How the prophetic Oleg is now going
Take revenge on the unreasonable Khazars...

A. S. Pushkin

The Khazars, which the great Russian poet mentions in The Song of the Prophetic Oleg, is another mystery of history. It is known that the prince of Kyiv had good enough reasons for revenge: at the beginning of the 10th century, the Khazars defeated and imposed tribute on many Slavic tribes. The Khazars lived east of the Slavs. The Byzantines write about Khazaria as a state allied to them (even the henchman of the kagan, i.e. the king, Leo Khazar, sat on the throne in Constantinople): "Ships come to us and bring fish and skin, all kinds of goods ... they are with us in friendship and we eat ... possess military force and power, hordes and troops". Chroniclers speak of the greatness of the capital Itil. Surrounded by large settlements, castles that stood on trade routes grew into cities. Itil was such a city that grew out of the kagan's castle, which, as we know from sources, was located somewhere in the delta of the Volga. Many attempts to find its ruins for a long time did not lead to anything. It seems to have been completely washed away by the frequently changing course of the river. Several fairly detailed, although sometimes contradictory, ancient descriptions of this city have come down to us (mostly Arab authors). Itil consisted of two parts: a brick palace-castle built on an island, connected to the castle by floating bridges and also fenced with a powerful wall made of mud bricks. The fortress of the kagan was called al-Bayda, or Sarashen, which meant "white fortress". It had many public buildings: baths, bazaars, synagogues, churches, mosques, minarets and even madrasahs. Randomly scattered private buildings were adobe houses and yurts. Merchants, artisans and various common people lived in them.

Khazars - in Arabic Khazar - the name of the people of Turkic origin. This name comes from the Turkish qazmak (to wander, move) or from quz (country of the mountain turned to the north, shady side). The name "Khazars" was known even to the first Russian chronicler, but no one really knew who they were and where the "core" of Khazaria was, no archaeological monuments remained of it. Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov spent more than one year studying this issue. In the late 50s - early 60s, he repeatedly traveled to the Astrakhan region as the head of the archaeological expedition of the Russian Academy of Sciences, wrote in his writings that the Khazars had two major cities: Itil on the Volga and Semender on the Terek. But where are their ruins? The Khazars were dying - where did their graves go?

The historically educated reader knows that the Khazars were a powerful people who lived in the lower reaches of the Volga, professed the Jewish faith and in 965 were defeated by the Kyiv prince Svyatoslav Igorevich. The reader - historian or archaeologist - poses many questions: what was the origin of the Khazars, what language did they speak, why did their descendants not survive, how could they profess Judaism when it was a religion, conversion to which was forbidden by its own canons, and, most importantly, how did the Khazar people themselves, the country inhabited by them, and the huge Khazar kingdom, which covered almost the entire South-Eastern Europe and was inhabited by many peoples, correlate with each other?

L.N. Gumilyov. Discovery of Khazaria.

Found the legendary city of Itil...

And now archaeologists announced that they managed to make a long-awaited discovery: to discover the capital of the ancient Khazar Khaganate - the legendary city of Itil ... This was announced by one of the leaders of the expedition of the Russian Academy of Sciences, candidate of historical sciences Dmitry Vasiliev.

According to the scientist, a joint expedition of archaeologists from the Astrakhan State University and the Institute of Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences worked on the Samosdelsky settlement near the village of Samosdelki, Kamyzyaksky district of the Astrakhan region. The researchers came to the conclusion that this settlement is the ancient capital of Khazaria.

"Our scientific team, we are now publicly declaring this at scientific conferences says the archaeologist. - We found a very powerful cultural layer.

There are about three and a half meters, and not only the Khazar time, but also the pre-Mongolian and Golden Horde times. A large number of brick buildings were found, the contours of the citadel, the island on which the central part of the city stood, and less prosperous quarters were revealed.

According to him, archaeologists have been working on the settlement for ten years already - since 2000, a large number of interesting finds have been made there. "We donate them to our Astrakhan museum, every year 500-600 items. This is the 8th-10th centuries of our era," Vasiliev added.

However, it will never be possible to prove "100%" that the found city is Itil, the scientist believes. "There are always some doubts - after all, we will not be able to find a sign with the inscription "City of Itil".


There are a lot of indirect signs on which we are based," he explains. Firstly, archaeologists pay attention to the presence of a brick fortress: "Brick construction in Khazaria was a royal monopoly, and we know only one brick fortress on the territory of the Khazar Khaganate.

This is Sarkel, which was built directly by the royal decree. "Secondly, using the radiocarbon method, the lower layers of the Samosdelsky settlement were dated to the VIII-IX centuries - that is, the Khazar time.

The large size of the city also speaks in favor of the hypothesis of archaeologists. "Investigated, or rather explored, famous area- more than two square kilometers, according to the Middle Ages - this is a giant city. We do not know the density of the population, but we can assume that its population was 50-60 thousand people," Vasiliev said.


He added that the last mention of the Khazars dates back to the 12th century, after which they disappeared into the mass of other peoples and lost their ethnic identity. However, Itil continued to exist in the Golden Horde era and disappeared in the XIV century due to the rise in the level of the Caspian, it was simply flooded.

Astrakhan archaeologists are sure they have found the legendary Itil

A joint expedition of archaeologists from the Astrakhan State University and the Institute of Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences at the Samosdelskoye settlement near the village of Sasmadeki, Kamyzyaksky district of the Astrakhan region, found confirmation that the settlement, on which excavations scientists have been working for more than one year, is the legendary Itil.

Employees of the archaeological laboratory took a panorama of the settlement from the air. It turned out that in ancient times in this now arid place there was an island surrounded on all sides by deep channels. The island was small, and people also settled along the banks of the river. This coincided with medieval descriptions of the city of Itil, which are found among Arab historians and geographers.

Based on materials from the media of the Astrakhan region - AIF

Vladimir Yakovlevich Petrukhin - Doctor of Historical Sciences,

Leading Researcher, Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences,

professor at RSUH.

When it comes to the Khazars, the first thing that comes to mind is Pushkin's "Song of the Prophetic Oleg", familiar from the school desk:

How the prophetic Oleg is now going

Take revenge on the unreasonable Khazars.

Their villages and fields for a violent raid

He doomed swords and fires ...

The plot of Pushkin's "song" is not at all connected with the Khazars - after all, it tells about the death of Oleg from his beloved horse, but the beginning of any story is always remembered in the first place. At the time of Pushkin, they did not really know who the Khazars were, but they remembered that the beginning of proper Russian history was connected with them.

Nestor the chronicler, who told at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries. about the first Russian princes and the death of Oleg, begins Russian history with a mention of the tribute that the Khazars collected from the Slavic tribes of the Middle Dnieper, and the overseas Varangians from the tribes of Novgorod land back in the middle of the 9th century. Nestor tells in the Primary Chronicle - "The Tale of Bygone Years", how the steppe-Khazars approached the land of the meadows - the inhabitants of Kyiv and demanded tribute from them, and the meadows gave them tribute with swords. The Khazar elders saw in this tribute an unkind sign: after all, the Khazars conquered many lands with sabers sharpened on one side, and the swords were double-edged. And so it happened - Nestor completes his story about the Khazar tribute, the Russian princes began to own the Khazars.

The annals say nothing about revenge on the Khazars by the prophetic Oleg - this is a poetic "reconstruction" of history: in fact, it was "unreasonable" to oppress the Slavs and make "violent raids". The chronicle describes the relationship between Oleg and the Khazars in a different way. Oleg was a Varangian, heir Prince of Novgorod Rurik. He was called from across the sea with his Scandinavian (Varangian) squad, nicknamed Rus, to the Novgorod land to rule there according to Slavic customs - "in a row, by right." An outstanding domestic orientalist A.P. Novoseltsev even believed that the Slavs called the Viking Varangians to Novgorod in order to avoid the Khazar threat. One way or another, the first prince sent to the south - to Tsargrad, along the famous path from the Varangians to the Greeks, his warriors, who settled in Kiev, and after the death of Rurik, Oleg went there with the young Igor Rurikovich. He appeared in Kyiv in the 880s, proclaimed the new capital "the mother of Russian cities" and agreed with the Slavic tribes - tributaries of the Khazars, that they would pay tribute to the Russian prince. It was still far from “revenge” here - the Khazars were already “avenged” by Igor’s heir Svyatoslav, who in the 960s defeated the Khazar state, and only the remains of the Khazar cities - settlements on the Don and Seversky Donets, in the North Caucasus and in the Crimea - remind of once powerful Khazar state.

Archaic mythological plot with the World Tree.

Drawing from a vessel found in a burial ground on the Lower Don.

Publication by S.I. Bezuglov and S.A. Naumenko.

Real history is incomparably richer and more interesting than this old official doctrine. The Khazars were by no means the first inhabitants of the Eurasian steppe who sought to impose tribute on farmers and townspeople. At the end of IV-V century. Europe was shocked by the Hun invasion: the ancient cities of the Northern Black Sea region were destroyed, nomadic hordes rushed to Central Europe, to Rome and Constantinople, the centers of the Roman Empire. But the huge Hunnic state collapsed by the 6th century, and the Huns from Central Asia a new wave of conquerors came - the Turks, who created their own "empire" - the Turkic Khaganate. The title of the lord of this "empire" - kagan, "khan of khans", was equated with the imperial title. Then, in the 6th century, Slavs began to settle from Central Europe to the Danube and to the east - to the Dnieper and Volkhov.

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The Khazars are first mentioned in a certain historical and geographical context as a people living in the "Hunnic limits" north of the Caspian Gates - Derbent (Bab al-abwab). The very name Khazars most researchers correlate with traditional Turkic ethnonyms such as Kazakh denoting a nomad (it is assumed that Chinese sources called them Ko-sa). Syrian Christian author of the middle of the VI century. Zechariah Rhetor in his "Chronicle" first lists the five Christian peoples of the Caucasus, to which he also refers the Huns, then gives a description of the barbarian nomads. "Anvar, Sebir, Burgar, Alan, Kurtagar, Avars, Khasar, Dirmar, Sirurgur, Bagrasik, Kulas, Abdel, Eftalit - these 13 peoples live in tents, exist on the meat of cattle and fish, wild animals and weapons." The "Hun limits" of Zechariah are given extremely broadly, if he also includes the Central Asian Ephthalites ("White Huns"), but the Khazars, obviously, close the list of nomadic peoples of the Black Sea steppes: Sebirs - Savirs, Burgars - Bulgarians, Alans - Alans, Kurtagars - Kutrigurs, Avars - Avars, Khasar - Khazars.

In the VI century. after the Huns lost their power in the Eurasian steppes, a new state association arose in Central Asia, created by the Turks, headed by their ruler - a kagan from the Ashina clan - the Turkic Khaganate. His possessions stretched from Central Asia to the Black Sea steppes and included big number peoples. Since then, the Turkic peoples have replaced Iranian-speaking nomads in the steppes - Sarmatians, Alans. In the 7th century The Turkic Khaganate broke up into warring groups of Turks. On the western outskirts of the Khaganate, the Turks subjugated the Hephthalites and began to threaten Iran, including in Transcaucasia, which was subject to it - it was not for nothing that the Iranian rulers of the Sassanids began to fortify Derbent in the Caspian so that the Turks would not break into Iran-controlled Armenia through the Caspian gates.

In 626, when the Avars Turks, who migrated to Central Europe in the 6th century, and their allies, the Slavs, besieged Constantinople, the Khazars were already included in the general geopolitical system - the situation of the struggle of two great powers - and acted in Transcaucasia on the side of Byzantium, then Iran. In Armenian sources, the ruler of the Khazars is called jebu hakan and is recognized as the second person in the hierarchy of the ruling layer of the Turkic Khaganate. In the era of the collapse of the Turkic Khaganate, the Bulgarian association of tribes, headed by the noble Dulo family, supported one of the Turkic groups that fought for power in the Khaganate, the Khazars supported the other; It is believed that after the collapse of the Turkic Khaganate in the middle of the 7th century. a “prince” from the Ashina clan fled to them, which gave the rulers of the Khazars the right to be called khagans (khakans).

Khazaria and neighboring regions in10th century

Map from the book: Golb N., Pritsak O.

Khazar-Jewish Documents10th century

Moscow - Jerusalem, 1997.

The nomadic Bulgarians (proto-Bulgarians) in the process of disintegration of the state of the Huns, pressed by other Turkic nomadic Aquarians, in interaction with Iranian and Ugric tribal elements from the second half of the 5th century BC. invaded the Black Sea region. Tribes of Kutrigurs, Utigurs, Saragurs, Onogurs, Ogurs (Urogs, Ogors), Barsils, Savirs, Balanjars in the 5th-7th centuries. inhabited the territory from the Lower Danube to the Eastern Sea of ​​Azov, lived in the North Caucasus, in the Caspian Sea; they fought with the Avar and Turkic Khaganates. In the first third of the 7th c. during the collapse of the Turkic Khaganate, the Onogurs, part of the Kutrigurs and others, led by Khan Kubrat (Kuvrat) from the Dulo clan, formed the association of Great Bulgaria with a center in Phanagoria (on Taman), which included the territory between the Don and Kuban and to the west up to the Middle Dnieper.

Khazar warrior. Drawing by Oleg Fedorov.

The Khazars roamed the fertile lands of the foothills of the North Caucasus - in the country of the Savirs and, no less important, were familiar with the life of ancient cities. Like any nomads, they quickly found profit in the political struggle, which, as always, was waged in the Caucasus by the great powers: in those days it was Byzantium and Iran. In the 7th century the Khazars became so strong that they began to claim dominance not only in the Black Sea steppes, but also in the Byzantine cities of Taman and the Crimea, and in Transcaucasia. A new "empire" was being formed - the Khazar Khaganate: many peoples and lands began to obey the Khagan, the ruler of the Khazars. In the North Caucasus, the Alans, the Iranian-speaking descendants of the ancient Scythians and Sarmatians, became allies and vassals of the Khazars.

In the second half of the 7th c. The Khazars, in alliance with the Alans, who settled in the Caspian steppes and in the North Caucasus, invaded the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov and defeated Great Bulgaria. After that, part of the Bulgarians, incl. who switched to a settled and semi-settled way of life, remained under the rule of the Khazar Khaganate, making up, along with the Alans, most of the population of Khazaria. Another part of the Bulgarians - a horde led by Khan Asparukh, migrated to the Balkans to Byzantium (681). There, together with the Balkan Slavs, they created a new state - Danube Bulgaria. Another group of Bulgarians retreated to the interfluve of the Volga and Kama: there, by the 9th century. Volga Bulgaria (Bulgaria) was formed, nominally recognizing the power of the Khazar Khagan. In the forest-steppe, the Slavs began to pay tribute to the Khazars, who settled from the Dnieper region to the Oka and Don, including in those regions where farmers did not dare to settle until the time the Cossack villages were created. The power of the Khazars contributed to the Slavic agricultural colonization - after all, the Khazars needed bread and furs obtained in the forests of Eastern Europe.

Having subjugated the Alans, Bulgarians and other peoples of Eastern Europe, the Khazars clashed with Byzantium in its possessions in the Northern Black Sea region. At the end of the 7th-8th centuries. they captured the Bosporus, Eastern Crimea, even claimed Chersonese. But soon the Khazars and Byzantium had a common enemy - the Arab conquerors. The Arabs captured Central Asia, ousted the Khazars from the countries of Transcaucasia, and in 735 invaded the Caspian steppes. The ruler of Khazaria was forced to leave his headquarters in Dagestan - the cities of Belenjer and Semender and found a new capital in the inaccessible Volga delta. It received the same Turkic name as the Volga River: Itil, or Atil. "Jihad" has approached the borders of the current Russian state at the time of the rise of Islam.

The Arabs, however, could not hold out for long in the steppes: they retreated to Transcaucasia, and Derbent remained their outpost - and the outpost of Islam. Kagan restored his power in the North Caucasus and other areas.

This power needed to be strengthened, and the construction of fortifications began in the kaganate. Fortress systems arose in the North Caucasus and on the axial river highway of Khazaria - in the Don basin. For the construction of fortresses, the traditions of both Iranian and Byzantine fortification were used. Around 840, the Byzantine engineer Petrona erected the Sarkel fortress on the Don, excavated in the middle of the 20th century. archaeologists led by the largest researcher of the Khazars - M.I. Artamonov. On the other side of the Don, fortifications were erected that controlled the crossing across the river. A powerful fortress in Khumar controlled the Kuban basin. Settlements of the Khazar time continue to be explored by S.A. Pletneva, M.G. Magomedov, G.E. Afanasiev, V.S. Flerov, V.K. Mikheev, but research has so far affected only an insignificant part of the Khazar heritage.

Fortifications. Hillfort Humara.

The fortress controlled the Kuban basin.

IN last years(since 2000) these fortresses have been studied as part of the Khazar project, initiated by the Russian Jewish Congress (E.Ya. Satanovsky) and the Jewish University in Moscow (now the Higher Humanitarian School named after Sh. Dubnov - coordinators V.Ya. Petrukhin and I.A. Arzhantsev), but archaeologists have to deal primarily with saving dying archaeological sites and fixing the destruction of the Khazar fortresses on the Don, including the Pravoberezhny settlement near the village of Tsimlyanskaya - opposite Sarkel (V.S. Flerov). This white-stone fortress was called together with Sarkel to control the crossing over the Don - the central highway of the Khazar Khaganate. It is interesting that Kyiv, which paid tribute to the Khazars before the appearance of Russian princes there, was located, according to the Russian chronicle, on a ferry across the Dnieper. The Khazars, thus, sought to control the main river communications of Eastern Europe.

Excavations at Samosdelka. Summer 2005. Photo by E. Zilivinskaya.

But the main object of study of the Khazar project was ancient city, discovered in the Volga Delta, on the island of Samosdelka near Astrakhan. There are no such cities in the entire Lower Volga region. The capitals of the Golden Horde - Sarai-Batu and Sarai-Berke, built here by craftsmen brought by the Mongols from Central Asia, did not exist for long - their cultural layer on the main area does not exceed 0.5 m. time - VIII-X centuries. So far, a small area has been excavated (the leaders of the excavations are E.D. Zilivinskaya and D.V. Vasilyev), but it is already clear that brick was used in the construction of buildings (the kagan himself had the right to build bricks in Khazaria), and mass finds indicate that that the population of the city was Bulgarian and Oghuz - from Central Asia. Such was the population of the city in the Volga delta, mentioned by medieval sources - in the pre-Mongolian period it was called Saksin, in the Khazar period - Itil. Itil - the capital of Khazaria, was located in the delta on the island, and perhaps its remains were finally discovered by archaeologists.

Copper belt tips depicting a leopard chasing a hare and a dragon.

XI-13th century Settlement Samosdelka. Excavations by E.D. Zilivinskaya.

Published for the first time.

With the advent of years, the economy of the Khazars became multiform and depended on the traditions of the peoples that were part of the Khaganate. The Alans, who settled not only in the North Caucasus, but also in the Don and Donets basins, were experienced farmers and knew how to build stone fortresses. Agriculture was also practiced by the Khazars, who also learned gardening, winemaking and fishing. The Khazars were residents of ancient cities - Phanagoria and Tamatarkha (Tmutarakan) on Taman, Kerch in the Crimea. The Bulgarians in the steppe preserved mainly a nomadic way of life.

Archaeological monuments of Khazaria are vivid evidence of the formation of urban civilization where previously only steppes stretched and ancient burial mounds rose. But these monuments, like any archeological monuments, are “mute”: the Khazar chronicles have not been preserved, the inscriptions made in Turkic runes are few and have not yet been deciphered. What was said about the Khazar history is known from external - foreign evidence: a treatise by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, descriptions of the Arab geographer al-Masudi and other Eastern authors.

A defensive system and an economy, even a prosperous one, were not enough to win recognition in the world, even in the early medieval period. And recognition, especially of the great powers, was necessary. During the war with the Muslim Arabs, the kagan faced a confessional problem directly. The Khazars were pagans, they worshiped the Turkic gods, and peaceful relations with the pagans were impossible both from the point of view of orthodox Islam and from the standpoint of Christianity, the state religion of Byzantium.

It is not clear how long and seriously the Khagan professed Islam imposed on him by the Arabs. History has preserved amazing written evidence about the religion of Khazaria, which was brought to us by the so-called Jewish-Khazar correspondence - several letters written in Jewish letters in the 60s. 10th century

Cordova.

The initiator of the correspondence was the dignitary (“chancellor”) of the powerful caliph of Cordoba, the Jewish scholar Hasdai ibn Shaprut. He learned from the merchants that somewhere on the edge of the inhabited world (and North Caucasus was considered in the Middle Ages as the edge of the ecumene) there is a kingdom whose ruler is a Jew. He wrote him a letter asking him to tell about his kingdom. Hasdai was answered by Tsar Joseph, the ruler of Khazaria. He spoke about the enormous size of his state, about the peoples that are subject to it, and finally about how the Khazars became Jews by faith. A distant ancestor of Joseph, who still bore the Turkic name Bulan, saw in a dream an angel of God, who called him to accept the true faith. The angel gave him victory over his enemies - this was an important demonstration of the power of the biblical God for the Khazars, and Bulan and his people converted to Judaism. Then ambassadors from Muslims and from Christian Byzantium came to the king to reason with him: after all, Bulan accepted the faith of a persecuted people everywhere. The king arranged a dispute between Muslims and Christians. He asked the Islamic qadi which faith he considered more true - Judaism or Christianity, and the qadi, who revered the Old Testament prophets, of course, named Judaism. Bulan asked the priest the same question about Judaism and Islam, and he replied that religion old testament more true. So Bulan established himself as the correctness of his choice.

It still remains a mystery when and where the events described in Joseph's letter took place. Therefore, of particular interest are studies within the framework of the Khazar project of new Jewish monuments on Taman, the time of the appearance of which precedes the formation of the Khaganate (S.V. Kashaev, N.V. Kashovskaya).

The letter of the Khazar king was known in the Jewish communities of Spain and was quoted as early as at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries. Entire correspondence was opened for science as early as the 16th century. Isaac Akrish, a descendant of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, and published it in Constantinople around 1577. European science got acquainted with the correspondence in the second half of the 17th century, but it did not inspire confidence among researchers either in the 18th or even in the 19th century . indeed, in the Renaissance and subsequent centuries - in the period of formation historical science- a lot of hoaxes were created (the writers of “new stories”, such as Academician Fomenko and others like him, are still speculating on this). Moreover, a learned Jew could be suspected of a hoax, who was looking for periods of glory and power in the history of the persecuted people, it was not for nothing that he called the book itself with the publication of correspondence “The Voice of the Evangelist”.

But three hundred years after the publication of Akrish, when another scholarly enthusiast, the Karaite Abraham Firkovitch, collected a huge number of Jewish manuscripts in his expeditions, the attitude towards the Khazar documents changed. Among these manuscripts, the famous domestic Hebraist Abraham Garkavin discovered another - a lengthy edition of the letter of Tsar Joseph in a manuscript of the 13th century. This meant that the Jewish-Khazar correspondence was not a forgery.

In a lengthy version of his message, Joseph writes that he himself lives on the Itil River near the Gurgan Sea - there was the capital of the kaganate and the wintering quarters of the kaganate, from which, following the traditions of the nomadic nobility, he set off for the summer through the lands of his domain between the Volga and Don rivers . The king enumerates those subject to him " numerous nations"near the Itil River: these are Bur-t-s, Bul-g-r, S-var, Arisu, Ts-r-mis, V-n-n-tit, S-v-r, S-l-viyun. Further, in the description of Joseph, the border of his possessions turns to "Khuvarism" - Khorezm, a state in the Aral Sea region, and in the south it includes S-m-n-d-r and goes to the Caspian gates and mountains. Further, the border follows to the "sea of ​​Kustandin" - "Konstatinople", i.e. Cherny, where Khazaria includes the areas of Sh-r-kil (Sarkel on the Don), S-m-k-r-ts (Tamatarkha - Tmutarakan on Taman), K-r-ts (Kerch), etc. from there the border goes north to the B-ts-ra tribe, which wanders to the borders of the Kh-g-riim region.

Right-bank Tsimlyansk settlement.

Many names of peoples who, according to Josephus, pay tribute to the Khazars, are quite reliably restored and have correspondences in other sources. The first of them - Burtases(Bur-t-s), whose name is sometimes compared with the ethnicon "mordens" (Mordva), mentioned by the Ostrogoth historian of the 6th century. Jordan. However, in the Old Russian "Word of the Destruction of the Russian Land" (XIII century), a strikingly close list of peoples already subject to Rus' is given, where the Burtases are mentioned along with the Mordovians: the borders of Rus' stretch "from the sea to the Bulgarians, from the Bulgarians to the Burtas, from the Burtas to the Chermis , from Chermis to Mordvi". In the context of Joseph's letter, this ethnicon is obviously tied to the Volga region, where the Burtases are followed by the Bulgarians (in Joseph's list - Bul-g-r), and then - S-var, a name that is associated with the city of Suvar in Volga Bulgaria.

Next ethnicon arisu is compared with the self-name of the ethnographic group Mordovians erzya(accordingly, in the Burtases they sometimes see another group of Mordovians - moksha). Name C-r-m-s resonates with chermis ancient Russian source: these are the Cheremis, the medieval name of the Mari, a Finnish-speaking people in the Middle Volga region. The described situation, obviously, dates back to the heyday of the kaganate: in the 60s. In the 10th century, when the letter of Tsar Joseph was compiled, it was hardly possible that the peoples of the Middle Volga region, primarily the Bulgarians who had converted to Islam, depended on the dying kaganate.

The same can be said about the next group of peoples, in which they see the Slavic tributaries of Khazaria. In ethnicon V-n-n-tit usually see the name Vyatichi/Ventichi, who, according to the Russian chronicle, lived along the Oka and paid tribute to the Khazars until the liberation by Prince Svyatoslav during a campaign against Khazaria in 964-965. The next ethnicon - S-v-r - obviously means northerners living on the Desna: they were freed from the Khazar tribute by Prince Oleg, when the Russian princes settled in the Middle Dnieper. The term S-l-viyun, which completes this part of the list of tributaries, refers to common name Slavs. Apparently, here we can mean the whole set of Slavic tributaries, including radimichi And polyan who, according to The Tale of Bygone Years, paid tribute to the Khazars before the appearance Russ in the Middle Dnieper in the 860s. In general, the list of tributaries, therefore, dates back to no later than the second half of the 9th century, rather to the middle of the 9th century, the heyday of the Khazar Khaganate and the construction of white-stone fortresses, including the one mentioned in the Sarkel letter (c. 840).

The legend about the adoption of Judaism by the Khazars explained a lot for historians. Naturally, the kagan did not want to accept Islam: after all, this made him a vassal of the enemy - the Arab caliph. But Christianity did not suit the ruler of Khazaria: after all, he captured the Christian lands of Byzantium. Meanwhile, in the cities of the Caucasus and the Northern Black Sea region, including Phanagoria and Tamatarkh, Jewish communities lived from ancient times, experienced in communicating with the surrounding peoples. These communities also existed in the cities of the Caliphate and Byzantium: Christians and Muslims could communicate with Jews - after all, they were not pagans and revered the one God. The Kagan chose a neutral religion that honored the Holy Scriptures recognized by Christians and Muslims.

Hasdai, however, was an experienced diplomat and understood that the Khazar king was recounting the official legend of the Khazar conversion. Apparently, he turned to another correspondent - a Jew who lived within the boundaries of Khazaria (in Kerch or Taman), who presented the history of the kaganate and the conversion of the Khazars in a slightly different way. It is no longer about an angel who inspired the kagan to accept the true faith - this step of the ruler of the Khazars was vouchsafed by a pious wife from a family of Jewish refugees who escaped persecution in Armenia. This letter was discovered by the English Hebraist Schechter in 1910 in the materials of the largest collection of Jewish manuscripts, which comes from the storage (genizah) of the medieval synagogue in Cairo (Fustat). These materials were transported to Cambridge, and the letter from the anonymous Jew is called the Cambridge Document.

IN modern historiography the perniciousness of the choice of the Jewish faith is usually emphasized: only the Kagan himself and the Khazars accepted Judaism, other peoples retained their "pagan" beliefs. Historians believe that the kagan and the ruling elite of the kaganate were cut off by their faith from other subjects. The reality was still more complicated: if the kagan converted to Islam or Christianity, he would have to forcefully plant a new religion among the tribes and peoples subject to him, but Judaism did not require this.

As a result, an amazing ethno-confessional situation developed in Khazaria: according to the description of al-Masudi, in the Khazar cities, including the capital Itil, different religious communities coexisted side by side: the Jews - the kagan, his commanders bek and the Khazars, who lived in brick buildings, as well as Christians (the Christian population of the Black Sea cities remained among the subjects of the kagan), Muslims (the kagan's guard consisted of Central Asian Oghuz Muslims) and pagans (Slavs and Russia). Each community had its own judges and retained autonomy. This peaceful coexistence of different religious communities was characteristic even for the ancient cities of the Northern Black Sea region and for Constantinople. In Eastern Europe, the establishment of such a tradition was also an important step towards civilization.

However, a strong state pursuing an independent policy at the junction of Europe and Asia could not but arouse opposition from neighboring countries, especially since the Khazars did not leave claims to Byzantine possessions in the Black Sea region and power over the Slavs. In 860, Konstantin (Cyril) the Philosopher himself, the future first teacher of the Slavs, went on behalf of the emperor to the headquarters of the kagan to take part in another dispute about faith: the life of Constantine says that he specifically learned the Hebrew language in Chersonese for this. Obviously, the fate of Christians who found themselves under the rule of Khazaria worried Constantinople.

Another recently discovered Jewish document of the 10th century. (read by American Hebraist Norman Golb in 1962)

A letter about a debtor whom the community wants to redeem from debt bondage indicates that

that the Khazar Jews also appeared in the Slavic world.

This document comes from Kyiv and today remains the oldest Russian document.

The signatures of the trustees under this letter are surprising: along with typical Jewish names, a certain

Guests bar Kyabar Kogen.

Guests - Slavic name, known from Novgorod birch bark letters, Kyabar - the name of one of the Khazar tribes,

Cohen - the designation of the descendants of the priestly class among the Jews. Apparently, representatives of this community (one of whom was the son of a Khazarin - kyabara), who probably spoke Slavonic, if they had Slavic names, took part (along with Muslim Bulgarians!) And in a dispute about faith, which took place already under Kiev Prince Vladimir on the eve of the baptism of Rus' in 986

Tsar Joseph in his letter described Khazaria as a powerful state, to which almost all the peoples of Eastern Europe were subordinate, but by the 60s of the 10th century. reality was far from this picture. Already by the beginning of the X century. Islam spread in Volga Bulgaria, and Christianity spread in Alanya: the rulers of these once vassal lands of Khazaria chose their own religion and the path to independence.

Khazaria itself was threatened by new hordes of nomads from the east: the Pechenegs were pushing the Hungarians allied to the Khazars in the Black Sea region (at the end of the 9th century they ended up in Central Europe - present-day Hungary), and the Oguzes were advancing from the Trans-Volga region.

But Rus' became the most dangerous rival of Khazaria in Eastern Europe. Tsar Joseph wrote in his letter: if the Khazars had not stopped the Russians on their borders, they would have conquered the whole world. Rus' really rushed through the territory of Khazaria to the main markets of the Middle Ages - to Constantinople and Baghdad. As already mentioned, Prophetic Oleg with his Varangians and Slavs, nicknamed Rus, captured Kyiv and appropriated the Khazar tribute. In 965, Prince Svyatoslav moved on the last Slavic tributaries of the Khazars - the Vyatichi, who were sitting on the Oka. He subjugated the Vyatichi and went out with an army to the Volga Bulgaria. Rus' plundered the Bulgarian cities and moved down the Volga. The Khazar Khagan was defeated, and his capital city of Itil was taken.

Then Svyatoslav moved to the North Caucasus, to the Alans (yases) and Circassians (kasogs), imposing tribute on them. Apparently, then the Khazar Tamatarkha became a Russian city - Tmutarakan, and the North Caucasus - a "hot spot" of the Old Russian state. On the way back, the prince took Sarkel, which was renamed Belaya Vezha (Slavic translation of the name Sarkel). These Khazar lands came under the rule of Russian princes.

Tsar Joseph turned out to be right in predicting the danger from the peoples whose expansion was held back by Khazaria: the Oguzes seized part of Transcaucasia (forming the ethnic basis of the Azerbaijanis), Svyatoslav's Rus' moved from Kiev to the Balkans, conquering Bulgaria and threatening Byzantium.

The remnants of the defeated Khazars quickly disappeared into this turbulent historical space, which remained the steppes and the North Caucasus. The disappearance of the Khazars, whose mention ceases by the 12th century, gave rise to many romantic and quasi-historical conceptions about their heirs, the Karaites of Crimea. Mountain Jews of the Caucasus - up to brilliant literary hoaxes, including the famous "Khazar Dictionary" by Milorad Pavich. Of particular interest is the attempt of the English writer Arthur Koestler to see in the Khazars, who fled from Eastern Europe, the "thirteenth tribe", the ancestors of European Jews - the Ashkenazim. This historically completely unfounded concept was built on a noble impulse: to prove that anti-Semitism is devoid of any historical foundations - after all, the Khazars were not Semites, but Turks. In fact, European Jews, the ancestors of the Ashkenazim, settled in the X-XII centuries. from the traditional centers of the diaspora in the Mediterranean and knew almost nothing about the Khazars. The culture of the Volga Bulgarians became the most important component of the culture of the Golden Horde. The Volga Bulgarians formed the ethnic basis for the formation of the Chuvash and Kazan Tatars.

Many legends associated with the Khazars are associated with the largest medieval Jewish cemetery in Chufut-Kale. A. Firkovich tried to date some of the monuments to the Khazar time: within the framework of the Khazar project, a complete description of the cemetery is being carried out (A. M. Fedorchuk).

The Khazars suffered the fate of their predecessors, who created their "empires" in Eurasia - the Huns and Turks: with the death of the state, social and ethnic ties were destroyed, and the ruling people also disappeared. But the historical experience of Khazaria turned out to be in demand not only in the Jewish diaspora: it was not for nothing that Vladimir Svyatoslavovich, like his son Yaroslav the Wise, was called the title kagan in the Word of Law and Grace. In the historical sense, Khazaria turned out to be the forerunner not only of the Old Russian, but also of the Russian state as a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional entity. Those beginnings of state, ethnic and confessional development, which were laid down by the Khazars, have survived to this day in Eastern Europe. Ethnic and confessional diversity, coexistence different peoples, religions and cultures remain the key to the further development of our country.

Without pursuing any other goal, as soon as my own whim, according to which, during a walk, I suddenly wanted to combine three poets: A.S. Pushkin, V.S. Vysotsky and A.A. Galich through the prophetic Oleg, either because Providence or fate often occupied their minds and they somehow united in me through this association, or because the first two lines exist in an unchanged state in all three poems by three poets, but one way or another it happened. It seems that it is necessary to say about some distinctiveness in the imagery of these poets. If Pushkin's prophetic Oleg is written without irony and with faith in historical tradition, then Vysotsky's image of the prophetic Oleg is the bearer of a certain life rule, idea, and not a historical event as such. In Galich, the prophetic Oleg is no longer a historical character and not a moralizing idea, but rather a poetic line by Pushkin, transformed into an interpretation of history as such, history in general, and not a prophetic Oleg, and specifically directed against the Marxist approach to antiquity. Below I give all three poems, although A. Galich and V. Vysotsky call them songs and sing, however,
I don't see a significant difference between a song and a poem if there is a logical meaning to the song.
* * *
The circumstances of the death of Prophetic Oleg are contradictory. According to the Kyiv version (“PVL”), his grave is located in Kyiv on Mount Shchekovitsa. The Novgorod chronicle places his grave in Ladoga, but also says that he went "beyond the sea."
In both versions, there is a legend about death from a snakebite. According to legend, the wise men predicted to the prince that he would die from his beloved horse. Oleg ordered the horse to be taken away, and remembered the prediction only four years later, when the horse had long since died. Oleg laughed at the Magi and wanted to look at the bones of the horse, stood with his foot on the skull and said: “Should I be afraid of him?” However, a poisonous snake lived in the horse's skull, which mortally stung the prince.

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin

Song about the prophetic Oleg

Take revenge on the unreasonable Khazars:
Their villages and fields for a violent raid
He doomed swords and fires;
With his retinue, in Constantinople armor,
The prince rides across the field on a faithful horse.
From the dark forest towards him
There is an inspired magician,
Submissive to Perun, the old man alone,
The promises of the future messenger,
In prayers and divination spent the whole century.
And Oleg drove up to the wise old man.
"Tell me, sorcerer, favorite of the gods,
What will happen in my life?
And soon, to the delight of neighbors-enemies,
Will I cover myself with grave earth?
Tell me the whole truth, don't be afraid of me:
You will take a horse as a reward for anyone."
"Magi are not afraid of mighty lords,
And they do not need a princely gift;
Truthful and free is their prophetic language
And friendly with the will of heaven.
The coming years lurk in the mist;
But I see your lot on a bright forehead.
Now remember my word:
Glory to the Warrior is a joy;
Your name is glorified by victory:
Your shield is on the gates of Tsaregrad;
And the waves and the land are submissive to you;
The enemy is jealous of such a wondrous fate.
And the blue sea is a deceptive shaft
In the hours of fatal bad weather,
And a sling, and an arrow, and a crafty dagger
Spare the winner years ...
Under formidable armor you know no wounds;
An invisible guardian is given to the mighty.
Your horse is not afraid of dangerous labors;
He, sensing the master's will,
That meek stands under the arrows of enemies,
It rushes across the battlefield,
And the cold and cutting him nothing ...
But you will receive death from your horse."
Oleg chuckled - but the forehead
And the eyes were clouded with thought.
In silence, hand leaning on the saddle,
He gets down from his horse sullen;
And a true friend with a farewell hand
And strokes and pats on the neck steep.
"Farewell, my comrade, my faithful servant,
The time has come for us to part;
Now rest! no more footsteps
In your gilded stirrup.
Farewell, be comforted - but remember me.
You, fellow youths, take a horse,
Cover with a blanket, shaggy carpet;
Take me to my meadow by the bridle;
Bathe, feed with selected grain;
Drink spring water."
And the youths immediately departed with the horse,
And the prince brought another horse.
The prophetic Oleg feasts with the retinue
At the ringing of a cheerful glass.
And their curls are white as morning snow
Above the glorious head of the barrow...
They remember days gone by
And the battles where they fought together...
"Where's my comrade?" Oleg said,
Tell me, where is my zealous horse?
Are you healthy? Is his run still easy?
Is he still the same stormy, playful?"
And listens to the answer: on a steep hill
He had long since passed into a sleepless sleep.
Mighty Oleg bowed his head
And he thinks: "What is fortune-telling?
Magician, you deceitful, mad old man!
I would despise your prediction!
My horse would still carry me."
And he wants to see the bones of the horse.
Here comes the mighty Oleg from the yard,
Igor and old guests are with him,
And they see: on a hill, near the banks of the Dnieper,
Noble bones lie;
The rains wash them, their dust falls asleep,
And the wind excites the feather grass above them.
The prince quietly stepped on the horse's skull
And he said: "Sleep, lonely friend!
Your old master has outlived you:
At the funeral feast, already close,
It's not you who will stain the feather grass under the ax
And drink my ashes with hot blood!
So that's where my death lurked!
The bone threatened me with death!"
From dead head coffin snake
Meanwhile, hersing crawled out;
Like a black ribbon wrapped around the legs:
And suddenly the stung prince cried out.
Ladles are circular, foaming, hissing
At the feast of the deplorable Oleg:
Prince Igor and Olga are sitting on a hill;
The squad is feasting at the shore;
Fighters commemorate past days
And the battles where they fought together.

V.Vysotsky
Song about the prophetic Oleg (How the prophetic Oleg is now gathering ...)

How the prophetic Oleg is now going
Shield nailed to the gate,
When suddenly a man runs up to him
And well, lisp something.

"Oh, prince," he says for no reason at all, -
After all, you will accept death from your horse!

Well, he was just about to go to you -
Take revenge on the unreasonable Khazars,
When suddenly the gray-haired magi came running,
In addition, smashing with a fume.

And they say all of a sudden
That he will accept death from his horse.

"Who are you, where did you come from? -
The squad took up the whips. -
Drunk, old man, so go hang out,
And nothing to tell stories

And speak for nothing
"

Well, in general, they did not demolish their heads -
You can't joke with princes!
And for a long time the squad trampled the Magi
With their bay horses:

Look, they say out of the blue,
That he will accept death from his horse!

And the prophetic Oleg bent his line,
Yes, so that no one made a sound.
He only once mentioned the Magi,
And he chuckled sarcastically.

Well, you have to chat for no reason at all,
That he will accept death from his horse!

"And here he is, my horse, - he has rested for centuries,
Only one skull remained! .. "
Oleg calmly laid his foot -
And he died on the spot:

An evil viper bit him -
And he accepted death from his horse.

Each Magi strives to punish,
And if not, listen, right?
Oleg would have listened - another shield
Nailed to the gates of Constantinople.

The Magi said something from this and from this,
That he will accept death from his horse!
1967

Proposed text of my proposed speech at the proposed congress of historians of the countries of the socialist camp, if such a congress were held and if I were given the high honor to make an opening speech at this congress
Alexander Galich

Half the world is in the blood, and in the ruins of the century,
And it was rightly said:
"How is the prophetic Oleg going now
Take revenge on the unreasonable Khazars..."
And these ringing copper words
We repeated everything more than once, not twice.

But somehow from the stands a big man
He exclaimed with excitement and fervor:
"Once the traitor Oleg conceived
Take revenge on our Khazar brothers..."

Words come and words go
Truth follows truth.
Truths are changing, like snow in a thaw,
And let's say that the turmoil ends:
Some Khazars, some Oleg,
For some reason he took revenge!

And this Marxist approach to antiquity
It has long been used in our country,
He was quite useful to our country,
And your country will come in handy,
Since you are also in the same ... camp,
It will come in handy for you!

Reviews

I remembered the same Vysotsky: "And everyone drank not what he brought."
:)
In psychology, the most popular. Perhaps the test is a "non-existent animal", however, there are many similar ones, called projective. An installation is given to draw something, for example, an animal that never existed. A person sniffs, invents something like that, not suspecting that he always draws himself. Deciphering the drawing, it is very easy to tell about the artist)
So. Vysotsky and Galich wrote about themselves.
Pushkin is not about himself.
Because for a fee.
)

Something, Marigold, you wrapped up something almost psychoanalytic, so you can get to the point where you can treat poets and prose writers by interpreting their own works. Oleg, but it was just that the time was such that folk traditions and legends and, in general, the origins of the nation among the people were fashionable. The Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Humboldt, etc. etc. As Hegel would say, that first there was the thesis-Pushkin, then the antithesis-Vysotsky, and then the synthesis-Galich. And Kant would add that a priori there was a real historical event and then, apostoriori, the poets made their synthetic judgments.
I read here at leisure that you closed your site, due to the fact that you are no longer able to generalize something meaningful in poetry. I want to note that in poetry you don’t always need to generalize something, but rather express it privately.
"The sound is cautious and deaf,
The fruit that fell from the tree
In the midst of the silent chant
Deep silence of the forest."
O.M.
and he
"Only children's books to read,
Only children's thoughts to cherish,
Everything big is far to scatter,
Rise from deep sadness"
And finally
"And the day burned like a white page,
A little smoke and a little ash"
The ease of being, among other things, consists in the fact that a girl with a white bow does not stand on a chair to tell the guests of her parents the poem she has learned, but goes to school and sings a song that suits her mood.

In the summer of 965, Prince Svyatoslav put an end to the existence of the Khazar Khaganate.

Pushkin knows

How the prophetic Oleg is now going

Take revenge on the unreasonable Khazars:

Their villages and fields for a violent raid

He doomed swords and fires...

Thanks to the "Song of the Prophetic Oleg", written by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, the Russians are still in school age learn about the existence of such a people as the Khazars.

But for most acquaintance with the issue ends there. Who the Khazars are, why they are "unreasonable" and whether the claims against them from Prince Oleg were fair - the Russians are rather vaguely aware of this.

Meanwhile, the state of the Khazars was formed much earlier than the ancient Russian one, and the existence of such a concept as the “Khazar world” testifies to its influence. This term refers to the period of dominance in the Caspian-Black Sea steppes of the Khazar Khaganate, which stretched out for almost three centuries.

The Turks who took Tbilisi

As most often happens with ancient peoples, historians have several versions of the origin of the Khazars at once. The most common point of view is that the Khazars originated from a union of Turkic tribes.

Until the 7th century, the Khazars occupied a subordinate position in nomadic empires, but after the collapse of the Turkic Khaganate, they were able to form their own state - the Khazar Khaganate, which lasted more than 300 years.

Initially, the territory of the Khazars was limited to the regions of modern Dagestan north of Derbent, but then it expanded significantly, including the Crimea, the Lower Volga region, Ciscaucasia and the Northern Black Sea region, as well as the steppes and forest-steppes of Eastern Europe up to the Dnieper. IN different time The Khazar Sea was called the Black, Azov and Caspian Seas.

About the Khazars as a separate powerful military force chroniclers mention during the Iranian-Byzantine war of 602–628, during which in 627 the Khazar army, together with the Byzantines, stormed the city of Tbilisi.

These military successes, along with the weakening of the Turkic Khaganate, made it possible to create the Khazar Khaganate. A powerful army became the key to his well-being.

people of war

As a result of numerous military battles, the Khazar Khaganate turned into one of the powerful powers of the era. The most important trade routes of Eastern Europe were in the power of the Khazars: the Great Volga route, the route "from the Varangians to the Greeks", the Great Silk Road from Asia to Europe. For the passage of goods, the Khazars took a tax, which provided a steady income.

The second main source of income for the Khazar Khaganate was the receipt of tribute from the tribes conquered in the course of regularly carried out raids.

Initially, the main direction of the Khazar raids was Transcaucasia, but then, under the pressure of the ever-increasing Arab Caliphate, the Khazars began to move north, where their raids affected the Slavic tribes. Whole line Slavic tribes, which later formed the Old Russian state, were forced to pay tribute to the Khazars.

In the VIII century, the Khazars, having entered into a coalition with the Byzantine Empire, waged wars against the gaining strength of the Arab Caliphate. In 737, the Arab commander Marwan ibn Muhammad, at the head of a 150,000-strong army, completely defeated the army of the Khazar Khaganate, pursuing its ruler up to the banks of the Don, where the Khagan was forced to promise to convert to Islam. And although the complete transition of the Khazar Khaganate to Islam did not take place, this defeat seriously affected further development states. Dagestan, where the capital of the kaganate, the city of Semender, was previously located, turned into the southern outskirts, and the center of the state moved to the lower reaches of the Volga, where it was built new capital- city of Itil.

Jews from the banks of the Volga

Until the middle of the 8th century, the Khazars remained pagans. However, around 740, one of the prominent Khazar commanders, Bulan, converted to Judaism. This happened, apparently, under the influence of numerous Jewish communities living at that time in the "historical territory" of the Kaganate - in Dagestan.

Over time, Judaism became widespread among the ruling elite of the Khazar Khaganate, however, according to most historians, it did not completely become a state religion. Moreover, part of the military and commercial elite of the state opposed the ruling elite, which led to confusion and political instability.

Since the beginning of the 9th century, a kind of dual power has developed in the Khazar Khaganate - nominally the country was headed by khagans from a royal family, but the real control was carried out on their behalf by "beks" from the Bulanid clan that converted to Judaism.

It was difficult to envy the Khagans of Khazaria because of the peculiar traditions that existed among this people at the time of paganism. Despite the fact that the kagan was considered the earthly incarnation of God, when he ascended the throne, he was strangled with a silk cord. Brought to a semi-conscious state, the kagan had to name the number of years during which he would rule. After this period, the kagan was killed. Saying too many years also did not save - in any case, the kagan was killed when he reached the age of 40, because it was believed that by this time he was beginning to lose his divine essence.

Farmers versus nomads

Despite cruel morals and a religion not the most common in the region, adopted by the elite, the Khazar Khaganate remained an important player in international politics.

The Khazars actively interacted with Byzantium, participated in the political intrigues of the empire, and in 732 the allied relations of the powers were sealed by the marriage of the future emperor Constantine V with the Khazar princess Chichak.

The Khazars left a particularly deep trace in the history of the Crimea, which was under their control until the middle of the 9th century, as well as in Taman, which the kaganate controlled until its fall.

A clash between the Old Russian state and the Khazar Khaganate was inevitable. Simplistically, it can be imagined as a confrontation between settled farmers and nomadic invaders.

The Old Russian state was faced with the fact that part of the Slavic tribes turned out to be tributaries of the Khazars, which categorically did not suit the Russian princes. In addition, the regular raids of the Khazars led to the destruction of the settlements of the Russians, robberies, the withdrawal of thousands of Slavs into captivity and their subsequent sale into slavery.

In addition, the control of the Khazars over trade routes prevented the communication of the Rus with other states, as well as the establishment of mutually beneficial trade relations with other countries.

The Khazars could not refuse raids on the territory of the Slavic tribes, since robberies and the slave trade by the 9th century turned into the most important article state income.

The first fighters against the "Russian threat"

In 882, Oleg became prince of Kyiv. Having gained a foothold in Kyiv, he begins to conduct methodical work to expand the territory of the state. First of all, he is interested in the Slavic tribes that are not controlled by Kyiv. Among them were those who were tributaries of the Khazars. In 884 and 885, the northerners and Radimichi, who had previously paid tribute to the Khaganate, recognized Oleg's authority. Of course, the Khazars tried to restore the status quo, but they no longer had enough strength to punish Oleg.

During this period, the Khazars, more sophisticated in diplomacy, tried to transfer the "Russian threat" to Byzantium or the states of Transcaucasia, ensuring the unimpeded passage of the Russian troops through their possessions.

True, and here it was not without deceit. An episode that occurred after the return of the Russians after one of these expeditions to the coast of Azerbaijan is indicative. The ruler of the Khazar Khaganate, having received a previously agreed part of the booty, allowed his guard, formed from Muslims, to avenge their fellow believers. As a result, most of the Russian soldiers died.

The struggle of the Old Russian state with the Khazar Khaganate continued with varying success until Prince Svyatoslav Igorevich came to power. One of the most warlike princes of Ancient Rus' decided to put an end to the Khazar raids once and for all.

Around 960, the Khazar Khagan Joseph, in a letter to the dignitary of the Cordoba Caliphate, Hasdai ibn Shafrut, noted that he was waging a “stubborn war” with the Rus, not letting them into the sea and overland to Derbent, otherwise they, according to him, could conquer all Islamic lands to Baghdad. At the same time, Joseph was sure that he was able to fight for a long time.

And then Svyatoslav came ...

In 964, during a campaign to the Oka and the Volga, Svyatoslav freed from Khazar dependence last union Slavic tribes - Vyatichi. At the same time, it is worth noting that the Vyatichi did not want to obey Kyiv either, which resulted in a series of wars stretching for many years.

In 965, Svyatoslav with an army moved directly to the territory of the Khazar Khaganate, inflicting a crushing defeat on the troops of the Khagan. Following this, the Russians stormed the Sarkel fortress built on the banks of the Don with the help of Byzantium. The settlement came under the authority of the Old Russian state and received a new name - Belaya Vezha. Then the city of Samkerts on the Taman Peninsula was taken, which turned into the Russian Tmutarakan.

Over the next few years, Svyatoslav's army captured both capitals of the Khazar Khaganate - Itil and Semender. An end was put in the history of the once mighty state.

After Svyatoslav, the Russians retreated from the lower Volga for some time, which allowed the exiled kagan of Khazaria to return to Itil, relying on the support of the Islamic ruler of Khorezm. The payment for this support was the conversion of the Khazars to Islam, including the head of state himself.

However, this could not change the course of history. In 985, the Russian prince Vladimir again set off on a campaign against the Khazars and, having won a victory, imposed tribute on them.

From that moment on, the Khazars appear in historical annals not as representatives of a single power, but as small groups acting as subjects of other countries. Gradually, the Khazars dissolved among other, more successful peoples.

And in memory of the “first enemy of Russia”, we were left with only historical works and Pushkin’s lines about the “unreasonable”, with whom the prophetic Oleg intended to “revenge”.

PS The Khazar fortress Sarkel, aka Belaya Vezha, was planned to be flooded in 1952 during the construction of the Tsimlyansk reservoir.

660 YEARS TOGETHER AND 50 YEARS OF LIES

“How Prophetic Oleg is now going to take revenge on the unreasonable Khazars ...” Usually, it is precisely these Pushkin lines that limit all acquaintance of modern Russians with the history of Russian-Khazar relations, which goes back about 500 years.

Why did it happen so? In order to understand this, we need first of all to remember what these relationships were like.

KhAZARS AND Rus'

The Khazar Khaganate was a gigantic state that occupied the entire Northern Black Sea region, most of the Crimea, the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov, the North Caucasus, the Lower Volga region and the Caspian Trans-Volga region. As a result of numerous military battles, Khazaria became one of the most powerful powers of that time. The most important trade routes of Eastern Europe were in the power of the Khazars: the Great Volga route, the route "from the Varangians to the Greeks", the Great Silk Road from Asia to Europe. The Khazars managed to stop the Arab invasion of Eastern Europe and restrain the nomads rushing to the west for several centuries. The huge tribute collected from numerous conquered peoples ensured the prosperity and well-being of this state. Ethnically, Khazaria was a conglomerate of Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples who led a semi-nomadic lifestyle. In winter, the Khazars lived in cities, in the warm season they wandered and cultivated the land, and also staged regular raids on their neighbors.

At the head of the Khazar state was a kagan, who came from the Ashina dynasty. His power rested on military force and on the deepest popular reverence. In the eyes of ordinary pagan Khazars, the kagan was the personification of God's power. He had 25 wives from the daughters of rulers and peoples subject to the Khazars, and 60 more concubines. Kagan was a kind of guarantee of the well-being of the state. In the event of a serious military danger, the Khazars brought out their kagan in front of the enemy, the mere sight of which, it was believed, could put the enemy to flight.

True, in case of any misfortune - military defeat, drought, famine - the nobility and the people could demand the death of the kagan, since the disaster was directly associated with the weakening of his spiritual power. Gradually, the power of the kagan weakened, he became more and more a "sacred king", whose actions were fettered by numerous taboos.

Approximately in the 9th century in Khazaria, real power passes to the ruler whose sources title it differently - bek, infantry, king. Soon there are deputies and the king - kundurkagan and dzhavshigar. However, some researchers insist on the version that these are only the titles of the same kagan and king...

For the first time, Khazars and Slavs clashed in the second half of the 7th century. It was a counter movement - the Khazars expanded their possessions to the west, pursuing the retreating Proto-Bulgarians of Khan Asparuh, and the Slavs colonized the Don region. As a result of this clash, quite peaceful, judging by the data of archeology, part of the Slavic tribes began to pay tribute to the Khazars. Among the tributaries were glades, northerners, radimichi, vyatichi and the mysterious tribe “s-l-viyun” mentioned by the Khazars, which, perhaps, were the Slavs who lived in the Don region. The exact size of the tribute is unknown to us; various information on this subject has been preserved (squirrel skin "from the smoke", "slit from the ral"). However, it can be assumed that the tribute was not particularly heavy and was perceived as a payment for security, since there were no recorded attempts by the Slavs to somehow get rid of it. It is with this period that the first Khazar finds in the Dnieper region are associated - among them the headquarters of one of the kagans was excavated.

Similar relations persist after the adoption of Judaism by the Khazars - according to various dates, this happened between 740 and 860. In Kyiv, which was then a border town of Khazaria, around the 9th century, a Jewish community arose. A letter about the financial misadventures of one of its members, a certain Yaakov bar of Hanukkah, written at the beginning of the 10th century, is the first authentic document reporting the existence of this city. The researchers were most interested in two of the nearly a dozen signatures under the letter - "Judas, nicknamed Severyata" (probably from the tribe of northerners) and "Guests, son of Kabar Cohen." Judging by them, among the members of the Jewish community of Kyiv there were people with Slavic names and nicknames. It is highly probable that they were even Slavic proselytes. At the same time, Kyiv received a second name - Sambatas. This is the origin of this name. The Talmud mentions the mysterious Sabbath river Sambation (or Sabbation), which has miraculous properties. This turbulent, rock-rolling river is utterly impassable on weekdays, but with the onset of Sabbath rest time, it calms down and becomes calm. Jews living on one side of the Sambation cannot cross the river, as this would be a violation of Shabbos, and can only talk with their fellow tribesmen on the other side of the river when it calms down. Since the exact location of the Sambation was not indicated, members of the outlying Kyiv community identified themselves with those same pious Jews.

The very first contact between the Khazars and the Rus (by the name "Rus" I mean numerous Scandinavians, mostly Swedes, who rushed at that time in search of glory and prey) falls on the beginning of the 9th century. The latest source - "The Life of Stefan of Surozh" - records the campaign of the "Prince of the Rus Bravlin" on the Crimean coast. Since the path “from the Varangians to the Greeks” was not yet functioning, most likely Bravlin followed the then established path “from the Varangians to the Khazars” - through Ladoga, Beloozero, the Volga and the transfer to the Don. The Khazars, occupied at that moment by the civil war, were forced to let the Rus pass. In the future, the Rus and Khazars begin to compete for control of the trans-Eurasian trade route that passed through the Khazar capital of Itil and Kyiv. Mostly Jewish merchants, who were called "radanites" ("knowing the way"), cruised along it. The Russian embassy, ​​taking advantage of the fact that a civil war was blazing in Khazaria, arrived in Constantinople around 838 and offered an alliance to the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus, who ruled in 829-842. However, the Byzantines preferred to maintain an alliance with the Khazars, having built for them the Sarkel fortress, which controlled the route along the Don and the Volga-Don portage.

Around 860, Kyiv emerged from the Khazar influence, where the Russian-Varangian prince Askold (Haskuld) and his co-ruler Dir settled. According to the deaf references preserved in the annals, it can be established that it cost Askold and Dir a lot - for almost 15 years, the Khazars, using mercenary troops consisting of Pechenegs and the so-called "black Bulgarians" who lived in the Kuban, tried to return Kiev. But he was lost forever. Around 882, Prince Oleg, who came from the north, kills Askold and Dir and captures Kyiv. Having settled in a new place, he immediately begins the struggle for the subjugation of the former Khazar tributaries. The chronicler impassively records: in 884 " go Oleg to the northerners, but defeat the northerners, and lay tribute to the light, and will not give them tribute to pay tribute". In the following year, 885, Oleg subordinated the Radimichi to Kyiv, forbidding them to pay tribute to the Khazars: “... do not give a goat, but give me. And vzasha Olgovi according to shlyag like and Kozaro dayah". The Khazars respond to this with a real economic blockade. Hoards of Arab coins, found in abundance on the territory of the former Kievan Rus, testify that approximately in the middle of the 80s of the 9th century, Arab silver ceased to flow to Rus'. New hoards appear only around 920. In response, the Rus and the Slavic merchants subordinate to them are forced to reorient themselves towards Constantinople. After Oleg's successful campaign against Byzantium in 907, peace and a treaty of friendship are concluded. From now on, caravans of Russian merchants annually arrive in the capital of Byzantium. The path "from the Varangians to the Greeks" was born, becoming the main one for trade relations. In addition, the Volga Bulgaria lying at the confluence of the Volga and Kama is flourishing, intercepting the role of the main trading intermediary from the Khazaria. However, the latter still remains a major trading center: merchants from many countries come to Itil, including the Rus, who live in the same quarter with the rest of the “sakaliba”, as the Slavs and their neighbors were called in the 10th century, for example, the same Volga Bulgars .

However, sometimes not only merchants appear. A few years after Oleg's campaign against Byzantium, most likely around 912, a huge army of the Rus, numbering almost 50,000 soldiers, demands from the Khazar king to let them through to the Caspian Sea, promising half of the booty for this. The king (some historians believe that it was Benjamin, the grandfather of Joseph, the correspondent of Hasdai ibn Shaprut) agreed to these conditions, unable to resist, since several vassal rulers rebelled against him at that moment. However, when the Rus returned and, according to the agreement, sent the king his half of the booty, his Muslim guards, who may have been on the campaign at the time of the conclusion of the agreement, suddenly became indignant and demanded permission to fight the Rus. The only thing the king could do for his recent allies was to warn them of the danger. However, this did not help them either - almost the entire army of the Rus was destroyed in that battle, and the remnants were finished off by the Volga Bulgars.

It may be that it was in that battle that Prince Oleg also found his death. One of the chronicle versions of his death reads: Oleg died "beyond the sea" (about the possible causes of several versions of the death of this statesman we will discuss below). For a long time, this episode was the only one that overshadowed the relations between Khazaria and Kievan Rus, headed by the Rurik dynasty. But in the end, thunder struck, and it was the Byzantines who apparently decided to transfer the title of their main ally in the region to someone else. Emperor Romanus Lekapinus, who usurped the throne, decided to raise his popularity by persecuting the Jews, whom he ordered to force to be baptized. For his part, the Khazar king Joseph, it seems, also carried out an action against disloyal, in his opinion, subjects. Then Roman persuaded a certain “king of the Rus” Kh-l-gu to attack the Khazar city of Samkerts, better known as Tmutarakan. (This is about the campaign against the Khazars of the Prophetic Oleg.) The revenge of the Khazars was truly terrible. The Khazar commander Pesakh, who bore the title, which various researchers read as Bulshtsi or "Balikchi", at the head of a large army, first ravaged the Byzantine possessions in the Crimea, reaching Kherson, and then headed against Kh-l-gu. He forced the latter not only to hand over the loot, but also to set off on a campaign against ... Roman Lekapin.

This campaign, which took place in 941 and is better known as the campaign of Igor Rurikovich, ended in complete failure: the boats of the Rus met ships throwing the so-called "Greek fire" - the then miracle weapon, and sank many of them. The landing force, which ravaged the coastal provinces of Byzantium, was destroyed by the imperial troops. However, Igor's second campaign, which took place around 943, ended more successfully - the Greeks, without bringing the matter to a collision, paid off with rich gifts.

In the same years, a large army of Russ reappeared on the Caspian Sea and captured the city of Berdaa. However, the uprising of the local population and epidemics led to the failure of this campaign.

It would seem that from the moment of Kh-l-gu's campaign, relations between the Rus and Khazaria are completely spoiled. The next news about them refers to approximately 960 - 961 years. The Khazar king Joseph in a letter to the court Jew of the Cordoba Caliph Abd-arRahman III Hasday ibn Shaprut categorically states that he is at war with the Rus and does not allow them to pass through the territory of his country. “If I had left them alone for one hour, they would have conquered the entire country of the Ismailis, all the way to Baghdad,” he emphasizes. However, this statement is contradicted both by the information reported by Hasdai himself - his letter to Joseph and the latter's answer proceeded through the territory of Rus' - and by the numerous mentions of the authors of the general Russian colony in Itil. Both powers are likely to maintain mutual neutrality and try on a future fight.

It turns out to be associated with the name of Prince Svyatoslav of Kyiv. Most researchers agree that the main reason for the campaign against Khazaria was the desire of the Kiev prince to eliminate the very burdensome Khazar mediation in the eastern trade of the Rus, which significantly reduced the income of merchants and the feudal elite of Kievan Rus, closely associated with them. Thus, The Tale of Bygone Years records under the year 964: “And [Svyatoslav] went to the Oka river and the Volga and climbed the Vyatichi and said to the Vyatichi: “To whom do you give tribute?” They decide: “We give Kozaram a shlyag from the ral.” In the entry under the year 965, it is noted: “Svyatoslav went to the goats, hearing the goats from the dosha against his prince Kagan and stepping down, he beats and used to fight, overcoming Svyatoslav the goat and taking their city of Bela Vezha. And defeat the yas and kasog. Record for 966: "Vyatichi defeat Svyatoslav and pay tribute to them." Combining chronicle references, information from Byzantine and Arab authors, and archaeological data, one can imagine the following picture. The Rus army, which came from Kyiv, or possibly from Novgorod, wintered in the land of the Vyatichi. In 965, the Russians, having built boats, moved down the Don and somewhere near Sarkel (annalistic Belaya Vezha) defeated the Khazar army. Having occupied Sarkel and continued his campaign down the Don, Svyatoslav subjugated the Don Alans, known as Ases-Yases. Having entered the Sea of ​​Azov, the Rus crossed it and captured the cities on both banks of the Kerch Strait, subjugating the local Adyghe population or making an alliance with it. Thus, an important segment of the path “from the Slavs to the Khazars” passed under the control of the Kievan prince, and burdensome duties were probably reduced by the Khazars after the defeat.

In 966, Svyatoslav returned to Kyiv and never returned to the Don region again, turning his attention to Bulgaria. Returning from there, he died in 972. Thus, the Khazar Khaganate had a chance not only to survive, but also to regain its former power.

Unfortunately, trouble never comes alone. In the same year 965, the Guzes attacked Khazaria from the east. The ruler of Khorezm, to whom the Khazars turned for help, demanded conversion to Islam as a payment. Apparently, the position of the Khazars was so desperate that all of them, except for the kagan, agreed to change their faith in exchange for help. And after the Khorezmians drove away the "Turks", the Khagan himself accepted Islam.

The power of Khazaria was finally defeated as a result of the campaign of a large army of the Normans, who around 969 devastated the lands of the Volga Bulgars, Burtases and Khazars. Since the local population and the Arab geographers did not really distinguish between the Rus and the Vikings, in the eastern historiography the participants in this campaign were referred to as "Russ".

The outstanding Arab geographer and traveler Ibn Khaukal in his work “The Book of the Earth’s Appearance” described the results of this campaign as follows: “In the Khazar side there is a city called Samandar ... I asked about this city in Jurjan in the year (3) 58 (968 - 969 years.- Note. auth.)... and the one whom I questioned said: “There are vineyards or a garden such that it was alms for the poor, and if anything was left there, then only a leaf on a stem. The Russians came upon it, and neither grapes nor raisins were left in it. And this city was inhabited by Muslims, representatives of other religions and idolaters, and they left, and due to the dignity of their land and their good income, not even three years will pass, and it will become as it was. And there were mosques, churches and synagogues in Samandar, and these [Rus] made their raid on everyone who was on the banks of Itil, from among the Khazars, Bulgars, Burtases, and captured them, and the people of Itil sought refuge on the island of Bab-al-Abvab (modern Derbent) and fortified on it, and part of them - on the island of Siyah-Kuh (modern Mangyshlak), living in fear (option: And the Russians came to all this, and destroyed everything that was the creation of Allah on the Itil River from Khazars, Bulgars and Burtases and took possession of them)... Bulgar... a small city... and the Rus devastated it, and came to Khazaran, Samandar and Itil in the year 358 and immediately went to the country of Rum and Andalus.

The eastern campaign of Prince Svyatoslav and the events connected with it drew a line under the long-term rivalry between Kievan Rus and the Khazar Khaganate for hegemony in Eastern Europe. This campaign led to the establishment of a new balance of power in the Volga region, the Don region, the North Caucasus and the Crimea. The results of the campaigns of 965-969 were as follows. The Khazar Khaganate did not cease to exist, but weakened and lost most of its dependent territories. The power of the kagan extended, apparently, only to his own domain and, perhaps, to part of the coastal Dagestan, where the fugitives from Derbent and Mangyshlak returned.

Very soon, the Khorezmians, represented by the emir of Urgench al-Mamun, decided that the conversion of the Khazars to Islam was insufficient payment for the assistance provided, and occupied the lands of the khanate. Probably, it was from this time that a group of Khazar Christians and Jews appeared in Urgench, whose presence was recorded by travelers of the 12th-14th centuries. The descendants of these Khazars could be the Adakly-Khyzir (or Khyzir-eli) tribe that existed until recently in Khorezm. We do not have data on the belonging of Tmutarakan in the 70s - 80s. The most common point of view is that the city passed into the hands of the Kasogs. His submission to Byzantium is also possible. However, the existence of a Khazar principality in the city cannot yet be completely ruled out, as evidenced by the colophon from the collection of the famous Karaite historian and collector of manuscripts A. Firkovich, which is considered a fake.

As for Sarkel and the Don region in general, these lands could either remain under the control of the Rus, or go back to the Khazars. Another option is the existence of an Asco-Bulgarian principality there.

In 986, Prince Vladimir of Kiev, who had recently made a campaign against the Volga Bulgars, moved down the Volga. According to the testimony of the 11th-century author Jacob Mnich, who wrote “Memory and Praise to the Holy Prince Vladimir”, Vladimir “went against Kozary, I won and put tribute on us.” The allies of the Kyiv prince in this enterprise, apparently, were the Guzes, who helped him in the campaign against the Volga Bulgarians. Maybe then Vladimir met with the “Khazar Jews”, who tried to convert the prince to Judaism.

Most likely, it was this campaign that led to the disappearance of the Khazar Khaganate. After that, we no longer hear anything about the Khazar state with its center in Itil. However, this did not bring much benefit to Kievan Rus. The place of the Khazars was taken by the Pechenegs and Polovtsy, who forced the Eastern Slavs to leave the previously inhabited lands in the lower reaches of the Dnieper, on the Middle and Lower Don.

However, the Rus had to take part in another campaign against the Khazars. According to the Byzantine historians Skilitsa and Kedrin, in January 1016, Emperor Basil II sent a fleet under the command of Mong to Khazaria (as Crimea was then called). The purpose of the expedition was to suppress the uprising of the ruler of the Crimean possessions of Byzantium (possibly autonomous or semi-autonomous, as Skilitsa calls him "archon") George Tsula. The seals of Tsula found in the Crimea call him the strategos of Kherson and the strategos of the Bosporus. Mong was able to cope with the recalcitrant strategist only with the help of Vladimir Svyatoslavich's "brother", a certain Sfeng. Probably Sfeng was an educator - the "uncle" of Mstislav Tmutarakansky, and the Byzantines confused his position with kinship. Tsula was captured in the first encounter. Whether it was an uprising of a rebellious strategist or an attempt by the Khazars to form their own state, it is impossible to establish for sure. Probably, it was from these times that Khazaria was mentioned as part of the Byzantine imperial title, recorded in the decree of Vasileus Manuel I Komnenos of 1166.

THE KHAZARS AND Rus' AFTER THE KHAZARIA

After the fall of the Khazar Khaganate, historical writings speak of several groups of Khazars. Only one of them was connected with Russia - the Khazars who lived in Tmutarakan.

After Vladimir's campaign against the Khazars or after the capture of Korsun in 988, Tmutarakan and the Don region pass into the hands of the Kyiv prince, who immediately installs one of his sons as prince there. According to the traditional version, it was Mstislav. In 1022 (or, according to another date, in 1017), Mstislav made a campaign against the Kasogs, who were then led by Prince Rededya (Ridade). Having “slaughtered” Rededya “before the regiments of the Kassogians”, Mstislav annexed his lands to his own and felt so strong that in 1023 he came to Rus' with the Khazar-Kasogian squad to demand his share of Vladimir’s inheritance. After the bloody clash at Listven in 1024, when it was the onslaught of his squad that brought victory to Mstislav, the Tmutarakan prince achieved the division of Rus' into two parts along the Dnieper. After the death of Mstislav in 1036, due to the lack of heirs (the only son Eustathius died in 1032), all his lands went to his brother. After the death of Yaroslav the Wise in 1054, Tmutarakan and the Don lands became part of the Chernigov Principality of Svyatoslav Yaroslavich. But in 1064, Svyatoslav's nephew Rostislav Vladimirovich appeared in Tmutarakan. He expelled his cousin Gleb, withstood the struggle with his uncle, who was trying to drive his nephew from the throne, and led an active struggle to expand his own possessions.

According to an annalistic entry from 1066, Rostislav "earned tribute from the Kasogs and other countries." One of these "countries" is named by Tatishchev. According to him, these were jars, most likely from the Don. The seal of the prince has been preserved, proudly calling him "the archon of Matrakha, Zikhia and all Khazaria." The latter title contained a claim to dominion over the Crimean possessions of Byzantium, which, before the fall of the kaganate, may have been subordinate to the Tmutarakan tarkhan. This could not but cause alarm among the Greeks and, apparently, was the reason for the poisoning of Rostislav by the Kherson catepan, who came to him for negotiations, in the same 1066.

After the death of Rostislav, Tmutarakan was successively in the hands of Gleb (until 1071) and Roman Svyatoslavich. His brother Oleg fled to the latter in 1077, and Tmutarakan became involved in inter-princely civil strife. In 1078-1079 the city became the base for unsuccessful campaigns brothers Svyatoslavich on Chernihiv. During the second campaign, the bribed Polovtsians killed Roman, and Oleg had to flee to Tmutarakan.

Upon Oleg's return to Tmutarakan, the Khazars (who, apparently, were fed up with the constant wars that had a disastrous effect on city trade, and they probably organized the murder of Roman) seized the prince and sent him to Constantinople. Oleg spent four years in Byzantium, two of which were in exile on the island of Rhodes. In 1083 he returned and, according to the chronicle, "cut the Khazars." But not all of them were "excised". So, for example, the Arab geographer Al-Idrisi even mentions the city and country of the Khazars, who lived near Tmutarakan. Perhaps he meant Belaya Vezha, which was subordinate to Tmutarakan: after the Russians left the city in 1117, the Khazar population could remain there. But, perhaps, it was about the territory to the east of Tmutarakan. This can be confirmed by the deaf mention of Veniamin Tudelsky about the existence of a Jewish community in Alania, which was subordinate to the exilarch in Baghdad. Probably, the Khazar population continued to remain in Tmutarakan until it was conquered by the Mongols, and possibly even later until the final assimilation. The city itself in 1094 (or according to another version in 1115) came under the rule of Byzantium and remained in this status at least until the beginning of the 13th century.

In addition, when in 1229 the Mongols subjugated Saksin, which arose in the 12th century on the site of Itil, the remnants of the Saxin population fled to the Volga Bulgaria and Rus'.

Yes, and in Kyiv, the Jewish community continued to exist, living in its own quarter. It is known that one of the Kyiv gates was called “Zhidovsky” until the 13th century. Probably, the main language of communication among the Kyiv Jews, among whom there was a large proportion of proselytes, was Old Russian. At least the first abbot of the Pechersk monastery Theodosius (died in 1074) could freely argue with them without resorting to the services of an interpreter. In the XII century it is known about the existence of the Jewish community in Chernihiv.

THE KHAZAR HERITAGE

Reading the title of this chapter, perhaps the reader will smile and ask: what kind of inheritance do I mean? However, when analyzing the sources, it can be established that the Rus, especially at an early stage of their history, borrowed quite a lot from the Khazars, mainly in the administrative sphere. The ruler of the Rus, who sent an embassy to Byzantium in 838, already calls himself a kagan, like the ruler of the Khazars. In Scandinavia, the name Hakon has since appeared. In the future, Eastern geographers and Western European annalists more than once mentioned the Khagan of the Rus as their supreme ruler. But finally this title will be established only after the fall of Khazaria. Probably, it remained with the princes as long as any areas of the indigenous territory of the kaganate remained under their rule.

Metropolitan Hilarion in his "Sermon on Law and Grace" speaks of Vladimir and Yaroslav as kagans. On the wall of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, graffiti has been preserved: "God save our kagan S ...". Here, in all likelihood, this refers to the middle son of Yaroslav - Svyatoslav, who reigned in Chernigov in 1054 - 1073 and kept Tmutarakan in submission. The last Russian prince, in relation to whom the title of kagan was used, was the son of Svyatoslav - Oleg Svyatoslavich, who reigned in Tmutarakan at the end of the 11th century. But the Russians were not limited to titles.

Historians have long noticed that the chronicler, talking about the events of the 9th-10th centuries, almost always speaks of two rulers who simultaneously ruled Rus': Askold and Dir Igor and Oleg, and after the death of Oleg - Sveneld, who retained his functions under Igor's son Svyatoslav and grandson Yaropolka, Vladimir and his uncle Dobrynya. Moreover, one of them is always mentioned as a military leader, whose position is not hereditary, and the second passes his title of ruler by inheritance. It was very similar to the system of co-government that developed in Khazaria. Assumptions about the existence of such a system were confirmed when in 1923 a complete manuscript of the “Book of Ahmed ibn Fadlan” was discovered, the secretary of the embassy of the Baghdad caliph to the ruler of the Volga Bulgars, in which he described the customs of the peoples of Eastern Europe. It clearly indicates the existence of two rulers among the Rus - the sacred king, whose life was shackled by many prohibitions, and his deputy, who was in charge of all affairs.

This may clear up a lot. For example, the existence of several versions of the death of Prophetic Oleg can be explained by the fact that there were several of these same Olegs, or rather Helga (if it was a name at all, and not a title). Then, for the chronicler, they simply merged into one image. Since the tradition of such co-government has not yet had time to firmly establish itself, it is relatively quickly disappearing under the onslaught of the energetic Vladimir Svyatoslavich, giving way to the traditional division of the state into several destinies between the rulers.

Probably, the Rus also borrowed the tax system of the Khazars. At least, the chronicles directly say that the former Khazar tributaries paid the same taxes to the Kyiv prince as they used to pay to the Khazar Khagan. However, given the claims of the rulers of the Rus to the kagan title, we can say that for the Slavs, everything did not change much - the system remained the same.

The realities of Judaism, which became known not in last turn thanks to the Kyiv community of Jews. It is known that for some time Kyiv and its environs were considered as the new Holy Land. This is evidenced by the toponymy preserved in the people's memory: the Zion Mountains, the Jordan River - this was the name of the Pochaina that flowed not far from Kyiv, many of whose legendary properties brought it closer to Sambation. Moreover, it was specifically about Eretz Yisroel, since neither Mount Golgotha, nor anything else from Christian toponymy, was mentioned here. In addition, despite the fact that the attempt of the “Khazar Jews” to convert Vladimir to Judaism failed, Kievan Rus showed great interest in ancient Hebrew literature, many of whose monuments were translated into Church Slavonic or Russian.

FROM TRUTH TO FALSE

Pre-revolutionary Russian professional historians and archaeologists - D.Ya. Samokvasov, M.K. Lyubavsky M.D. Priselkov, S.F. Platonov - respected Khazaria and its role in the formation of the ancient Russian state. To their credit, it should be noted that neither Jewish pogroms nor anti-Jewish propaganda at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries darkened the image of the Khazars for them.

A similar attitude prevailed in pre-war Soviet historiography. The general tone for the work on the Khazar problem was set by M.N. Pokrovsky, who wrote the first Soviet textbook on Russian history. In contrast to the Russian chauvinists, he wrote that the first large states on the Russian Plain were created not by the Slavs at all, but by the Khazars and Varangians.

In this direction, some Ukrainian historians developed their theories - D.I. Doroshenko, academician D.I. Bagalei, emigrant V. Shcherbakovsky. They emphasized that the Eastern Slavs, protected by the Khazars from the raids of the steppe nomads, were able to populate the southern steppes up to the Black Sea, while the weakening of the Khazar state forced them to leave this territory.

Ukrainian historian V.A. Parkhomenko added that the tribes of the Slavic southeast voluntarily submitted to the Khazars and began to build their statehood under their auspices. Parkhomenko even suggested that the meadows that came to the Middle Dnieper from the southeast brought with them not only elements of the Khazar state system (for example, the title "Kagan"), but also the Jewish religion, which explains the well-known heat of the Christian-Jewish dispute in the first centuries of Kievan Rus . Parkhomenko saw in the behavior of Prince Svyatoslav the habits of a warrior brought up in the Khazar steppe.

In the 1920s, the well-known historian Yu.V. Gauthier. He singled out the Khazars from other steppe nomads and noted that "the historical role of the Khazars is not so much conquering as unifying and pacifying." It was thanks to a soft policy and religious tolerance, Gauthier believed, that the Khazars were able to maintain peace in their possessions for centuries. He believed that the tribute imposed on the Slavs by the Khazars was not burdensome.

The next stage in the study of the Khazars is associated with the name of M.I. Artamonov (1898 - 1972), an outstanding archaeologist who did a lot to study the early medieval monuments in the south of Eastern Europe.

Image of a Khazarin.

In his original approach to the Khazar themes, Artamonov followed closely the Soviet concept of the 1920s. It was clear to him that the insufficient development of many issues of Khazar history and culture was a consequence of the chauvinism of pre-revolutionary historiography, which “could not come to terms with the political and cultural predominance of Khazaria, which was almost equal in strength to Byzantium and the Arab Caliphate, while Rus' was just entering the historical arena and then in the form of a vassal of the Byzantine Empire. Artamonov regretted that even among Soviet scientists there was a disdainful attitude towards Khazaria. In fact, he wrote, in the bowels of the vast Khazar state, a number of peoples were being formed, for Khazaria served as "the most important condition for the formation of Kievan Rus."

In the 1940s, historian V.V. Mavrodin, who dared to interpret the 7th-8th centuries as the "period of the Khazar Khaganate" in the history of the Russian people. He suggested that the hypothetical pre-Cyrillic Old Russian writing could have been formed under the influence of the Khazar runes. This scientist allowed himself to call Kievan Rus"the direct heir to the power of the kagan."

The end of the considered tradition was put by the Stalinist campaign of "fight against cosmopolitanism", begun in 1948. One of the accusations brought against the "cosmopolitans" was "belittling the role of the Russian people in world history." This campaign also affected archaeologists, among whom was M.I. Artamonov.

At the end of December 1951, a note appeared in the party organ, the Pravda newspaper, the author of which attacked historians who dared to put education ancient Russian state in connection with the Khazar influence, downplaying the creative potential of the Russian people. The main blow was dealt to Artamonov. The author of the note tried to present the Khazars as wild hordes of robbers who seized the lands of the Eastern Slavs and other peoples and imposed a “predatory tribute” on their indigenous inhabitants. The author had no doubt that the Khazars could not play any positive role in the history of the Eastern Slavs. In his opinion, the Khazars allegedly not only did not contribute to the formation of the state among the Russians, but also in every possible way hampered this process, exhausting Rus' with devastating raids. And he insisted that it was only with great difficulty that Rus' escaped from the grip of this terrible yoke.

Whose views did the author of the article in Pravda rely on? Even on the eve of the First World War, some amateur historians, Russian chauvinists and anti-Semites - A. Nechvolodov, P. Kovalevsky, A. Selyaninov - tried to introduce the “Khazar episode” into anti-Semitic discourse: to give Khazaria the appearance of a steppe predator, infected with the terrible bacillus of Judaism and striving to enslave Slavs. A small note in Pravda, written by an unknown author, echoed precisely these anti-Semitic writings. And it was this assessment that from now on determined the attitude of Soviet science to the Khazar problem for decades. In particular, the Khazars were viewed as entirely "an alien people, alien to the culture of the original population of Eastern Europe."

If in ancient times the Khazars had not accepted Judaism (part of the people, or only to know, or to know and part of the people - this is not the main thing!), How would they be remembered? It seems that - at least in Russian science and literature - no more often than, say, about the Berendeys, and there would be no more disputes around the Khazars and their role in the history of Rus' than about the Pechenegs!

But it was as it was - although no one can say exactly: HOW it was. And the dispute about the Khazars, their conquests and roles acquired a completely non-historical and archaeological character. Academician B.A. Rybakov (1907 - 2001) became the main herald of this line. Here, for example, is what he wrote in the collection Secrets of the Ages, published in 1980.

“The international significance of the Khazar Khaganate was often overly exaggerated. A small semi-nomadic state could not even think about rivalry with Byzantium or the Caliphate. The productive forces of Khazaria were at a level too low to ensure its normal development.

IN ancient book we read: “The country of the Khazars does not produce anything that would be exported to the south, except for fish glue ... The Khazars do not manufacture fabrics ... The state revenues of Khazaria consist of duties paid by travelers, from tithes collected from goods along all roads leading to the capital... The king of the Khazars has no courts, and his people are unaccustomed to them.”

As articles of the Khazar export proper, the author indicates only bulls, rams and captives.

The dimensions of the Khaganate are very modest... Khazaria was an almost regular quadrangle, elongated from southeast to northwest, the sides of which were: Itil - Volga from Volgograd to the mouth of the Khazar (Caspian) Sea, from the mouth of the Volga to the mouth of the Kuma, Kumo-Manychskaya depression and Don from Sarkel to Perevoloka.

Khazaria was... a small khanate of nomadic Khazars that existed for a long time only due to the fact that it turned into a huge customs outpost that blocked the paths along the Northern Donets, Don, the Kerch Strait and the Volga ... "

There are reasons to think that it was B.A. Rybakov inspired the publication of that very note in the Pravda newspaper in 1951.

After the criticism that hit Artamonov, this scientist was forced to reconsider his positions. IN new concept put forward by Artamonov in 1962, he had to touch upon the problem of Judaism and Jews in Khazaria. The adoption of Judaism, he believed, caused a split in the Khazar environment, for Judaism was the national religion and did not recognize proselytism. The historian tried to prove that the figure of the almighty bek arose only by the beginning of the 9th century, when the descendants of the Dagestani Jewish prince completely removed the kagan from real power. Artamonov portrayed this as "the seizure of state power by the Jew Obadiah and the conversion of the government of Khazaria to Judaism." It was about a complete change in the state system: "Khazaria became a monarchy, submissive to the king, alien to the people in culture and religion." The author had no doubt that the Christians and Muslims of Khazaria eked out a miserable existence "as eternal taxpayers and frightened servants of their cruel masters." They, of course, sympathized with the rebels and did not support the government, which consisted of Jews. Therefore, the authorities were forced to unleash a wave of repression on both of these confessions. However, Judaism never became the state religion. That is why, - concluded Artamonov, - "the glorified religious tolerance of the Khazars was a forced virtue, submission to the power of things to cope with which the Khazar state was not able to."

It is these two provisions that became the core of the anti-Semitic concept, which was adopted by the Russian national patriots, and it flourished in pseudo-scientific literature in the 1980s and 1990s. In the writings of numerous "patriots" Khazaria was portrayed and portrayed as a country whose main goal was the enslavement of the Slavs, including the spiritual one, and imposing Jewish domination on the world. Here is how, for example, the Khazar policy towards the Slavs is assessed by an anonymous author who published his historical opus in the Russian National Unity (RNE) newspaper "Russian Order".

“The cruel, merciless policy continued to be carried out by the Khazars against the Slavs, whose lands became an inexhaustible source of “living goods” for the enslavers. The main goal of the Slavic policy of the Khazar Khaganate was the maximum weakening of the Russian territories and the destruction of the Kyiv principality. This would turn the Jews into the financial masters of the entire Eurasian space.”

There was even a novel written by a certain A. Baigushev about the Khazars, in which Jews, Masons, Manichaeans and the unfortunate Khazar people, oppressed by the "isha" Joseph, were thrown into one heap. Baigushev, as it turned out, preferred an incorrect reading of one of the titles of the Khazar king, given in the book of the Arab geographer Ibn Ruste: the original was "shad" - "prince". This is all the more strange, because it is not known exactly who Joseph himself was - a king or a kagan?

In addition, assertions roam from essay to essay that Judaism was accepted only by the elite of the Khazars, who made it a religion for the elect, and ordinary Khazars were in the most humbled position and therefore almost gladly met the troops of Svyatoslav.

His theory was as follows. Initially, the Khazars peacefully coexisted with the Slavs, charging them a small tribute for protection. Everything changed when “Jewish Talmudists” appeared in the country, who considered themselves the chosen people and despised everyone else (by the way, Gumilyov emphasized the participation of Jews in the capture of Slavic slaves). After the Jewish protégé Obadiah seized power as a result of a coup d'état around 800, relations with the Slavs and Rus deteriorated, as the Jewish elite of Khazaria sought to enslave them. (Note: it is not possible to draw an unambiguous conclusion from existing sources whether Obadiah belonged to the Ashina dynasty or not, despite the categorical statements of L.N. Gumilyov.) to world domination. Under the chimera, Gumilyov, as a supporter of the theory of "purity of blood", understood the ethnic group that arose as a result of mixed marriages. As for the conversion to Judaism, Gumilyov repeats a quote taken from no one knows that Judaism is not a proselytizing religion, and the converts were allegedly considered "the leprosy of Israel." Since the words quoted above were taken from the Talmud, then we have (if the quote is genuine) either the saying of one of the parties to a long-standing dispute or a reflection of the situation when Jews were forbidden to engage in proselytizing activities by local authorities, which was not uncommon. The choice of Khazaria as an object of study was far from accidental. After all, Gumilyov's main goal was to show who were friends of Ancient Rus', and who were enemies. And the author had no doubt that her worst enemy was "aggressive Judaism", as well as that it was Khazaria that turned out to be " evil genius Ancient Rus'".

Gumilev convinced the reader in every possible way that the Jews showed in Khazaria all the deceit and cruelty of their nature. They took over the fabulously profitable caravan trade between China and Europe. Through mixed marriages, the Jews penetrated the environment of the Khazar nobility. The Khazar khans fell under the influence of the Jews, and they gained access to all government posts. Ultimately, the Jews carried out a coup d'état in Khazaria, and the local Jewish community turned into the dominant social stratum, mastering not the natural, but the anthropogenic landscape (cities and caravan routes). Therefore, Gumilyov called the Jews the colonizers of the Khazar lands. And so a “zigzag” arose that deviated from the normal ethnogenetic development, and “a predatory and merciless ethnic chimera” appeared “on the stage of history”. All subsequent events in the Khazar Khaganate, as well as its foreign policy activities, Gumilyov depicts only in black tones, due to the "harmful activities" of the Jews.

The relations between the “Jews” and the Russian kaganate, whose capital allegedly already in the first third of the 9th century was Kiev, turned out to be initially hostile, since it was precisely under the protection of the Rus that the supposedly Hungarians who had migrated to the West, and the so-called Kabars - tribes, fled, defeated V civil war in Khazaria. Then the Khazar Jews set the Varangians against the Kiev Khaganate in order to stop the spread of Christianity in Eastern Europe, which was unprofitable for them. (Note, however: in reality, Christianity began to spread en masse in the lands inhabited by Eastern Slavs, after the fall of the Khaganate; As for the Christians who lived in Khazaria itself, they most likely died under the swords of the Normans.)

The author tries to present the Khazars as an "oppressed minority" in Khazaria, where all conceivable and unthinkable benefits were given to supposedly Jewish rulers and merchants. Succumbing to the tricks of the mythology of the “worldwide Jewish conspiracy”, Gumilyov enthusiastically describes the supposedly concluded agreement between the Khazar Jews and the Normans on the division of Eastern Europe, “forgetting” about the fundamental impossibility of concluding such an agreement. Then the Jews, of course, violated the agreement and by the beginning of the 10th century they seized all the Eastern European lands, as a result of which “the natives of Eastern Europe faced an alternative: slavery or death.” In addition, Gumilyov denounces “aggressive Judaism” in every possible way as the most important geopolitical factor of the early Middle Ages, thereby repeating the backs of the old anti-Semitic theory about the Jewish desire for world domination and occasionally throwing remarks that would be an honor to any author of the Nazi newspaper “Der Stürmer” - for example, about "a typically Jewish formulation of the question, where other people's emotions are not taken into account." With regard to the atrocities of the Varangians-Russians during the campaigns against Byzantium in 941, Gumilyov casually throws the phrase: “All this points to a war of a completely different nature than other wars of the 10th century. Apparently, the Russian soldiers had experienced and influential instructors, and not only Scandinavians,” referring to the Khazar Jews. However, the question immediately arises: did the Jews instruct him in 988, when Korsun was taken by Prince Vladimir?

In general, Gumilyov draws the gloomy fate of the Eastern European peoples during the reign of the Khazar Jewish kings, which, by the way, was not confirmed by any historical source: Russian heroes died in masses for someone else's cause, the Khazars were robbed and offended, the Alans lost Christian shrines, the Slavs had to pay tribute, etc. .d. “This permanent disgrace,” he writes, “was difficult for all peoples, except for the merchant elite of Itil ...”

The most interesting thing is that the picture drawn by Gumilyov resembles an anti-Semitic sketch of the first years of Bolshevik power: the Jews who seized power hold it with the help of foreign mercenaries, reducing the bulk of the population to the status of cattle and providing unprecedented advantages to the Jews. As a result, Gumilyov concludes that an alien urban ethnos, cut off from the earth and moved to a new landscape for itself, could not act otherwise, because its very existence in the new conditions could be based only on the most severe exploitation of the surrounding peoples. Thus, Gumilyov depicts the entire Jewish history in golus as the history of an exploiting people.

Judging by the “evidence” of Gumilyov, the Khazar state was defeated by Svyatoslav without much difficulty, since the “true Khazars” - the common people - did not see anything good from their rulers and met the Rus almost as liberators: “The death of the Jewish community of Itil gave freedom for the Khazars and all the surrounding peoples... The Khazars had nothing to love the Jews and the statehood they had planted,” the author claims. The Jews behaved so intolerantly that "both people and nature rose up against them."

Svyatoslav's campaign itself is described as follows: having deceived the Khazar army, which allegedly awaited him in the Dnieper-Don interfluve (then this army mysteriously disappears somewhere and is not mentioned again by Gumilyov), the prince descended the Volga and defeated the Khazar militia near Itil. After the capture of Itil, Svyatoslav moved to Samandar (Semender), identified by Gumilyov with the settlement near the village of Grebenskaya, ... by land, since "river boats were not suitable for sailing on the sea." Thus, this author completely ignores the facts of the navigation of the Rus on the same "river boats" in the Caspian Sea in the 9th - 12th centuries. Then Gumilyov sends a foot army of Russ straight to Sarkel, forcing them to march across the waterless Kalmyk steppes without any explanation for the "ignorance" of rich Tmutarakan by the Rus.

A follower of Gumilyov, a literary critic who became a writer V.V. Kozhinov even invented the term "Khazar yoke", which was allegedly much more dangerous than the Mongol one, since it supposedly consisted in the spiritual enslavement of the Slavs. Kozhinov argued that Rus', under Svyatoslav, overthrew the very “Khazar yoke”. What is meant is not explained: either the Khazars were going to open McDonald's in every forest, or to convert the Slavs to Judaism en masse...

The last in a series of writers demonizing the Khazars was, unfortunately, A.I. Solzhenitsyn, who devoted several lines to Russian-Khazar relations in his book "200 Years Together". He trusted Gumilyov's theory about the Jewish elite, allegedly ethnically alien to the rest of the Khazars. And although the writer speaks quite favorably about the settlement of the Judaizing Khazars in Kyiv, however, after a few lines he again refers to unverified data cited by the historian of the 18th century V.N. Tatishchev about the alleged exorbitant extortion of the Jews, which predetermined the pogrom in Kyiv in 1113, and about their expulsion by Vladimir Monomakh. However, according to a number of reputable historians, Tatishchev simply invented these stories in order to justify the expulsion of Jews from Russia under the Empress Elizabeth, to whom his own historical work was dedicated, with a “historical example”.

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