Today, an unprecedented interest in history. What caused it? What is it based on? Many curious people, and there are always such people, entangled in today's problems and not finding a way out of a difficult situation, turn to history for instructive examples.
Since each ethnic group is associated with the surrounding nature (habitat), then here the story begins with climate change.
Until the third century, the Volga delta was not similar to the current one. Then the clear waters of the Volga flowed across the dry steppe of the high Baer hills. The river was shallow, flowing not along the current channel, but to the east. The Khazars then huddled in the lower reaches of the Terek. In the II-III centuries, Atlantic cyclones shifted their path to the north. The rains stopped irrigating the steppe, where the desert reigned for a while, and began to pour out in the Volga-Oka interfluve and at the latitude of the Kama.
Humidification was especially strong in winter: drifts of snow and huge spring floods. The Volga carried its muddy waters, but the channel in its lower reaches turned out to be narrow for such streams. It was then that a delta was formed, stretching widely to the south. The freshened shallow water began to feed huge schools of fish, the banks of the channels were overgrown with dense forest, and the valleys between the hillocks turned into green meadows. The country changed its face, and the ethnos (people) that inhabited it changed.
The Sarmatians of the steppe left the banks of the canals: mosquitoes haunted the livestock, and wet grasses were unusual and harmful. But the Khazars spread along these shores, they brought with them a grapevine from the flat Dagestan (between Terek and Sulak), they also engaged in fishing and hunting. In the second century, Jews who fled to the Caucasus from Persia became their neighbors.
They had to flee because of the uprising of the vizier Mazdak, who was a resourceful politician: during the next famine in Persia, he put forward his program of fighting the crisis. Its essence was that there is good and evil in the world. Good is reason, and evil is foolishness. (Although it is the mind that is often delusional). Mazdak decided that it was unreasonable when some had harems and full of food, while others were swollen with hunger. We must take away from the rich and divide everything among the poor. This teaching was called Mazdakism. And Mazdak began to implement his program, but there were many poor, and all the wealth of the rich was not enough. Only Mazdak's supporters, the Mazdakites, got it. It seemed, and where did the Jews? Jews were active participants in these events. After the victory of Shah Khosrov, the surviving Mazdakites fled to Azerbaijan,they also settled on a wide plain between Terek and Sulak, where they met with the Khazars. So, the anti-system penetrated into the unsuspecting and tolerant to complete promiscuity of the Khazar ethnos. According to L. Gumilyov, Antisystem is “the systemic integrity of people with a negative attitude. The anti-system is characterized by a certain secrecy of actions and such a method of struggle as a lie. All anti-system ideologies and teachings deny the real world in the name of other abstract goals. Such teachings call to radically change the world, in fact destroying it, or require a person to break out of the shackles of reality, destroying himself. " Remember, the words from the international: "We will destroy the whole world of violence to the ground, and then we will build ours, we will build a new world: who was nothing, he will become everything." This is the anthem of the anti-system. The ideology of the anti-system always opposes itself to the ethnic tradition, and also tries to destroy the traditions of the ethnic group, where this anti-system is being introduced. Anti-systems can exist for a long time, shaking and destroying an ethnos for centuries.
After the climate change, the richest land in the Volga delta went to the Khazars and Jews without bloodshed and wars - by the grace of nature. True, in the harsh years the grapes died, and the vine was again brought from Dagestan. The connection between the Tersk and Volga Khazaria was not interrupted.
The warlike neighbors, the Huns and Alans, were not dangerous: any cavalry that tried to penetrate into Khazaria very quickly lost its orientation in the thickets and channels, and in winter the ice could rarely withstand the rider, and even in shallow water a wet rider in the wind was a bad warrior. If the invaders made fires to dry themselves, they received an unexpected blow and were forced to leave the floodplain. The Khazars never lived in the steppe, which means they were not nomads.
Promotional video:
Ethnic groups living in the lower reaches of the Volga were in the system of homeostasis - equilibrium with nature (they took from nature as much as they needed for life), and under such a system, ethnic groups rarely actively communicate. They had nothing to fight for. It is unprofitable to marry a girl from another ethnic group: she is accustomed to a different way of life, and will be a bad mistress in her husband's house.
Khazars are descendants of the ancient Caucasoid population of Western Eurasia. A very important role in the Khazar ethnos fell to the lot of the newborn ethnos of the ancient Turks - the Turkuts.
In 439, a small detachment of Prince Ashin fled from Northwest China. The composition of the detachment was variegated, but the majority were Xianbing, ancient Mongols. Settling on the slopes of Altai and Khangai, mixing with the natives, the Turkuts mastered the smelting of iron and the making of weapons.
In 552, their first khan, Tumyn, won a victory over the steppe Zhuzhani, who dominated the Steppe in the 4th-5th centuries. This is how the Great Turkut Kaganate was created. Tumyn's younger brother, Khan Istemi, reached the Don and the Black Sea. Some tribes fled from him (the Hungarians to Pannonia), and the Khazars considered it an honor to help the winner. Indeed, at that time, the defeated were not killed, but taxed or taken into the auxiliary army. This is how the Khazar-Turkuts appeared.
In the 6th-7th centuries, the Khazar-Türküts together had to fight off the Arabs who conquered the lands from India to Aquitaine. In the Caucasus, the war went on with varying success (667-774). The Khazars invaded Transcaucasia, the Arabs reached Derbent. For a whole hundred years, the Turkut khans used the territory of Khazaria as a base for their military operations. In Khazaria, the Türkuts rested after crossing the dry steppes from the Crimea or Transcaucasia, where they skipped loot.
Everyone knows how women relate to winners. And the children that appeared as a result sincerely considered themselves Khazars. They did not know their fathers, they were brought up among the Khazars, in the landscape of the Volga delta. As an inheritance from the Türkuts, they received not only anthropological characteristics, but also passionarity. This went on for a hundred years: the Turkic khans ruled Khazaria, but they did not change their way of life: they lived in the steppe as a nomadic way of life and only returned to the adobe houses of Itil in winter. The Khan supported himself and his army himself, without burdening the Khazars with taxes. The Turkuts led the fight against the Arabs, taught the Khazars to repulse the onslaught of regular troops, as they mastered the skills of the steppe maneuver warfare.
In the second half of the 8th century, Jewish rabbis from Byzantium began to come to Khazaria. Probably the Greek-Armenian lobby won the battle for the right to trade. But there were also known cases when on the periphery of the Byzantine Empire the gates of a city were often open for plunder by strangers, and the Jews had great profits from the trade in slaves from the conquered and plundered city. Apparently, not wanting bloodshed, the Byzantines invited the Jews to leave the country. Since the Jewish rabbis were city dwellers, they settled exclusively in cities: Itil, Semender, Belendzher, etc.
The new arrivals were engaged in trade, for which the Khazars themselves did not show abilities. It is almost impossible to assess this or that event, which often occurs on the other side of the world, but it is this seemingly insignificant episode that can change the course of history in the future. The further fate of Khazaria was greatly influenced by the events that took place in the Crimea.
In the VIII century, the Khazars shared the Crimea with the Greeks (Byzantium). The Khazars belonged to the steppe Crimea, the eastern part of the southern coast, from Kerch to Surozh (Sudak) and sometimes Gothia with the principality of Theodoro (Mangup) standing on the yayla. Sometimes Mangup wanted to submit to Byzantium. The mainstay of power in the Crimea was Korsun (Chersonesos), a rich city with obstinate inhabitants, which held on independently of the Constantinople government, but never separated from the empire. From the Crimea came the spread of Orthodoxy to Khazaria.
But one day some tribe of Rus from the Dono-Donets area came to Crimea and plundered Naples (Simferopol), before reaching Surozh (Sudak), the Rus plundered the entire coast of Crimea from Korsun (Chersonesos) to Kerch. This means that the Rus gained access to the Black Sea, and their raids ravaged the coast of Asia Minor for 200 years. The Christian churches suffered the most from the plunders of the Russians, and therefore the Orthodox influence in Khazaria was weakened. Orthodox preachers stopped appearing on the territory of Khazaria. A political vacuum was created that was immediately filled by Judaism.
The Rus and the Slavs merged only under Vladimir the Holy, in the X century. Until that time, the Rus were an independent people, well known in Germany. The German chroniclers called them Rugi, and Olga - Regina rugorum. The merger process began in the 9th century, but was long and thorny. Rus fought with the Slavs often. The Rus tribe was warlike, passionate: real robbers.
In the middle of the VIII century, the biggest shift was the accession of the Abbasids in Baghdad, which meant the beginning of the collapse of the Caliphate. The Baghdad events opened the way from West to East for those enterprising merchants who explored these roads. Road in Persian is rah, the root of the verb to know is don. Those who know the way are Rahdonites. This was the name of the Jewish merchants who seized the monopoly of the caravan trade between China and Europe.
The trade was fabulously profitable, because they did not trade in consumer goods, but only in luxury goods. For example, silk was exchanged for gold (from China to Europe), silver - for furs (from Iran to Kama). In terms of profitability, this trade corresponds to today's foreign exchange transactions or drug resale.
Only excess profits covered the cost of transportation and maintenance of the route, on which domes were erected over springs and ponds, landmarks were erected indicating the direction of the road, and caravanserais were built for especially hot days and overnight stays. If uprisings were a common thing in the Abbasid Caliphate, then the Khazars clearly kept order on the roads. The importance of Khazaria as a transit point and place of rest grew. Resting on the Volga was not only convenient, but also pleasant.
It must be said that the persistence of ethnic integrity was determined by the belonging of the entire population of Khazaria (TURKYUTO-KHAZARS) to the Western Eurasian super-ethnos. We must never forget that good relations and ethnic contacts are not the same thing. If the former are determined by political situations and conjuncture, the latter do not depend on the consciousness of people, and even more so on the decisions of khans or beks. The laws of nature have their own logic and in the 9th century this logic came into force.
The ruling at that time Turkic khans from the Ashin dynasty believed that their state, represented by the Jews, was acquiring hard-working and intelligent subjects who could be used for diplomatic and economic assignments. Wealthy Jews presented expensive gifts to the Khazar khans. For the Jews of the Rakhdonites it was annoying that the attempt of their protege Bulan (a Karaite by his mother) to carry out a military coup failed. The military power remained in the hands of the Turkic-Khazar nobility, which was not always easy to cope with.
And then love came into play. It took almost 80 years to get what I wanted. The Jews tried to give their beautiful daughters in marriage to the khans and their relatives. Since polygamy was allowed in Khazaria, the Jews replenished their harems. Their sons remained Turkic princes, becoming members of the Jewish community. At the end of the 8th century, many children from mixed marriages appeared.
For Christians and Muslims, family affiliation is determined by the father, and in the Jewish religion by the mother. Karaites are children from mixed marriages, when the father was a Jew and the mother was a Khazark. Such children did not have the right to study the Talmud and were not considered Jews, and therefore were deprived of all rights and privileges in Khazaria.
And once a certain influential Jew Obbadiya turned the khan from the Ashina dynasty (after the Karaite's father) into a puppet and made rabbinic Judaism the state religion of Khazaria. It is clear that the coup cannot be carried out if you have no connections and money. And, of course, Obbadia did not spare the Khazar gold to invite fellow believers from Byzantium. The Jews took over all leadership positions. The fact that Obbadiya acted as a representative of the Khazar people does not at all mean that he was worried about the fate of this people and state. In fact, a coup d'etat was carried out, as a result of which a civil war began.
After this war, Khazaria changed its appearance. All potential leaders capable of leading the government and opposing Obbadia were killed or fled. From a systemic integrity, Khazaria turned into an unnatural combination of an amorphous mass of subjects with a ruling class, alien in blood and religion. There is no reason to call the current situation feudalism. And can an ethno-social chimera belong to any formation?
The main task of the authorities was to suppress internal enemies, and not to care about the development of the country and its people. The authorities were afraid of the people and began to hire troops to guard them. To pay the soldiers regularly, new subjects were needed. In the second half of the 9th century, the Dnieper became the western border of Khazaria. Slavic tribes: northerners, Vyatichi, Radimichi - became tributaries of Khazaria.
Paying the soldiers a large salary, the Khazar government made an original demand: the troops were forbidden to be defeated. An exception was made only for the leader and his deputy. they were Jews. The rest were executed for failure to complete the assignment. The warriors are not their own, they are paid, and for the money they give their masters their lives; therefore, the owner can dispose of the sold-out life as a thing. And since supply exceeded demand, it was more practical to use the "purchase" to the limit, with maximum benefit for yourself. From the point of view of the Eurasian nomads, Slavs, Byzantines, Arabs and even the Germans, such an attitude was unacceptable even to war horses and hunting dogs.
Having liquidated the church organization of Khazar Christians, the authorities forbade its restoration. In 854, the Muslim Khazars were forced to emigrate to Transcaucasia.
The government of Khazaria received funds to pay for the soldiers not from the Rakhdonites (with an increase in the duty, they could change the route of the caravans) traveling from China to Spain and from Iran to Great Perm, but from their subjects.
Itil amazed travelers with its size and population. Located on both banks of the largest channel of the Volga delta - Akhtuba, Itil stretched for 10 kilometers on the left bank and on a beautiful green island in the floodplain, where the king's palace was located. Synagogues, mosques, churches, huge bazaars full of cheap lamb, various fish, watermelons, children of both sexes sold into slavery, ships descending the Volga, and caravans approaching the city from the east and west - all this made a strong impression on eyewitnesses …
Naive travelers believed that if such a large rich city of Itil, then the people live well. They did not know that both mosques and churches were only for visitors, and the Khazar people performed their religious rites in the same huts where they lived. In fact, Khazaria did not produce anything except fish glue, which was sold for next to nothing. The main subject of export from Khazaria in the VIII-X centuries. there were slaves. In the cities of Khazaria at the beginning of the 9th century, the Jewish community numbered 4 thousand males, their wives and children lived with them, and they needed servants and military guards.
In their own country, the Khazars turned into subjugated, disenfranchised government officials of an ethnos alien to them, alien in religion and tasks. If Khazaria in the VIII century can be called an ethnic chimera, then in the IX-X centuries. it has become a socio-economic chimera.
Jewish merchants who equipped the caravans founded their settlement colonies in China: one settlement was in the northwest of China, in the city of Chang'an, the other in the southeast, in Canton. The entire burden of the economic policy of imperial China fell not on the peasants: the government officials collected silk from them. As a result, Huang Chao was found, who led the peasant uprising, it was directed against the dominance of foreigners and trade with them. The rebels took Canton, where the entire alien population was massacred. The government suppressed the uprising with the help of Tibetans and Turks-chateau. China was bleeding to death: many peasants died, the Chinese economy was undermined. There was nothing to take out, there was no one to care for the mulberry trees. China dropped out of world trade.
The catastrophe that befell the "silk road" affected Khazaria. Revenues plummeted. But the energetic Khazar merchants found a way out: the detachments of their mercenaries moved north. Khazar troops, rising along the Volga, defeated and subjugated the Kama (Volga) Bulgaria, even further north was Great Perm (in the Norwegian sagas it is called Biarmia). It was here that those who knew the way organized new trading settlements-trading posts. Biarmia forests gave precious fur of sables, martens, ermines. Moreover, the traffickers organized the sale of children.
But again there was another trouble. In the 9th century, the Baghdad Caliphate, the main friend of the Rakhdonites, began to fall apart. Its center, Baghdad, like a spider, sucked juices from huge areas under its control, giving nothing in return. Spain broke away, then Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Central Asia and Eastern Iran separated. The Deilem region (the southwestern coast of the Caspian Sea) was isolated.
The Deilemites (Shiites) captured part of northern Azerbaijan (up to Derbent), and in the south - western Persia. In 945 they captured Baghdad. In general, the friends of Khazaria felt bad. The route from the Volga to Baghdad along the Caspian coast, until quite recently so fast and convenient, turned out to be closed: the Deilemites did not let anyone through.
The problem was that in the mercenary troops of Khazaria there were the Deilemites' neighbors on the Caspian coast - the Gurgans. It was the Gurgans who won victories for the Khazar Jews over the Guzes on the Yaik River, over the Bulgars on the Kama, over the Burtases on the Sakmara River, over the Savirs on the Donets. But they refused to fight their fellow believers - the Deilemit Muslims.
And then the Khazar rulers invited the ancient Rus to fight the Muslims. The mercenary army of the Rus marched along the Volga, built ships in the Caspian and then made sea raids on Persia. In the first campaign, they plundered Abeskun Island. In 913, during the second campaign, the Rus encountered the Deilemites. The Deilemites repulsed the attack, but the Rus attacked the city of Ganja in southern Azerbaijan. And then the Khazar ruler allowed his Gurgan guards to avenge their fellow believers.
The death of the entire squad ended the campaign of the Russian squad in 913. The last two decades of the history of Khazaria took place in conflicts with the Slavs - with the already arisen Kiev principality.
In 939, the Russian prince Igor captured the city of Samkerts (Taman) belonging to the Khazars, located on the shore of the Kerch Strait. A Muslim army under the command of Pesach moved against the Rus. Pesach liberated Samkertsi, marched along the southern coast of Crimea (940), exterminating the Christian population. They were saved only in the impregnable Chersonesos. Having crossed Perekop, Pesach reached Kiev and imposed a tribute on the Russian principality. Then the Russians gave their swords to the Khazars, which is described in the "Tale of Bygone Years".
In 943, the Khazars again sent their Russian tributaries to the Caspian to fight the Deilemites. The Rus captured the Berdaa fortress in the lower reaches of the Kura. But dysentery began in the Rus camp. They fought their way to their boats and sailed away, but no one returned home.
Unsuccessfully resisted the Khazars at the beginning of the 10th century. Kiev. This has become the main problem in Kiev. And therefore, Princess Olga of Kiev, who ruled under her young son Svyatoslav, tried to acquire a strong ally in the person of the Greeks: she went to Constantinople, where she secretly was baptized, choosing Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus as her godfather.
The young prince Svyatoslav began a campaign that destroyed Khazaria in the summer of 964. He did not dare to go from Kiev to the Volga through the steppes, because a tribe of northerners, supporters of the Khazars, lived between Chernigov and Kursk. The Rus climbed the Dnieper to its upper reaches and dragged the boats to the Oka. Along the Oka and Volga Svyatoslav came to the capital of Khazaria - Itil.
Svyatoslav's allies in the campaign of 964 - 965 were the Pechenegs and the Guzes. The Pechenegs, supporters of Byzantium and natural enemies of the Khazars, came to the aid of Svyatoslav from the west. Guzes came from the Yaik, crossed the Caspian open spaces covered with dunes. The allies met safely at Itil. The capital of Khazaria was located on a huge island (19 km wide), which was formed by two Volga channels: the Volga (from the west) and Akhtuba (from the east). Akhtuba in those days was as wide as the Volga. In the city there were a stone synagogue and the king's palace, rich wooden houses of the Rakhdonites, and there was also a stone mosque for foreigners.
Svyatoslav's soldiers cut off all the routes from Itil. But its inhabitants probably knew about the approach of the Russians, and most of the Khazar aborigines fled to the Volga delta. The Volga delta was a natural fortress: only a local resident could understand the labyrinth. The islands of the delta are covered with Berovskaya mounds as high as a four-storey building. These hillocks gave refuge to the real Khazars.
The Jewish population found itself in a different position. It made no sense for Jewish merchants and their relatives to study the Volga canals: that's why they created their monopoly of foreign trade and usury, in order to live in the comfort of an artificial landscape - a city. They were alien to the indigenous population - the Khazars, which they mercilessly exploited. Naturally, the Khazars, to put it mildly, did not like their rulers and were not going to save them.
In the besieged city, the Jews had nowhere to run, so they had to fight Svyatoslav, and they were defeated. The survivors fled to the Terek, but Svyatoslav came to the Terek. There stood the second large city of the Rachdonites - Semender, which had a quadrangular citadel. But she didn't save the city. Having defeated Semender and taking horses, oxen, and carts from the population, Svyatoslav moved across the Don to Russia. On the way home, he took another Khazar fortress - Sarkel, which was located near the present village of Tsimlyanskaya. Sarkel was built by the Byzantines during their short friendship with Khazaria, and was created by the Greek architect Petron. The prince destroyed the fortress, won a victory and renamed the city to Belaya Vezha.
As a result of the campaign 964-965. Svyatoslav excluded the Volga, the middle reaches of the Terek and the middle Don from the sphere of the Jewish community. Svyatoslav returned independence to Kievan Rus. There were also communities in the Kuban, Crimea, Tmutarakan, where Jews under the name of Khazars, for another two centuries, still held dominant positions, but the state of Khazaria ceased to exist forever. The ethnic system has ceased to exist. The Turkic-Khazar ethnos crumbled apart: a part of the Khazars, who converted to Islam and were unable to pray, fled to Transcaucasia under the existing Khazaria. The rest were divided by religion: the Orthodox Khazars are the ancestors of the Terek Cossacks, and the Astrakhan Tatars are the descendants of the Muslim Khazars.
It should not be assumed that the creation of chimeras is an exceptional phenomenon and that the Jews played a unique role here. No, similar consequences arise wherever inorganic contacts arise at the superethnic level.
The Chimera was the Bulgarian kingdom (created by the Bulgarians on the Slavic lands in 660 AD, it was the anti-system of bohumilism that weakened the ethnos and the seizure of Bulgaria by the Ottoman Turks became possible). The antisystem of bohumils spread here. In pre-Columbian America, there were also chimeras (states of the Incas and Muisca). This is the Arab Caliphate in the X century. AD, where the Arabs, by creating harems, mixed with other super-ethnic groups, and the Ismaili anti-system arose. The Macedonian dynasties of the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids for three hundred years were also hated strangers for their subjects.
Many people may say that this is not about us and therefore they are not interested in it. I wrote in such detail so that it was clear that ethnos is not a state, but a seething living process. Of course, each ethnic group has its own unique history. The second part will be devoted to our past and present.
The text uses materials from the books of L. Gumilyov