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THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
Farda ASADOV
Ph.D. (Hist.), Head of the Department of History and Economy of the Arab Countries, Z. Buniyatov Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan (Baku, Azerbaijan).
KHAZARIA, BYZANTIUM, AND THE ARAB CALIPHATE: STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL OVER EURASIAN TRADE ROUTES IN THE 9TH-10TH CENTURIES
Abstract
T
he author traces the ups and downs of the struggle among the largest powers of the 9th-10th centuries for control
over the main arteries of the Great Silk Road and its echoes in the future of the Eurasian countries and peoples.
Introduction
For three centuries, starting in the mid-7th century, the Khazar Khaganate controlled the key hubs of the Silk Road arteries and profited from the transit advantages of these vast territories. Strong enough to collect tribute from the local populations (including the Eastern Slavs), it remained a trading partner in lucrative international trade. Byzantium and the Arab Caliphate were two other great trading powers and, therefore, the Khaganate's strongest rivals.
Rus Vikings Come to Eastern Europe
The Scandinavian Vikings who came to Eastern Europe where they set up political entities with Slavic populations supplied another dimension to the rivalry between the Khaganate, Byzantium, and the Arabs. Confronted by a new factor and the inevitable necessity of taming it, the principal players had no other choice but to gear their foreign policies accordingly.
Merciless invaders and plunderers, the Vikings were described by medieval West European annalists as a scourge and the worst of God's punishments. In Western Europe they were known as Normans, people from the North. It is commonly believed that the West was invaded mostly by warriors from Norway and Denmark, while people from Sweden boarded their ships to invade the East. Scholarly writings used the blanket term Scandinavians and described their military operations as hit-and-run tactics: armed detachments would disembark from their ships, quickly plunder the coastal villages, jump back on their ships, and disappear.
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At a time of incessant feuds, these inroads were nothing out of the ordinary and as such not worthy of comment in the annals. The first documented military march of the Scandinavians on England took place in 793 when a Viking detachment plundered the Anglo-Saxon Monastery of St. Cuth-bert on Lindisfarne Island off the English northeastern coast. This marked the beginning of the so-called "Viking Age of Invasion."1
It was an age of plundering and looting of European towns and villages and feeble Scandinavian attempts to set up their political entities (in northern France, on the British Isles, and in Sicily) invariably hostile to the local dynasties and state units and invariably locked in struggle for political domination. In Britain, the Norman states were gradually tamed by the local Anglo-Saxon rulers; in France King Charles the Simple had no other choice but to transfer a region in northwestern France to a Norman. The area became known as Normandy, while in 1066, William the Conqueror, descendant of the first Scandinavian ruler of Normandy, occupied England to become its king.
The Viking inroads to the East are still a subject of heated discussions in academic circles; the Scandinavian sources, sagas, are mostly myths and poetic accounts of the heroic campaigns of military Scandinavian chieftains and their warriors. Some of them distort historical facts beyond recognition; an Icelandic saga recorded in the 13 th century (circa 1200) by Snorri Sturluson is one of the pertinent examples. It tells how Odin, the central figure of Scandinavian mythology, and his army came to Scandinavia from unidentified southeastern lands. The details inspired Thor Heyerdahl, a prominent Norwegian traveler, to seek the roots of part of the Scandinavian ethnicity (its political elite to be more exact) in the Caucasus and the Northern Black Sea coast. Gravestones and memorial plaques of Scandinavian konungs (kings) offer much more reliable, and chronologically related, information about the events and names of heroes, even though inscriptions are too few and far between to serve as a historical source in their own right.
Russian chronicles say next to nothing about the earlier stages of Scandinavian inroads to the East: history begins in 860 when Rurik and his armed Scandinavian detachment were invited to rule in Novgorod (Holmgard).2 Arab sources supply us with the richest details about the time Scandinavians reached Eastern Europe, the Northern Black Sea littoral, and the Caspian in particular.
There is direct evidence that large units of armed Scandinavians came to the East in the late 9th and first half of the 10th centuries.3 They fought the local people and the states for control and military domination over the captured territories and the international trade routes that ran across it. This was when the Rurik dynasty established itself in Kiev captured by Oleg. It shifted the balance of military force and political power in the lands crisscrossed by trade routes.
Russian Historians about the Rus
Arab authors used the word "Rus" to describe hitherto unknown people. For want of space I will not dwell on the vague origins of the term. Arab and Byzantine sources used the word to describe predominantly Scandinavian armed detachments with probably small Slavic components. This gave rise to the term "Rus'" that later became the contemporary term "Russia."
Russian historians insist that the statehood of the Eastern Slavs is rooted in the pre-Rurik Slavic tribes and that, therefore, all assumptions or even assertions about the much earlier presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe and on the trade routes leading to the south and the east do not hold water. A recent collection of articles by Russian academics published in 2010 Izgnanaie normannov iz russkoy istorii (Eviction of Normans from Russian History) gives an ample idea of what has been
1 "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Part 2: A.D. 750-919," Online Medieval and Classical Library Release, No. 17, available at [http://omacl.org/Anglo/part2.html].
2 See: Povest vremennykh let, Transl. by D.S. Likhachev, available at [http://old-russian.chat.ru/01povest.htm].
3 See: V.V. Bartold, "Arabskie izvestia o rusakh," in: Sochinenia, Vol. II, Part 1, Moscow, 1963, pp. 810-858.
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written lately about the Scandinavians' advent to the Russian territories.4 Certain facts and historical evidence cast doubts on what this group of Russian authors has written in their collective work.
■ Archeological finds testify that in the mid-8th century there were Scandinavian settlements in northwestern Russia. While earlier artifacts are not indisputably Norman, the finds in Staraia Ladoga on the southeastern coast of Lake Ladoga (dated 750) are undoubtedly Scandinavian.5
■ The hoards of Muslim coins discovered along the eastward trade routes are dated to the early 9th century.6 One such buried treasure, found in Staraia Ladoga, can be dated to the late 8th century.
■ There is evidence that the Rus invaded what is now the South of Russia in the early half of the 9th century, that is, several decades before 882 when Oleg, Rurik's relative and military leader conquered Kiev.
—The earliest information about this can be found in the Slavic text of The Life of St. Stefan of Surozh compiled in the 15th century. It tells the story of an inroad of a certain Bravlin, who, at the head of a Rus detachment, plundered the Crimea, probably in the 790s.7
—The so-called Paphlagonian expedition of the Rus is recorded in The Life of St. George of Amastris. There is no agreement about the exact date, however most researchers relate the expedition to the first quarter of the 9th century.8
—According to the Annals of St. Bertin, in 838, the so-called Rus Khaganate dispatched its embassy to the Byzantine Empire; the names of the ambassadors quoted in the document are unmistakably Scandinavian. The embassy was diverted to the court of the King of the Francs in Ingelheim because the return route had become too dangerous.9
Trade Routes across the Eurasian Steppes
The above suggests that trade contact between Scandinavian merchant-warriors and the local population of southeastern Europe and the Caucasus was fairly intensive; this is confirmed by the finds of Islamic coins in the regions of northwestern Russia controlled by Scandinavians as early as late 8th-first half of the 9th centuries. Silver dirhams minted in the Middle East and by Muslim rulers of the Central Caucasus and Central Asia were the most convenient and practically only means of payment. Coins minted by the Samanides (819-999), an Iranian dynasty, occupied a special place. At the height of its power, the dynasty spread its political influence to the entire stretch of settled agriculture in Central Asia; in 900, Ismail al-Samani defeated Amr ibn al-Lauth and expanded his power to the southeastern Caspian.
Security was the key to flourishing international trade; peaceful borders guaranteed uninterrupted trade and an inflow of money when foreign goods crossed borders. New empires invariably sought direct control over the world trade routes, their ambitions trimmed by no less ambitious neighbors. Sooner or later the sides arrived at mutually acceptable compromises.
4 See: Izgnanie normannov iz russkoy istorii, Russkaya panorama, Moscow, 2010, available at [http://statehistory. ru/books/11/Izgnanie-normannov-iz-russkoy-istorii/].
5 See: Th.S. Noonan, The Islamic World, Russia and the Vikings, 750-900: The Numismatic Evidence, Variourum Collected Studies Series: CS 595, Ashgate Publishing, UK, 1998, p. VII.
6 See: Th.S. Noonan, "Why Vikings First Came to Russia," Jahrbücher für Geshichte Osteuropas (Stuttgart), No. 34, 1986, p. 346.
7 See: A.N. Sakharov, Diplomatiia Drevney Rusi. IX-pervaia polovina X vv., Mysl Publishers, Moscow,1980, p. 28.
8 See: Ibid., p. 36.
9 See: M.I. Artamonov, Istoria Khazarii, Hermitage, Leningrad, 1962, p. 366.
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Before the Arabs, the Gokturks, who set up the Great Turkic Khaganate, pursued similar foreign policy priorities. Their state clashed with the Hephthalites and Iran; after defeating the Hephthalites, the Turks and Iran vacillated between military clashes and drawing closer to protect their obviously common, including economic, interests. Until the rout of the Sassanides, the interests of the Great Silk Road partners guaranteed more or less regular trade from China via Iran or along the northern route (via Khwarezm and Khazaria). Hostility and even armed clashes could not be avoided because of the internal instability in the state of the Sassanides and the interests of Byzantium as the third power. The world of the late Sassanian Iranians and their contemporaries, the Turks of Central Asia, could no longer remain a system of mutually exclusive values.
The Muslim merchants could no longer bring their merchandise from China to Europe across the lands that once belonged to the Sassanides: since the latter half of the 7th century, they were controlled by the Arabs; the relations between them and Byzantium were hostile. This made the Eurasian steppes the only transit territory, which forced the Caliphate to spare no effort to establish peaceful relations with the local peoples and states where their attempts to establish control over the trade routes with the use of force had failed.
The new power did not pave new roads, but followed in the footsteps of its predecessors. After the collapse of the Sassanian Empire, the Arabs found it much harder to press forward in the Caucasus; they were stopped by the Khazars led by the Khagans of the Ashina dynasty, relatives of the ruling dynasty of the Great Turkic Khaganate. Under Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809), who concluded "peace and union" with the Khazars, an end was put to several decades of fierce fighting.10
In the same 8th century, the Arabs were engaged in never-ending fighting with the Central Asian Turks, whereby the Arab viceroys of the captured lands of Maverannahr strengthened the walls along the borders with the Turkic relatives of the Khazars.11 Hostilities invariably ended in establishing peaceful contacts with the survivors and ensuring security of the Great Silk Road, which brought huge incomes to merchants and intermediaries. Under Harun al-Rashid, peaceful contacts were restored both in the Caucasus and Central Asia and trade was revived. He dispatched a diplomatic mission headed by Tamim ibn Bahr to the capital of the Uyghur Khagan on the Orkhon, probably to receive political guarantees of the safety of the trade route between the Caspian and China.12 The exact dates of the mission have not been established: it is dated to the period between 752 and 822. This is of little importance: what is important is the fact that there was a turn toward peaceful coexistence and closer diplomatic relations between the Caliphate and powerful rulers of the Turkic steppes. Still, one of the suggested dates—before 808—allows us to relate the event to the last years of Harun al-Rashid. It was during his rule that integration between the west and the east of the empire became more pronounced and, hence, peace on the Caliphate's eastern borders became a priority.
Depending on the political context, international trade along the Silk Road in the Caspian area used the two competing routes that connected Central Asia with Europe: either the northern one from the Khwarezmian city of Gorgan across the north Caspian areas of Khazaria, or the southern route across the Southern Caspian and Horasan and further on to Asia Minor and Byzantium. Gorgan and Dikhistan, the south Caspian areas, deserve special mention in the context of the relations between the Rus and Khazars and the way trade was organized with the Arab Caliphate.
For more than a century, Khazaria, which had gained a lot of military might and influence, remained in control of the areas of intensive trade turnover; this was also promoted by a peace with the Caliphate established in the 9th century. According to historical sources, the Khazars managed to create and play the first fiddle in trade-political unions that ensured the movement of commodities from the north to the south to the central areas of the Caliphate and from the east to the west to the borders of Western Europe.
10 .
11 See: V.V. Bartold, "Turkestan v epokhu mongolskogo nashestviia," in: Sochinenia, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1963,
1 See: Z. Buniyatov, Azerbaijan v VII-IX vv., Baku, 1965, p. 115.
pp. 121, 163-164, 229-230.
12 See: F.M. Asadov, Arabskie istochniki o tiurkakh v rannee Srednevekovye, Baku, 1993, pp. 31-33.
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Arabian Authors on Trade between the Khazars and the Rus
A comparative analysis of two outstanding works of Arabic geographic literature supplies us with information of how trade was organized, which political forces were involved, and how long the routes organized by the Khazars remained in use. Here I have in mind the instructions related to postal communication and trade routes compiled in the 9th century by Abu'l-Kasim Obaidallah ibn Abdallah Ibn Khordadbeh,13 head of the postal service under Caliph al-Wasiq (842-847), and a geographic work by Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husain ibn Ali al-Masoudi (896-956), a well-known traveler, historian, and geographer.14
Ibn Khordadbeh wrote in the mid-9th century; those who published the text and those who studied it suggested that there was an earlier version written no later than 233 M.E. (847/848) and a later version dated 882-886. Dutch Orientalist M.J. De Goeje, who published and translated the fullest version, based his conclusion about the two versions and their dates on the fact that the shorter one, published by his predecessor Barbie de Meynard, did not mention a single fact that took place after 233/847; the fuller version published by M.J. De Goeje contained two extracts that can be reliably dated to the period between 882 and 886.15
Al-Masoudi's geographical work appeared nearly a century later than Ibn Khordadbeh's.16 The author posed himself the task of finding out whether the Caspian had an outlet to other seas. The famous geographer, historian, and traveler followed the southern Caspian coast to ask the local people whether the Caspian Sea was connected to the Azov Sea of which he had read in various sources. No one confirmed his surmise and merely pointed to the mouth of the Volga from where the Rus came to sow fear among the Caspian Muslims.17 The ancient geographer used his stories about the Rus and their military inroads to hold forth about the water routes and trade roads that connected Western Europe with the Caspian. The same author left us the fullest account of one of the biggest military enterprises of the Rus who marched on Arran in Northern Azerbaijan in the early 10th century. A comparative analysis of what Ibn Khordadbeh and al-Masoudi, separated by a century, wrote reveals the changes that occurred in politics and trade in the Caspian region between the mid-9th and the mid-10th centuries.
Ibn Khordadbeh left us the fullest description of all sorts of routes used by Jewish merchants who traded with Europe in Chinese goods. There is no agreement among the researchers about the origins of these merchants and the terms which described them. The main sources and the extant manuscript copies offer various spellings of the same term: ar-rosaniyya, ar-rodaniyya, ar-radhaniyya, and ar-rahdani-yya. Experts in Arabian texts came forward with different versions of the term's etymology, which survived in Ibn Khordadbeh's work. Early in the 10th century, ibn al-Faqih used the same term (independently of the primary source) in his Kitab al-Buldan. Those who tried to explain the term and clarify its etymology associated it with a trading corporation, nautae rhodanici, which carried construction materials in Southern France (derived from Rhodanus, the Latin name of the River Rhona), or with al-Rasan area in the Iranian Interfluve. Prominent Dutch expert in Arabian studies Reinhart Dozy relied on the manuscript of a book by ibn al-Faqih (ar-rahdaniyya)1S to suggest that the word should be translated
13 See: Kitab al-Masalik Wa'l-Mamalik. Auctore Abu'l-Kasim Obaidallah ibn Abdallah Ibn Khordadbeh. Quae cum versione gallica edidit M.J. De Goeje, Lugduni Batavorum, Leiden, 1889.
14 See: Murudj az-Zahab wa Maadin al-Djauhar, Talif Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husain ibn Ali al-Masoudi, Dj. 1-4, Dar sadir, Beirut, 2005.
15 See: Ibn Khordadbeh, Kniga putey i stran, Transl. from Arabic, commentaries, investigation, indices and maps by Nailya Velikhanova, Elm, Baku,1986, p. 18.
16 In several places al-Masoudi mentioned that he wrote his book in 332 AH (943/944) (see: Murudj az-Zakhab, op. cit., pp. 142, 144).
17 See: Ibid., p. 95.
18 See: Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum, ed. by M.J. de Goeje, Vol. 5, Lugduni Batavorum, Leiden, p. 270.
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from the Persian as "those who know the routes."19 Some scholars believed that the merchants got their name from the city of Rey in Iran.20 Relatively recently, Polish Orientalist Franciszek Kmietowicz joined the polemics with a fairly original interpretation of the term as veredarius (courier).21
Nailya Velikhanova, a prominent Azeri expert in Arabian studies and the author of the contemporary commented translation of Ibn Khordadbeh's work, is convinced that these merchants descended from the Medina Jews and that the term ar-rasaniyya applied to them was derived from the arRasan village on the Arabian Peninsula. Many researchers, however, rely on the fact that in certain other manuscripts of Ibn Khordadbeh's text, the word ar-rahdaniyya (which looks similar to ar-rasaniyya) is applied to Jewish merchants; they argue that this term stemmed from the Persian and meant "those who know the routes." J. Marquart22 and Russian Orientalist V. Rozen23 accepted this interpretation. This looks more plausible since the merchants about whom Ibn Khordadbeh wrote in his time probably cooperated with the Jews who had fled Iran driven by the movement of Mazdak and who settled in Byzantium and Khazaria (more details below).
The academics have not yet agreed on what Ibn Khordadbeh wrote about the trade of the Rus; he called them people from "Saqaliba" and said that they traded in furs and swords which they brought from the remotest corners of the country of Saqaliba to the "Rum Sea" and paid taxes to Byzantium; they also brought their merchandise up the Don to the Khazarian city of Hamlij,24 where they paid taxes to the Khazars.25
Al-rahdaniyya, A Jewish Merchant Guild
Ibn Khordadbeh's story about the Rus is wedged between two parts of the story relating to the trade routes used by the Jewish merchants called ar-rasaniyya 2 There is a frequently aired opinion (shared at one time by Vasili Bartold) that this inset, which cut the otherwise complete story about the Jewish merchants into two parts, was hard to explain.27 This explains an opinion that the story about the Rus was added by later copyists.28 Nailya Velikhanova, the author of the Russian translation of and detailed commentaries to Ibn Khordadbeh's work, agreed with M.J. De Goeje, who published Kitab al-Masalik Wa'l-Mamalik, and arrived at the conclusion that the piece about the Rus belonged to Ibn Khordadbeh himself.29 The Azeri Orientalist ended her textological analysis with this conclusion; she obviously did not intend to look for a logical connection between the stories about the Rus and the al-rahdaniyya merchants.
Prominent Orientalist Omelyan Pritsak, an American of Ukrainian extraction, offered numerous arguments in favor of different authors of the extracts about the al-rahdaniyya and the Rus. He be-
19 R. Dozy, Supplément aux Dictionnaires Arabes, Tome Premier, E.J. Brill, Leyde, 1881, p. 562.
20 See: S. Katz, The Jews in the Visigothic and Frankish Kingdoms of Spain and Gaul, Cambridge Mass., 1937.
21 See: F. Kmietowicz, "The Term of Radaniyya in the Work of Ibn Khurdadbeh," in: Folia Orientalia, Tome XI, 1969, Krakow, 1970, pp. 169-171.
22 See: J. Marquart, Osteuropäische und ostasiatische Streifzuge, Leipzig, 1903, pp. 24, 350.
23 See: A. Kunik, V. Rozen, Izvestia al-Bekri i drugikh avtorov o Rusi i slavianakh, Vol. 2, St. Petersburg, 1903, p. 142—"those who know the routes."
24 There is any number of different opinions about the term's origin and interpretation, as well as about the localization of Hamlij. For want of space I will not go into details and will not offer my own opinion. Today, it is commonly believed that this word is related to the Turkic Khanbalyk (the city of Khakan), that is, the capital city. This name could have been applied to that part of the Khazarian capital Itil where the khakan's residence was located.
25 See: Kitab al-Masalik Wa'l-Mamalik, p. 154.
26 See: Ibidem.
27 See: V.V. Bartold, Arabskie izvestia o Rusakh, p. 827.
28 See: Ibid., p. 826; B.N. Zakhoder, Kaspiyskiy svod svedeniy o Vostochnoy Evrope: Gorgan i Povolzhie v IX-X vv., Vol. II, Moscow, 1962, pp. 85-86; Ibn Khordadbeh, op. cit., p. 38.
29 See: Ibn Khordadbeh, op. cit., p. 39.
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lieved that the extracts about the Rus related to a much later period than the information about the trade routes of the al-rahdaniyya merchants. This does not suggest, however, that the story about the Rus was a later addition made either by Ibn Khordadbeh or later copyists. Pritsak wrote that the story about the Rus appeared later than a certain account of the routes used by the al-rahdaniyya merchants; by this time, he argued, the corporation of Jewish merchants had lost much of its significance and control over the trade routes. In the 830s, when the Khazar fortress Sarkel appeared in the Volga-Don interfluve (the closest distance between the two rivers), the Rus merchants replaced the Jewish merchants and controlled all the major trade operations in the area until 886, the latest date for Kitab al-Masalik Wa'l-Mamalik. The piece about the Rus merchants was inserted after 830 by certain officials while Ibn Khordadbeh included this combined text in the second version of his book.30
The fact that the first part of the text about the Jewish merchants describes the southern sea routes of al-rahdaniyya deserves special mention. These people traded mainly in hides, furs, swords, and slaves imported from the northern countries and Western Europe. They were moved across the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the ocean to India and China, where they bought spices and incense to be sold in Byzantium and Western Europe. The first part concentrates on the marine routes of the Jewish merchants; the land route is mentioned in order to explain how goods were moved from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea port of Kulzum. A land route from Antioch to the Euphrates and down the river to Baghdad was another alternative; commodities were moved to the Tigris and down the river to Ubulla on the Gulf coast. In the first part the author was concerned with marine routes which, according to the author of Kitab al-Masalik Wa'l-Mamalik, were "interconnected."
The second part of the same story about the Jewish merchants was subtitled "about their land routes."31 It deals exclusively with the land routes that connected Europe and China; the chain of trade hubs that stretched from Western Europe to Northern Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, Iraq, Iran, India, and China arouses involuntary admiration of the merchants' enterprising spirit and the scope of their trade. We do not know whether any of them covered the entire stretch of the route, but nor can we say that this was impossible. Let us note that what Ibn Khordadbeh wrote in his work predated Marco Polo by five centuries.
The Rus Merchants and Transcaspian Trade
I have already written that a large part of the trade routes ran across the Muslim-controlled territories in which the Muslim merchants and Muslim governments created conditions that were maximally favorable for the financial and technical support of long-distance international trade; there was an infrastructure of haulage trade points and a network of reliable trade agents,32 which made it possible to use clearing instruments analogous to bills of exchange.33
The same part of Ibn Khordadbeh's account contains the following comment, which deserves special mention: "Sometimes they select routes outside Rumiyya (Byzantium.—FA.) in the country of Saqaliba, from which they reach the Khazar city of Hamlij, the Jurjan (the Caspian.—F.A.) Sea, and go on to Balkh, Maverannahr, the country34 of the Tuguzguzes, and China."35 The furs, hides, and
30 See: O. Pritsak, "Arabic Text of the Trade Route of the Corporation of Ar-Rus in the Second Half of the Ninth Century," in: Folia Orientalia, Tome XII, 1970, pp. 243-254.
31 Kitab al-Masalik Wa'l-Mamalik, p. 154.
32 See: Ibid., p. 123. Ibn Khordadbeh wrote that every year the Caliphate spent 159 thou. dinars or 676 tons of gold (a large sum at that time, about $17.6 million in today's terms) to maintain the stations in good shape.
33 See: Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi, Kitab ighathat al-Umma bi-Kashf al-G'humma (Book of Help to the Nation in Disclosing the Distress), Cairo, 1957, p. 68. Al-Maqrizi quoted a story about a merchant who showed a piece of strange-looking silk paper, which in Khanbalyk, the capital of China, was worth five dirhams.
34 Wurt in the text. Nailya. Velikhanova believes that the word is derived from Turkic yourt—fatherland or country.
35 Kitab al-Masalik Wa'l-Mamalik, p. 155.
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swords that the Jews exported to India and China were made in the areas to the north of the Black Sea and the Caspian. The Rus merchants paid tribute to the Khazars, "one sword and one squirrel skin per fireplace."36 Al-Masoudi demonstrated no mean knowledge about the quality of different furs brought to the Khazar capital by the Volga tributaries.37
Ibn Khordadbeh wrote that the Jewish merchants could move these commodities across Byzantium or across Khazaria. In both countries there were influential Jewish communities that had arisen after the two waves of Jewish exodus from Iran. The first left Iran after the victory of the Mazdakit movement to settle in Byzantium; the second wave consisted of the Jews who embraced the Mazdakit idea of equality and, therefore, had to move out of Iran when the movement was defeated. Neighboring Khazaria proved to be the nearest place. After installing themselves in the hub of north-south and north-east trade, these communities produced the bulk of the al-rahdaniyya merchants.
Khazaria proved to be the best place: very much in line with Turkic nomadic statehood, the khakans of the Ashina clan kept away from the life of their settled subjects and their religion. Russian historian Lev Gumilev, who analyzed these circumstances in the political and religious context of Byzantium, the Arab Caliphate, and the Slavic world, concluded that as soon as the economically flourishing Jewish community in Khazaria got the chance to realize its political ambitions, it moved to the fore in east-west trade. The Khazar Khaganate, the rulers of which adopted Judaism, developed into a merchant state with a complicated and not entirely disentangled, political structure with a Jewish king and a Khazar Khagan with very limited powers.38
While the Jewish merchants probably owned the goods they moved to the sea ports from which ships went to India and China, this did not suggest that they were shipbuilders and seafarers. They probably moved their merchandise by Byzantine ships in the Mediterranean or by ships of agents from other Christian and Muslim countries of the same region. In the south, it was the Arabs who moved goods across the sea; the fairly developed system of crediting, mutual settlement, and chartering of vessels guaranteed the merchants their right to the goods, while agents in different trade hubs followed their instructions. While goods were moved from one point to another along the long trade route, they changed owners several times, that is, goods were sold in big trading centers. This deprived the original owner of a large chunk of his potential profit, which meant that he wanted to remain an owner as long as possible.
This was not equally obvious when commodities were moved across Khazaria: from the mouth of the Volga, where the Khazar capital stood, the goods had to be delivered to the haulage points controlled by the Arabian Caliphate and the local Muslim dynasties. Ibn Khordadbeh wrote that the goods of Jewish merchants crossed the Caspian to reach Gorgan; significantly, he mentioned this in the section dealing with the land routes of the al-rahdaniyya. The Rus followed the same route on their ships: Ibn Khordadbeh wrote about this in the text adjoining the section dealing with the naval routes of the al-rahdaniyya.
Abaskun was the most important of the Gorganian ports.39 The bulk of the merchandise was brought there to be moved further on to the east. Neither the Khazars nor the Jews had ships suitable for crossing the fairly stormy Caspian Sea. Only al-Masoudi mentioned the boats (zawariq) the Khazars could have used to bring commodities from the north along the Volga tributaries to Itil.40 Vasili Bar-told believed that this did not mean that the Khazars had their own ships and insisted that, since they politically dominated the Rus, they regarded the ships the Rus seafarers used as their own.41 In fact, Ibn-Haukal wrote that the Khazars brought what they grew in their fields and kitchen-gardens to the river to move everything to the capital by the river. This meant that they travelled by water; al-Masou-di wrote that they had river boats, but no sea-going vessels.
36 Povest vremennykh let.
37 See: Muruj az-Zahab, op. cit., pp. 143-144.
38 See: L.N. Gumilev, Drevniaia Rus' i Velikaia step, Mysl Publishers, Moscow, 1989, pp. 113, 136-137.
39 See: Muruj az-Zahab, op. cit., p. 146.
40 See: Ibid., p. 143.
41 See: V.V. Bartold, Arabskie izvestia o Rusakh, p. 832.
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So it was probably the Rus who moved Jewish commodities from Itil across the Caspian; they could have transferred their own goods together with the cargoes of the Khazar and Muslim merchants. In the 9th century, the scope of these operations was probably considerable: Ibn Khordadbeh quoted his friend poet al-Buhturi, who wrote that the merchants with trade contracts signed in Hamlij (capital of Khazaria) enjoyed a lot of respect in Baghdad.42
It seems that the Rus landed not only in Abaskun, but also along the entire stretch of the southern and eastern coast: according to Ibn Khordadbeh, "they sail the Gorgan Sea and land anywhere they like."43 This is indirectly confirmed by what al-Masoudi wrote later, in the 10th century, when the picture had changed radically. The Rus, no longer peaceful merchants and seafarers, had become cruel invaders and plunderers. They attacked the coasts of Gorgan, Tabaristan, Gilan, Deylam, and Azerbai-jan,44 of which they knew enough to be aware that they were worth plundering.
Separated by one century, Ibn Khordadbeh (mid-9th century) and al-Masoudi (mid-10th century) left us two very different accounts of how the Rus penetrated the Caspian area and sailed the Caspian Sea. Ibn Khordadbeh wrote about trade operations: the Rus brought traditional northern commodities and acted as reliable counteragents of the Khazar-Jewish and Muslim merchants; like many other merchants in the Muslim world they followed the familiar trade routes as far as possible to come back with as much money as they could earn. Sometimes they sold their cargoes on the southern Caspian coast; sometimes they went as far as Baghdad. Arabic sources say nothing about their eastward trade expeditions with merchandise: it seems that the East received the goods bought by Muslim merchants in Abaskun and other south Caspian ports from the Rus who delivered them. According to Ibn Khordadbeh, the route went from Gorgan to Balkh and Maverannahr and across the land of the Tuguzguzes to China.
There is the opinion that as late as the Middle Ages, during Arab times, the Oxus (Amu Darya) or one of its branches could have flown into the Caspian along the currently dried-up riverbed called Uz-boy. Information supplied by ancient geographer Strabo suggests that in pre-Arab times, the Uzboy was navigable and goods were moved along it. This confirms the opinion that in antiquity the now dried-up branch of the Oxus was a stretch of one of the trade routes that connected China, India, and the world of Classical Antiquity. Travelers used the Oxus branch to reach the eastern Caspian coast, crossed the sea, entered the Kura River and moved up the Kura and its tributaries to finally find themselves on the Black Sea coast. It remains unclear how this trade route functioned: we still do not know what sort of ships were used to cross the Caspian and who manned them. If this route did exist, the Greeks, the best seafarers of antiquity who sailed along the Black Sea coasts, could have sailed the Caspian as well.
The question is: can we rely on information about the Rus trade operations and their crossing the Caspian to surmise that this route was functioning at the time we are talking about? Indeed, those engaged in trans-Caspian trade could have been tempted to go up the Uzboy. We cannot exclude the possibility that the ships were unloaded at the mouth of the Uzboy, but did the Amu Darya run into the Caspian? It seems that archeological finds, which have already proven that the Rus moved further east along the Silk Road, can serve as indirect evidence that the Uzboy was navigable as far as the Amu Darya main riverbed. Even if the Uzboy was no longer navigable in the 9th century, the caravans that started at the Khwarezmian city of Gorgan (today Konya-Urgench) could still reach the Caspian shores to board ships of the Rus. A vague echo of this can be found in the legend about buildings with green cupolas amid impassable marches to the east of Khwarezm as told by al-Garnati, a 12th-century author. A chance traveler found an emerald bowl there and presented it to the shah of Khwarezm who, together with his warriors, tried to reach the green cupolas. Failing, he decided to dig a channel from Amu Darya to the buildings and died without accomplishing this task.45
42 See: Kitab al-Masalik Wa'l-Mamalik, p. 124.
43 Ibid., p. 154.
44 See: Murudj az-Zahab, op. cit., p. 146.
45 See: Puteshestvie Abu Hamida al-Garnati v Vostochnuiu i Tsentralnuiu Evropu (1131-1153 gg.), Published by O.G. Bolshakov and A.L. Monggayt, GRVL, Moscow, 1971, p. 47.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
The road from Kwarezm to Europe started in Gorgan; it ran across the north Caspian steppes, the home of the Oghuzes and Pechenegs. It also ran to Khazaria, Rus, and the north where Bjarmia was situated. An alternative to the route across the Caspian, it became actively used in the 10th century when political shifts in the relations among Khazaria, Byzantium, Kievan Rus, the Caliphate, and the nomads of the Northern Caspian and Northern Black Sea coastal area made navigation in the Caspian too hazardous.
Conclusion
After spreading across Sassanian Iran, the Arabs had to find the best possible mode of coexistence with the local people and political forces in the region. For political and ideological reasons, the clash with Byzantium led to a never-ending confrontation. The war with the Turks of Central Asia was exhaustive; for the first time the Arabs had to switch, on the border, from offensives to defens-es.46 For nearly one-and-a-half centuries, the Arabs remained locked in a stubborn struggle against the Khazars for control over the Central Caucasus. It was under Harun al-Rashid that the confrontation was finally resolved in a peace treaty and an alliance.47
In this way, by the early 9th century, the Arab Caliphate reached the Chinese borders, having solved the task of creating trade and political alliances to ensure security of the trade routes from China to the Middle East that crossed the former Sassanian possessions. The southern route from China to Western Europe could function only if there was sustainable peace on the border between the Caliphate and Byzantium. This was never achieved: the relations between the two empires remained strained: they were locked in an ideological and economic conflict. Short periods of peace were cut short by regular inroads of Arabic border units into Byzantium. In 838, Caliph al-Mut'tasim (833842) completely routed the Byzantine army; the enemy captured the fortress of Amorium, one of the strongholds in the west of Asia Minor. This was predated by a no less destructive march of Byzantine Emperor Theophilos (829-842), which was probably deliberately coordinated with the anti-Arab revolt of the Khurramites led by Babak in Azerbaijan (816-836). It comes as no surprise that Caliph al-Mut'tasim moved against the city of Amorium, the home city of the Amorium dynasty of Byzantine emperors.
Significantly, the Khazar Khaganate, an enemy of the Caliphate in the Central Caucasus in the previous period, kept away from Babak and the Khurramites, this neutrality being the price of the Khazars' involvement in the trade between China and Europe and Europe and the Middle East carried out across the Eurasian steppes and the Caspian. Five years before Emperor Theophilos' march on the Arabs, the Khazars asked Byzantium to help them build a border fortress, Sarkel, at the place where the Don and the Volga interfluves were the shortest. The emperor dispatched one of his architects to help the Khazars. The fortress built in the shortest time possible stirred up heated discussions among historians, who have not yet identified the enemy against whom the fortress was built in the first place. Later, it was used for tax collection and inspection of the goods the Rus merchants brought to the Volga to move them down the river to the Caspian and further on across the sea to the Middle East. At the time the fortress was built, Hungarians had already appeared in the Black Sea steppes. They never threatened the Khazars, but paid tribute to them; the Khazars had arranged their political system and brought the Arpad dynasty to power, which in 896 led the Hungarians beyond the Carpathians to Pannonia.48
46 See: V.V. Bartold, "Istoria Turkestana," in: Sochinenia, Vol. II, Part I, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1963, p. 244.
47 See: Z. Buniyatov, op. cit., p. 115.
48 See: M.I. Artamonov, Istoria khazar, Hermitage, Leningrad, 1962, p. 346.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
It seems that the Sarkel Fortress changed the balance of power and alliances; as a result, Byzantine found itself in political and trade isolation. Constantinople expected that its assistance to the Khazars would allow it to control the nomads of the Black Sea steppes. This did not happened which is indirectly confirmed by the disagreements that erupted with the Khazars while the fortress was still being built. Mikhail Artamonov, who assessed the Byzantine influence and its real contribution to the project, pointed out that it had nothing in common with Byzantine architecture. The columns that architect Petronas brought remained unused. The fortress was built by local people, while the Byzantine architect limited himself to technical suggestions. He was dispatched to the region to assess the recent changes brought about by the Khazars' adoption of Judaism, arrival of the Magyarok (Hungarians),49 and the Rus as a new political force. The Khazars probably outwitted Byzantine diplomats: it was at that time (834) that the above-mentioned embassy of the Rus Khagan came to see the emperor of Byzantium. Some researchers even thought that the embassy staffed with Scandinavians had been dispatched by the Khazar Khagan. Even if those who sided with the hypothesis were wrong, the embassy could have been dispatched jointly by the Rus and the khagan: by that time they were tied together by a political and trade agreements to protect the trade routes across the Caspian against the politically loose nomads who threatened the smoothly organized trade.
Oleg's capture of Kiev tipped the military-political balance in favor of the rapidly growing state of the Rus; Scandinavian units arrived from the north to be strengthened by the local Slavs who paid tribute. The growing state had to select the main axis of advance and directions of peaceful trade. The marches on Constantinople that followed early in the 10th century show that at first the new state continued the confrontation probably inherited from the traditional policy of the Rus Khaganate based on an alliance with Khazaria and a triple trade alliance between Kiev, Khazaria, and the Arab Caliphate. There is information that the semi-legendary peace treaties of the early 10th century offered favorable conditions to the Rus merchants in Constantinople and in transit trade across Byzantium. This means that political and trade priorities were changing. Propaganda of Christian Orthodoxy among the Kievan political elite was equally important. Constantinople could finally end its political isolation by allying with Kievan Rus. There was no hope of convincing the Rus to challenge the Arab Caliphate, the formidable sworn enemy. It could have been weakened, however, by destroying the triple Khazar-Arab-Rus alliance. As a result, in the first half of the 10th century, the Rus marched on the Caspian to plunder the Muslim regions. This upset the political component of the international trade alliance and destabilized the situation inside Khazar-ia. The former allies resumed their rivalry up to and including acts of retribution carried out by the Muslim guard of the Khazar Khagan against the Rus units returning with rich spoils of war procured in Azerbaijan and Gilan in 913 and 943. The Caliphate resorted to diplomatic measures to bypass the Jewish government of Khazaria to contact the Volga Bulgars who although ruled by the Khazars were still their rivals.
The well-known embassy of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan was dispatched between the two largest marches of the Rus on the Muslim Caspian regions (921-922). Khazaria was facing isolation and was finally isolated: even if the march of Prince Svyatoslav supported by nomads (Oghuzes) of 965 did not destroy the Khazar Khaganate, it shattered it to its very foundations. The Rus captured Sarkel and started calling it Belaya Vezha (White Tower, a literal translation of the Khazar name into Slavic). This ended the three-hundred-year long era of Khazar domination in international trade in the region.
' See: M.I. Artamonov, op. cit., p. 302.
