The Khazar presence in the Crimea practically disappears by the end of the 9th century AD; about a century later, at the end of the 10th century, the Khazar empire itself collapsed. The sources of the XI-XIII centuries that have come down to us contain only a few rather fragmentary and not too reliable evidence of the Khazars. Despite the fact that after the X-XI centuries it is hardly possible to trace the further existence of the Khazars as a separate ethnos and Khazaria as a state entity, many authors, due to some mysterious inertia of historical thinking, continued to call Crimea and the Northern Black Sea region "Khazaria" in the medieval and even in early modern times, i.e. already much later than the collapse of the Khazar Empire. Let's look at what exactly was called "Khazaria" in the XII-XVII centuries.
Khazar presence in Crimea
As you know, the Khazar Turks appeared in the Crimea at the end of the 7th - beginning of the 8th centuries AD. Khazar troops penetrated into Tavrika, most likely through the eastern Crimea. How exactly the military and administrative presence of the Khazars in Crimea looked like is still unclear to this day. Classical researchers of the 19th century, as a rule, wrote about Crimea as an integral part of the Khazar Kaganate from the end of the 7th to the second half of the 10th century. Recent studies, however, quite clearly show that in the 19th century, the degree of influence of the Khazars on the fate of medieval Taurica was significantly exaggerated - largely due to insufficient research of this problem from an archaeological point of view. The Khazars, of course, were an important military force on the territory of Crimea (especially in its eastern part), however, this, nevertheless, does not mean at allthat they owned the entire peninsula. According to modern researchers, shortly after the Khazar invasion of Crimea, from the beginning of the VIII century and somewhere until the beginning of the 40s of the IX century, a system of Byzantine-Khazar condominium (dual power) was formed in Crimea.
In practice, this military-political Byzantine-Khazar alliance looked like this. In a number of Byzantine cities of Taurica, there were representatives of the Khazar government (for example, the governor-tudun) and Khazar garrisons. Nevertheless, the most important coastal centers (Bospor, Kherson, Sugdeya / Sudak) continued to maintain self-government, a pro-Byzantine political and trade-economic orientation, while the mountainous regions of Crimean Gotia with the capital in Doros-Mangup maintained their “allied” status in relation to Byzantium.
What was called "Khazaria" the era of the late Middle Ages
In the sources of the XII-XV centuries, two trends can be observed. Some geographers used this toponym in a "narrow" sense, calling so the Crimean peninsula or, even more narrowly, its eastern part in the area of the Genoese colony of Kaffa (modern Feodosia). Others used the toponym "Gazaria / Khazaria" in a broad sense, referring so not only to the Crimea, but also to all the possessions of the Golden Horde both in the Crimea and beyond. The Fleming Wilhelm de Rubruck (1253–1255), for example, mentioned that the Italians called the Crimea Gasaria, while the Greeks called it Cassaria or Caesaria. Later travelers also used this toponym. The Venetian Josaphat Barbaro, who visited Crimea in the last quarter of the 15th century, called the eastern Crimea l'insula de Capha (Italian "Kaffinsky Island"), indicating that this region was previously called la Gazaria. Thus, Barbaro,apparently, he correlated with the term Gazaria only the eastern, non-Gothic part of Crimea. The toponym Gasaria (Gazaria) was used quite often by other Italians. In the Italian office documents of the XIV-XV centuries, the term imperia Gazaria ("the Gazaria empire") meant not only Crimea, but also the Golden Horde steppes as a whole.
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What Jews, Armenians and Byzantines called "Gazaria"
The term "Khazaria" in relation to the Crimea and its environs was also used by Jewish authors. This is exactly how the Eretz Kozaria (Hebrew "the country of Khazaria"), in Hebrew called Tavrika and its environs the famous Jewish traveler Rav Petakhia from Regensburg (second half of the 12th century). Armenian medieval sources also often used the toponym "Gazaria". Moreover, due to the same inertia of thinking, they called Crimea "the country / world of the Huns and Gazars." Apparently, the Armenian authors considered the Huns to be identical with the Khazars.
The toponym "Khazaria" was also used by the Byzantines. So, for example, in the Trebizond horoscope of 1336, the concept of khoras tes Khazarias (Greek "land of the Khazars") was used in a broad sense and meant the lands of Crimea and the Golden Horde steppes. Even more interesting is the nickname Khazaros, recorded in one of the documents of the second half of the 13th century. In this context, three centuries after the collapse of the Khazar state, this nickname meant "Crimean" and could belong to both a Turk and a Greek, a native of the Crimea or the Northern Black Sea region. In this case, this nickname bore not an ethnic, but a geographical meaning and meant people from the late medieval "Khazaria" in the broad sense of this toponym. Hieromonk Matthew visited in 1395 "the land of Khazaria", which also means the Crimean peninsula and its surroundings. Alexei,the prince of the Crimean Gothia and Theodoro in the southern and southwestern Crimea, was called in the middle of the 15th century neither more nor less "the prince of all Khazaria" - and this is when you consider that even in the narrow sense of this term, he could not own the territory of the eastern Crimea, which belonged to at that time to the Genoese.
In the 16th and 17th centuries
Despite the fact that the inhabitants of this region chronologically moved further and further from the "real" early medieval Khazaria, we meet this toponym in the works of the authors of the early modern period, even in the 16th and 17th centuries! For example, the geographer Marius Niger in the second half of the 16th century believed that the Crimea was divided into two parts: Gothia, located in the south, and Gazaria, located in the north. Martin Bronevsky, Polish ambassador to the Crimea (c. 1578), reported that local barbarians (Crimean Tatars?) Called Tavrika Gadzaria. A Jewish author from Prague, Gershon ben Eliezer Halevi, in the 17th century called the outskirts of Crimea "Khazaria".
"Khazar Sea" in Evliya Chelebi's travel notes
Finally, the Turkish traveler Evliya elebi (second half of the 17th century) brought this place name outside the Crimea: he called the Caspian Sea “the Khazar Sea”. The traveler recorded a curious message about a giant fish that lived there:
“This fish is found only in the Khazar Sea, and fishermen call it the monster with elephant ears. All fish are afraid of her. And verily, on other sea shores one cannot find [a creature] with a similar body and skin as this one, which lay on the shores of the Caspian Sea. His skin bears no resemblance to the skin of marine animals. These creatures themselves are sometimes quadrangular, sometimes pentagonal, sometimes round, like a club, and their tail is narrow."
What the famous traveler meant is anyone's guess. According to some assumptions, he described the beluga that was found in the Caspian Sea, which really reached large sizes and weight up to one and a half tons.
So, for several centuries after the collapse of the Khazar Kaganate, Crimea and - more broadly - its surroundings and even, at times, the entire Golden Horde by inertia were associated with Khazaria and Khazars and were named accordingly. In the narrow sense of this word, "Khazaria" was called the Crimean peninsula, and the nickname "Khazarin" was used in the meaning of "Crimean, resident of Crimea." In a broad sense, Khazaria was the name for the vast territories of Crimea, modern southern Ukraine, and even all the Golden Horde possessions. In the late medieval period, the toponym "Khazaria" was used by Italians, Byzantines, Armenians and, less often, Jews. After the Ottoman conquest of Crimea in 1475, the toponym "Khazaria" was used extremely rarely. The last use of this place name in the Black Sea context, according to the information at our disposal,found in the work of Rabbi Gershon ben Eliezer in the first half of the 17th century. Evliya Chelebi called the Caspian the "Khazar Sea".
I will note, although this is not directly related to the topic of this article, that some anti-Semitic modern authors, again due to inertial thinking, speak of modern Russia as the "Third Khazaria". In their opinion, the "First" was during the Middle Ages, the "Second" was the Soviet Union, the "Third" is the modern post-Soviet Russia ruled by Masons and Semites. However, the topic of the use of Khazar history by modern authors requires additional research.
Mikhail Kizilov
