of destruction Pastyrsky settlement and other fortifications left by the population [8, p. 172] is correct, then opponents Slavs and Russ could be only Avars supervising the grounds Kuturgurs (the western branch Bulgarian), from Carpathian up to Don. In 631 the Avars put down a revolt of Kuturgurs, the rest of which united with Kuturgurs in 633. When the latter were defeated by the Khazars in 656, the Bulgars scattered some to the Kama, some to the Danube, some to Italy, and the former lands of Kuturgurs were inhabited by Tiberians and Uliches.
All these events in no way diminished the power of the Avars, who "dominated the Dulebs," i.e. dominated the steppes east of the Carpathians. The decline of the Avar Kaganate came in 800-809, years after they lost the war with the Franks, and after that fateful decade began Khazar aggression to the west.
Such is the "connection of times" or "logic of events”. Ant or Polanian tribal union, which included the Rossomonians, arose as an East Slavic ethnos because of the passionate push of the second century simultaneously with Byzantium, and with it entered an acclimatic phase, ending with a victory over a cruel enemy Avars, after which the Slavs spread to the shores of the Black Sea. Unlike Byzantium, the Polanian ethnos survived the crisis of transition from phase to phase safely, as it received an unexpected, but very useful reinforcement.
It should be taken into account that the Russian Kaganate was isolated from the countries with a written geography: Khazar Kaganate separated it from the Muslim East, Bulgarian Kaganate from Byzantium, and Avar Kaganate from Germany. That is why the information about the 9th century Russians was so incomplete and fragmentary. And that is why the German authors of the 9th century could confuse the forgotten Russomons with Swedes: i.e. both were Scandinavians, though the ancestors of the Russomons left their homeland in the I-II centuries.
Already in the X century contemporaries described Russ and Slavs as two different ethnoses, acting, as a rule, together. [304-305] So here was a situation similar to that which has developed with Turks and Khazars, with one, rather important, difference. Turkuks brought a passionarity to Khazars, while Russomons and Slavs were equally passionate at their meeting and contact, because of which they formed in the habitat of a single passionary impulse.
Now a few words about the Vikings, about whom there are so many false judgments, that it is necessary to avoid misunderstandings. There was no overpopulation in the ninth century in Scandinavia, because there are many free fiords even now, although there were more people. The formation there was communal-primal, and the konungs were elected tribal chiefs. Until the ninth century, the Scandinavians barely defended their land from the onslaught of the Lapps, until they drove them to the far north, on the tundra. Vikings were called those people who did not want to live in a tribe and obey its laws.
The word "Viking" had an insulting connotation then, like today's "pirate, bandit. When a young man left his family and joined a Viking band, he was mourned as if a dead man. And indeed, it was not easy to survive the distant campaigns and constant fighting. That said, the Vikings had no greater physical courage than those who stayed at home; the physical courage of southern peoples often exceeds that of northern peoples, but this is not passionalism, but another behavioral trait - not aggressiveness, but the ability of adequate reaction, usually manifested in self-defense.
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The Vikings feared death like all humans, but hid this fear from each other by gorging themselves on intoxicating mushrooms before battle. Their modern Arabs attacked sober, but the Vikings, indomitable in their intoxication, crushed Arabs, Franks and Celts alike. They especially valued berserks (like bears), i.e. people capable of going into a hysterical state before a fight and smashing the enemy with great force. After the seizures berserkers fell into a deep depression until the next nervous breakdown.
Berserkers were not tolerated under normal circumstances. They were forced to leave their villages and retreat into mountain caves, where they were wary of going. But in the Viking detachments berserks found a use for themselves. In other words, passionarity makes even not very brave people fierce. So the Vikings were people of a somewhat different stock from other Scandinavians. Having a high degree of passionarity, they were intolerant of the less-passionate Norwegians, who preferred to sit at home and fish for herring. Therefore, the passionate part of the population branched off from the bulk of the people and died in a foreign land. But [305-306] the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish passionary warriors spread the glory of their fury throughout Europe and forced its possessors to defend themselves.
This was part 2 of 4.
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