The Khazars

The Classical Armenian Xazirkʿ, with the regular Armenian plural, the name of the power beyond the Caucasus in the historians of the empire’s most exposed corner. Its richest witness is Movsēs Kałankatuacʿi’s history of Caucasian Albania, which records the Khazar irruptions of the seventh century from underneath: the sack of Darband, the siege of Tbilisi, the tribute officers of the qaghan installed over Albanian towns, and the mission of the bishop Israyēl to the huts and holy groves of the north, one of the closest looks at steppe religion any medieval author took. The Armenian Geography lists the Xazirkʿ among the peoples of its inherited Sarmatia, the old Ptolemaic frame updated with the steppe’s new master, as the Sarmatians’ page of this atlas records.

The Armenian name is the earliest in the family’s documentary record, in use while Greek and Arabic were still learning whom they faced, because the Caucasus principalities met the qaghanate first and hardest. Its entries are correspondingly unlike the others on this page: not the diplomacy of equals or the geography of savants but the ledger of a small Christian world adjusting to a new roof, tribute assessed, churches bargaining, a bishop sent north to make Christians of the tax collectors. The great powers named the Khazars from across a chessboard; Armenian named them from beneath.

The Arabic al-Khazar, the geographers’ and historians’ name for the qaghanate the caliphate could conquer least of all its neighbors: the Arab-Khazar wars of the eighth century twice carried armies through the Caucasus in each direction and ended in a standing frontier at Darband. The classical geographers then mapped the people in detail, al-Iṣṭakhrī describing the twin city of Atil on its river, Ibn Faḍlān reporting the strange dual kingship of sacred qaghan and working king, and al-Masʿūdī, writing within living memory of the fact, recording that the king of the Khazars had become a Jew in the days of Hārūn al-Rashīd. From the people’s name the Arabic tradition also named the sea, Baḥr al-Khazar, the form the Caspian’s page of this atlas already holds.

The entry sits at the head of the name’s most durable line. Arabic fixed al-Khazar into the standard geography of the world, Persian carried it on, and the sea-name outlived the qaghanate by a millennium: the Caspian is still the Khazar Sea in Persian and Turkish. The people themselves the Arabic tradition treated with the respect of an unresolved war, a power beyond the Gate whose conversion it recorded without polemic, one book-religion noting, almost as a colleague, that the steppe had chosen another.

The Greek Cházaroi, the standing Byzantine name for the qaghanate of the northern steppe, written across the ninth- and tenth-century historians and codified in the De Administrando Imperio, Constantine VII’s confidential handbook of steppe diplomacy, which devotes chapters to how the Khazars may be attacked and by whom. The relationship the name carries was, for Byzantium’s dealings with nomads, uniquely close: Justinian II fled to the Khazars and married the qaghan’s sister, Leo III wed his son to the Khazar princess whose son ruled as Leo the Khazar, and the emperors built the qaghan’s fortress of Sarkel for him. An emperor of Byzantium could carry this page’s ethnonym as his own byname, an honor no other steppe people of this atlas achieved.

The entry’s texture is bureaucratic intimacy: where Byzantium wrote most steppe names in fear or contempt, Cházaroi appears in marriage contracts, engineering commissions, and the cold prose of a statecraft manual weighing the Khazars as one permanent piece on the northern board. The De Administrando’s chapters on unmaking them were written, in the event, a bare generation before the Rus did exactly that, so the name’s Greek career closes as a case study in the handbook’s own subject, the management, and the disposability, of steppe allies.

The Classical Persian Khazar, carried by the geographical tradition that New Persian shares with Arabic and given its fullest early Persian treatment in the anonymous Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam of 982, whose chapter on the Khazar country describes Atil, the qaghan and his deputy, the export of cattle and captives, and a people, it notes, of wealth and armies. The book was written on the eve of the qaghanate’s fall, an obituary that did not know itself. The living part of the Persian name is the sea: Daryā-yi Khazar remains the ordinary Persian name of the Caspian, the form the Caspian’s page records beside its Arabic twin.

The entry is the family’s demonstration of how a name survives its bearer by changing hosts. The people vanished within a century of the Ḥudūd’s chapter, but Persian had already lodged their name in a geographical fixture that no dynasty could dissolve, and eleven centuries of Persian speakers have named that water daily without a Khazar among them. On the Khazars’ own page the Persian entry is thus the one written closest to the end, the last portrait of the living kingdom in a language that would go on to keep, in a sea’s name, the longest memorial anyone kept of it.

The Hebrew Kūzār, the form of the Khazars’ name in the tenth-century Khazar Correspondence: Ḥasdai ibn Shapruṭ, the Jewish minister of the caliph of Córdoba, hearing that a Jewish kingdom stood by the Caspian, wrote across the world to its king, and the reply that circulated in Joseph’s name recounts the land of the Kuzar, its rivers, its cities, and the famous story of the disputation by which its kings chose Judaism. Two centuries later Judah Halevi built his philosophical masterwork on that story, casting its argument for Judaism as the dialogue that persuaded the king, and his title fixed the Hebrew name permanently: the Sefer ha-Kuzari, the Book of the Khazar.

Nothing else in this atlas is quite this entry. Every other name on the page is a neighbor’s word for the qaghanate; Kūzār is the name as the kingdom’s own court wrote it, yet in a language that was no more natively Khazar than Greek was, adopted with the faith the ruling house had chosen. The correspondence is the closest thing to the Khazars’ own voice that survives, and it speaks Hebrew from the Volga to Córdoba, diaspora and steppe empire discovering each other by post. A people whose own tongue is lost thus keeps its name in the atlas’s records twice over as other people’s word, and once, movingly, as its own word in a borrowed holy alphabet.