Caspian expeditions of the Rus'

Ahmad ibn Fadlan is sent from Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulgars, on behalf of the Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtadir.

Primarily, the purpose of the embassy is to explain Islamic law to the recently converted Bulgar peoples living on the eastern bank of the Volga River in what is now Russia.

(These are the Volga Bulgars; another group of Bulgars had moved westward in the sixth century, invading the country that today bears their name, and become Christians.).

Additionally, the embassy is sent in response to a request by the king of the Volga Bulgars to help them against their enemies, the Khazars.

Ibn Fadlan serves as the group's religious advisor and lead counselor for Islamic religious doctrine and law.

Ibn Fadlan and the diplomatic party utilize have established caravan routes toward Bukhara, now part of Uzbekistan, but instead of following that route all the way to the east, they had turned northward in what is now northeastern Iran.

Leaving the city of Gurgan near the Caspian Sea, they have crossed lands belonging to a variety of Turkic peoples.

One notable group he has encountered are the Khazars, a uniquely religious khanate that is one of the few peoples to adopt Judaism amid the surrounding Christian and Muslim spheres of influences.

Ibn Fadlan also records his encounters with the Oghuz on the east coast of the Caspian, the Pechenegs on the Ural River, and the Bashkirs in what is now central Russia.

All told, the delegation covers some four thousand kilometers kilometers (twenty-five hundred miles).

When the embassy arrives to the Volga Bulgars’ capital on May 12, 922 ,Ibn Fadlan reads aloud a letter from the Caliph to the Bulgar Khan, and presents him with gifts from the caliphate.

The meeting with the Bulgar ruler, “a man of striking appearance and dignity, stout and broad, who sounded as though he were speaking from inside a large barrel,” left Ibn Fadlan “frightened and distressed,” since he was blamed for not bringing with him the promised money from the caliph to build a fortress as defense against enemies of the Bulgars.

A substantial portion of Ibn Fadlan's account is dedicated to the description of a people he calls the Rūs or Rūsiyyah.

Most scholars identify them with the Rus' or Varangians, which would make Ibn Fadlan's account one of the earliest portrayals of Vikings.

The Rūs appear as traders who set up shop on the river banks nearby the Bolğar camp.

They are described as having bodies tall as (date) palm-trees, with blond hair and ruddy skin.

They are tattooed from "fingernails to neck" with dark blue or dark green "tree patterns" and other "figures" and that all men are armed with an ax, sword and long knife.

Ibn Fadlan describes the Rus as "perfect physical specimens" and the hygiene of the Rūsiyyah as disgusting (while also noting with some astonishment that they comb their hair every day) and considers them vulgar and unsophisticated.

In that, his account contrasts with that of the Persian traveler Ibn Rustah, whose impressions of the Rus were more favorable.

He also describes in great detail the funeral of one of their chieftains (a ship burial involving human sacrifice).

Some scholars believe that it took place in the modern Balymer complex.

The second large-scale campaign by the Rus' in the Caspian region is dated to 943, when Igor is the supreme leader of the Rus', according to the Primary Chronicle.

During the 943 expedition, the Rus' row up the Kura River, deep into the Caucasus, defeat the forces of Marzuban bin Muhammad, and capture Bardha'a, the capital of Arran.

The Rus' allow the local people to retain their religion in exchange for recognition of their overlordship; it is possible that the Rus' intended to settle permanently here.

According to ibn Miskawaih, the local people broke the peace by stone-throwing and other abuse directed against the Rus', who then demanded that the inhabitants evacuate the city.

This ultimatum is rejected, and the Rus' begin killing people and holding many for ransom.

The slaughter is briefly interrupted for negotiations, which soon break down.

The Rus' stay in Bardha'a for several months, using it as a base for plundering the adjacent areas, and amass substantial spoils.

The city is saved only by an outbreak of dysentery among the Rus'.

Encouraged by the epidemic, the Muslims approach the city.

The Rus', their chief riding on a donkey, make an unsuccessful sally after which they lose seven hundred warriors, but evade encirclement and retreat to the Bardha'a fortress, where they are besieged by the Muslims.

Exhausted by the disease and the siege, the Rus' "left by night the fortress in which they had established their quarters, carrying on their backs all they could of their treasure, gems, and fine raiment, boys and girls as they wanted, and made for the Kura River, where the ships in which they had issued from their home were in readiness with their crews, and three hundred Russes whom they had been supporting with portions of their booty."

(Vernadsky, George (1959).

The Origins of Russia.

Oxford, Clarendon Press).

The Muslims then exhume from the Rus' graves the weapons that had been buried beside the warriors.

George Vernadsky proposed that Oleg of Novgorod was the donkey-riding chief of the Rus' who attacked Bardha'a.

Vernadsky identified Oleg with Helgu, a figure mentioned in the Schechter Letter.

According to that document, Helgu went to Persia by boat and died there after a failed attack on Constantinople in 941.

On the other hand, Lev Gumilev, drawing on the name of the Rus' leader (as recorded in Arabian sources), hypothesizes that this leader was Sveneld, a Varangian chieftain whose wealth was noted in the Primary Chronicle under 945.

The Khazar city of Sarkel, a large limestone-and-brick fortress on the left bank of the lower Don River, had been built in 833 to protect the northwestern border of the Khazar state, when the Khazars had asked their ally, emperor Theophilus, for engineers to build them a fortified capital, and Theophilus had sent his chief engineer Petronas.

In recompense for these services, the Khazar khagan had ceded Chersonesos and some other Crimean dependencies to Constantinople.

The city serves as a bustling commercial center, as it controls the Volga-Don portage, which is used by the Rus to cross from the Black Sea to the Volga and thence to the Caspian; the route is known as the "Khazarian Way".

A garrison fortified at Sarkel includes Oghuz and Pecheneg mercenaries.

Around 965, Sviatoslav destroys Sarkel and possibly sacks (but does not occupy) the Khazar city of Kerch on the Crimea.

At Sarkel, Sviatoslav establishes a Rus' settlement called Belaya Vyezha ("the white tower" or "the white fortress", the East Slavic translation for "Sarkel").

The efforts of Kievan ruler Olga to bring Christianity to Russia are resisted by her son Sviatoslav, grand prince of Kiev from 945, who, after coming of age around 963, had begun a series of bold military expeditions, leaving his mother to manage the internal affairs of the Kievan state.

Sviatoslav is the son of Grand Prince Igor, who was himself probably the grandson of Rurik, prince of Novgorod.

Virtually nothing is known about his childhood and youth, which he spent reigning in Novgorod.

Sviatoslav's father, Igor, had been killed by the Drevlyans around 942.

The Russian Primary Chronicle says that Sviatoslav “sent messengers to the other lands announcing his intention to attack them.” Shortly after his accession to the throne, Sviatoslav had begun campaigning to expand the Rus' control over the Volga valley and the Pontic steppe region.

Between 963 and 965, he has attacked the Ossetes and Circassians in the northern Caucasus; …

…he has also attacked the Volga Bulgars.

Sviatoslav’s greatest success is the conquest of Khazaria, the Jewish state between the Volga and the Don, which for centuries has been one of the strongest states of Eastern Europe.

The sources are not clear about the roots of the conflict between Khazaria and Rus', so several possibilities have been suggested.

The Rus' had an interest in removing the Khazar hold on the Volga trade route because the Khazars collected duties from the goods transported by the Volga.

Historians have suggested that Constantinople may have incited the Rus' against the Khazars, who had fallen out with the Empire after the persecutions of the Jews in the reign of Romanus I Lecapenus.

Sviatoslav began by rallying the Khazars' East Slavic vassal tribes to his cause.

Those who would not join him, such as the Vyatichs, are attacked and forced to pay tribute to the Kievan Rus' rather than the Khazars.

Proceeding by the Oka and Volga rivers, he invades Volga Bulgaria and exacts tribute from the local population, thus bringing under Kievan control the upper Volga River.

He employs Oghuz and Pecheneg mercenaries in this campaign, perhaps to counter the Khazars' and Bulgars' superior cavalry.

Sviatoslav subsequently (probably in 968 or 969) destroys the Khazar capital of Atil.

A visitor to Atil wrote soon after Sviatoslav's campaign: "The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch." (The exact chronology of his Khazar campaign is uncertain and disputed; for example, Mikhail Artamonov and David Christian proposed that the sack of Sarkel came after the destruction of Atil.)

Most Polabian Slavs see Jesus as a "German god" and remain pagan, despite the efforts of Christian missionaries.

In the Great Slav Rising in 983, the pagan Slavs revolt against their subjugation to the Kingdom of the Eastern Franks, aka East Francia.

The Slavic Lutici and Obotrite people, who live to the east of the Elbe in modern northeast Germany, defeat Emperor Otto II in at the Battle of Stilo in 982, then rebel against the Germans the following year.

The Hevelli and Lutici destroy the Bishoprics of Havelberg and Brandenburg., and some Slavs advance across the Elbe into Saxon territory, but retreat when the Christian Duke of the Polans, Mieszko I, attacks them from the East.

The Holy Roman Empire retains only nominal control over the Slavic territories between the Elbe and the Oder.

The successors of Sviatoslav I of Kiev had succeeded in crushing Khazar power by 1010.

Although the Khazars continue to be mentioned in historical documents as late as the twelfth century, by 1030 their political role in the lands north of the Black Sea has greatly diminished.

(Despite the relatively high level of Khazar civilization and the wealth of data about the Khazars that is preserved in Eastern Roman and Arab sources, not a single line of the Khazar language has survived.

References to the Judaized Turkic Khazars become much more sparse after the fall of Khazaria.

Their ultimate fate as a people remains a mystery, although some clues point to their continuance among various Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities.

Some have speculated that the Mountain Jews of the eastern Caucasus are descended in part from the Khazars.

Various Turkic groups living in the North Caucasus today may be descended from Khazars who adopted Islam.

Abba Eban, Israel's foreign minister from 1966 to 1974, argued in his 1968 book My People that it is likely that “...Khazar progeny reached the various Slavic lands where they helped to build the great Jewish centers of Eastern Europe.”