by David Keys
Armed with bows and arrows, swords, lances, and even battle lassoes for pulling their opponents off their horses, the mounted hordes of Turk warriors penetrated every region of the steppes. The realm of the proto-Mongolian White Huns collapsed under Turk pressure, and on the southern fringes of the steppe, the great Iranian city-states of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khwarazm surrendered to Ishtemi and his armies.
Ishtemi ruled as Yabghu for twenty-four years (552–576), and although he never became supreme kagan, he was for periods the only really permanent ruling personality within the empire, as his brother Bumin died in 553 and three of his sons succeeded him between that year and 573.
The empire continued (apart from a brief twenty-five-year interlude) for almost two centuries until the 740s, when the Ashina ruling clan was dislodged from power by a coalition of other Turks, including Uighurs (long-standing rivals of the Ashina), Qarluqs (whose leaders were actually of Ashina origin), and Oghuzis. The most powerful element, the Uighurs, then seized power, turned on their Qarluq allies, and proceeded to try to wipe them out. Those who remained alive fled west in 745 and had succeeded in taking over the western part of the empire by 766.
So far, the expansion and evolution of Turkic influence and power, first uncorked by the climatic catastrophe of the 530s, had been relatively conventional. But in the early and mid–tenth century, intermittent conflict between the Arab caliphate (the Islamic empire founded by Muhammad and ruled by his successors) and the Qarluq Turkic state resulted in large numbers of Qarluq and other Turkic prisoners being captured by the caliphate. The caliphate’s strategy (operated on their behalf by their eastern governors, the Samanids) was above all to acquire slaves, as well as to discomfit and discourage potential Turkic aggressors.³ The Turkic prisoners were turned into slave-soldiers, most of whom were then converted from paganism to Islam and given their freedom on condition they remained loyal to the caliphate.
But ultimately the policy backfired dramatically. For instead of buckling down to a life of unquestioning obedience, the Turkic slave-soldiers tried in 962 to help “fix” the Samanid succession. They failed, but proceeded nevertheless to set up their own Turkic slave-soldier state (that of the Ghaznavids) in southern Afghanistan.
Within forty years the Arab caliph had formally given the slave-soldier state’s ruler, Mahmud, the title of sultan. Mahmud, the second ruler in the Ghaznavid dynasty, proceeded to establish a substantial empire within and outside the caliphate. His territory stretched from eastern Iran to what is now northern Pakistan, and it was Turkic involvement in the latter area that was to launch the religious transformation of much of the Indian subcontinent over subsequent centuries. From 1040 onward military pressure from their enemies forced the Ghaznavids to concentrate their energies on northwest India. Prior to that date, they had primarily been interested in raiding wealthy Hindu temples, but beginning in the middle of the century, they increasingly established political control in such areas as Kashmir, Lahore, northern Sind, and Baluchistan.
It was this political control that first saw the substantial introduction of Islam into India—a process that was to further accelerate under later Turkic and then Mughal rulers in subsequent centuries and which ultimately led to the partition of India in 1947 and the creation of Pakistan. If the Ghaznavid empire of the eleventh century had not established a substantial Islamic bridgehead into India, thus altering the religious and therefore geopolitical balance, it is doubtful whether later Muslims, culminating in the Mughals, would have been able to complete the job.
Just as the Qarluq Turks had fled from their erstwhile allies (the Uighurs) in 745, their fellow rebels, the Oghuz Turks, also fled a generation later, in the 770s.4 And just as the Qarluqs had had an impact on India, so the Oghuzis were destined to have an equal, if not greater, effect on Europe and the Middle East. The Oghuzi refugees, fleeing for their lives, arrived on the banks of the Aral Sea and rapidly created their own Turkic state around the north, east, and west of that great inland expanse of water. On the banks of the Syrdarya River, they then set about creating a capital for themselves, Yangi Kent (literally, “new city”).
Gradually one of the Oghuzi clans, the Seljuks, began to emerge as a powerful element within the Oghuz Turkic state, and in 985 they converted to Islam, a move which enabled the clan to more “legitimately” attack its still-pagan fellow Oghuzis.
Soon the Seljuks had become the leading element among the Oghuz Turks, a status that was confirmed in 1040 when they led the Oghuzis into battle against their fellow Turks of the Ghaznavid dynasty and won. This had the dual effect both of forcing the Ghaznavids to retreat and concentrate on faraway India and of allowing the Seljuk clan to evolve into a superpower, for when the official ruler of the Arab caliphate heard of the Seljuks’ success, he invited them into his territory—indeed, into his capital, Baghdad—to ally with him against his enemies. Thus it was that in 1055 the Seljuks and their Oghuz army annihilated the Iranian military warlords who had run the caliphate, irrespective of the caliph’s wishes, for the previous 110 years.5
The victory made the Seljuk Turkic clan virtual masters of the Islamic world. Two extraordinary brothers, Toghrul and Chaghri, were made sultans of the caliphate by the caliph himself. Soon the Oghuz were colliding with the eastern frontiers of the Roman Empire, and in 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert in eastern Anatolia, Chaghri’s son and heir, Alp Arslan (literally, “brave lion”), shattered the Roman army.6
In a sense, the Battle of Manzikert marked the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire, for by the late thirteenth century, another Oghuz group was coming to prominence in the frontier country where the caliphate and the empire met. Their leader was Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, which was destined to create one of the world’s greatest empires.
Within fifty years the Ottomans had taken over most of Anatolia (modern Turkey) and had been invited to participate in the internal affairs of the Roman Empire.7 Soon they were in Europe, and they had reached the Danube by the 1380s. More than 1,750 years of Roman imperial history finally came to an end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 when the Ottoman sultan, Muhammad the Conqueror, claimed to combine in his rule the imperial traditions of the Turkic steppe, the caliphate, and the Roman Empire itself.
Over the next few centuries the Ottoman Empire conquered and ruled all of southeast Europe, most of North Africa (including Egypt), and most of the Middle East. In the late sixteenth century their armies even reached the outskirts of Vienna. Today the Republic of Turkey, the Turkish presence in Cyprus, and the sometimes embattled enclaves of Bosnia and Kosovo as well as Albania are the living legacy of the Ottoman advance.
Perhaps an even more fundamental geopolitical legacy is the fault line that divides the political and social culture of Europe between East and West. For although the Ottoman Empire was one of the world’s most glittering political achievements between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, by around 1700 the state had become deeply conservative, resistant to any and all innovation. Politically and economically, eastern Europe bears the mark of up to 180 years of stiflingly conservative government experienced at precisely the time that western Europe was industrializing and internationalizing.
Thus it was that, for good and for ill, the Turkish genius for empire building and for adapting was liberated in the wake of the climatic catastrophe of the sixth century. And thus it was that the Turk tide rolled ever westward (and southward) to shape so much of today’s world.
12
T H E J E W I S H
E M P I R E
“Dishonoured and humiliated in our dispersion, we have to listen in silence to those who say: ‘Every nation has its own land and you [the Jews] alone possess not even a shadow of a country on this earth.’ I feel the urge to know the truth, whether there is really a place on this earth where harassed Israel [the Jewish people] can rule itself, where it is subject to nobody.”
Thus wrote the Jewish chief minister of Moorish Spain (the Umayyad calip
hate, based in Cordoba) to the king of a faraway empire that, according to reports reaching Spain, was a Jewish state.
“If I were to know that this is indeed the case, I would not hesitate to forsake all honors, to resign my high office, to abandon my family, and to travel over mountains and plains, over land and water, until I arrived at the place where my Lord, the [Jewish] King rules.”¹
For hundreds of years after the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple in A.D. 70, there had been no Jewish state, and the Jews had been scattered all over the known world. So when, in c. 955, the Jewish chief minister of Muslim Spain, Hasdai ibn Shaprut,² learned about the existence of a Jewish kingdom 1,500 miles east of Spain and 700 miles north of Jerusalem, in and to the east of what is now the Ukraine, he could hardly credit what he heard.³
What he did not know at the time, however, was that this Jewish empire had already been in existence for more than two hundred years. (So poor was information transmission and international political knowledge in medieval times that the Ukraine might as well have been on the dark side of the moon as far as Hasdai was concerned.) It had already played a vital role in world history and would ultimately do so again. But how had a Jewish empire come into existence on the Eurasian steppes, and what impact did it have on the international stage?
Following the climatic problems of the 530s, the Turks had overthrown Avar rule in Mongolia and had established their own great empire.4 However, within just over a hundred years, one key element of that Turkic empire—a group probably related to its ruling clan—broke away to form a state of its own. This group, the Khazars, rapidly set about constructing an empire that stretched from central Asia to the borders of Poland. As the Khazar state grew stronger, it became a northern buffer between the Christian late Roman Empire and the Muslim empire of the Arab caliphate.5
Confronted with the two superpowers, the Khazars realized that neutrality became a political necessity. The pagan Khazars could well see that most of the “civilized” world followed one or the other of the politically powerful monotheistic creeds, Christianity or Islam. The Khazars felt it was desirable to place themselves on the same monotheistic theological (and therefore political) level as the two superpowers, but sensibly, they did not wish to take sides.
In practice, neutrality meant opting for a “common-denominator” religious affiliation, one that could not be seen as leaning in either a Christian or a Muslim direction. Judaism fitted the bill exactly. Despite some Christian antagonism toward Judaism, both the Christian church of the Roman Empire and the Muslim caliphate regarded it as a legitimate faith. Christians found less to disagree with in Judaism than in Islam—and, likewise, Islam found Judaism less offensive than the “man-god” ideas inherent in Christianity. Of the three faiths’ holy scriptures, it was the Old Testament—the bedrock of Judaism—that was accepted as the word of God by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. For these reasons Judaism appealed politically to the Khazars, and they adopted it as their faith.
Surviving records suggest that, at least for the appearance of fairness, representatives of the three faiths were invited to the Khazar royal court to present their arguments.6 There seems to have already been a strong Jewish influence there, for the Christian and Muslim representatives had to be sent for from abroad, whereas the Jewish representative was on the spot. It is possible that the Jewish presence in Khazaria even predated the Khazar state and consisted of Crimean Jews and refugees from Constantinople’s anti-Semitic pogroms of the 630s.
According to the eleventh-century Arab historian Al-Bakri, a high Khazar official advised the king that “those in possession of sacred scriptures fall into three groups.” He suggested that the king should “summon them and ask them to state their case,” and then “follow the one who is in possession of the truth.”7
In another version (written by the tenth-century Khazar king Joseph), both the Romans and the caliphate sent envoys—this time uninvited—with “precious gifts and money and learned men to convert [the king] to their beliefs.”8
“But,” wrote Joseph, “the King was wise and sent for a Jew with much knowledge and acumen and put all three [the two envoys and the Jew] together to discuss their doctrines.” After a lengthy debate, the Khazar monarch, a king called Bulan, adjourned the conference for three days. He then asked the Christian which of the other two faiths he preferred. The Christian envoy, probably a bishop, chose Judaism. The king then put the same question to the Muslim and received the same response.
It seems likely that the Khazar ruler—with political neutrality in mind—had already decided to opt for Judaism before the conference started, but had thought it expedient to give the others the opportunity to put their bids in, so to speak. Indeed, from a neutral second-preferences perspective, the Khazar king had seen to it that his choice of faith was, in a sense, actually seen to be in line with his superpower neighbors’ wishes.
The conversion seems to have taken place sometime in the second quarter of the eighth century. But the Judaism the Khazar king followed appears to have been of a very basic variety. For possible internal reasons and probable external geopolitical ones, the newly converted king, Bulan, and his Jewish advisors seem to have kept exclusively or at least predominantly to the Old Testament and not to have paid much attention to Rabbinic law or the Talmud—the huge body of Jewish legal and cultural literature compiled in the fifth century. Within Judaism in the eighth century there was in some places—especially geographically peripheral areas—fierce doctrinal reluctance to accept Talmudic (originally predominantly Mesopotamian) interpretations of Jewish law and practice. In Mesopotamia itself, this actually developed into a major schism in which anti-Talmudic conservatives broke away to form a sect still known today as the Karaites.9
In Khazaria, the argument for embracing Judaism had been the commonality of the Old Testament’s acceptability to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—and so geopolitically it would no doubt have been seen as “additionalist” to put any emphasis on the Talmud. After all, the Koran and the New Testament had not been embraced, precisely because they had not passed the commonality test. The dictates of political neutrality and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the Talmud seemed to have given early Khazar Judaism a fairly conservative complexion.
It is likely that at that stage relatively few inhabitants of the empire converted, probably just the king and his immediate clan. However, the new religious situation must have led to at least some Jewish emigration by more pro-Talmudic elements and a steady flow of official and unofficial conversions to Judaism within the Khazar community as well as within other ethnic groups (also mainly Turkic) within the empire.
The anti-additionalist arguments of the 730s served their purpose but soon were no longer politically vital. Thus, by around 800, the Khazar king Obadiah, “a brave and venerated man,” was able to “reform the Rule and fortify the Law according to tradition and usage.” The reforming king then “built synagogues and schools, assembled a multitude of Israel’s sages, gave them lavish gifts of gold and silver, and made them interpret the 24 [sacred] books, the Mishna and the Talmud and the order in which the Liturgies are to be said.”10 This seems to suggest that Talmudic knowledge did not exist in Khazaria at this time and that Talmudic experts had to be invited in from abroad, almost certainly to settle, as their theological interpretation of the Scriptures and the Talmud would have been a long-term and ongoing activity.
Obadiah’s reform of Khazarian Judaism almost certainly stemmed, at least in part, from the king’s own religious commitment and enthusiasm—and it is likely that at this stage conversion to the Jewish faith became more prevalent. Widespread conversions certainly must have started at some point, given the number of ethnically non-Jewish groups attested to in medieval times as adhering to Judaism or to Jewish customs in the Khazar region.
First of all, there were the Khazars themselves, the empire’s ruling elite. Ethnically and linguistically Turkic, they probably numbered up to 750,000—at a guess perhap
s 25 percent of the empire’s total population of between 1.5 million and 3 million.11
Some of the Oghuz Turks—specifically those who worked for the Khazars in the ninth and tenth centuries—almost certainly became Judaized or even fully Jewish. It is known, for instance, that Seljuk, the founder of the dynasty that bears his name,12 called one of his sons Israel, while his grandson was called Daud (David), both specifically Jewish names; and it is possible that their house of worship, referred to by an Arab chronicler,13 was a synagogue.14
Some elements of another Turkic people, the Cumans, who swept west in the mid–eleventh century, also appear to have become either partially or fully Judaized. For instance, a Cuman prince by the name of Kobiak named his sons Isaac and Daniel.15 Certainly some Turkic nomads on the south Russian (now Ukrainian) steppes were fully or partially Jewish. The twelfth-century Jewish explorer Pethahiah of Regensburg recorded that he had met nomads on the steppes—perhaps Cumans or Oghuz—who followed an unconventional form of Judaism, observed the Sabbath in total darkness (no artificial light being permitted), and prohibited even the cutting of bread on that day.