Thereupon, however, the Khagan’s elite guard force of Muslim mercenaries, the Arsiya (see below, under ‘Armies of the Khaganate’), supposedly demanded revenge for their co-religionists slaughtered by the Rus raiders; it is likely that some Arsiya came from those regions which had been attacked. Being unable to hold back these enraged warriors, who formed a significant part of his army, the Khagan merely warned the Rus. The resulting battle lasted three days, after which some 5,000 Varangian Rus fled to their ships and sailed up the Volga. However, when they reached the territory of the Burtas and Volga Bulgars they were almost wiped out by local forces who were themselves subjects of the Khazar Khaganate.
However, al-Mas’udi’s account is inconsistent, and the chronicler probably exaggerates the ‘mutinous’ aspect of the Arsiya’s behaviour; it seems more likely that the attack on the Rus raiders was pre-planned after a decision by the Khagan himself. Elsewhere, Gumilev writes that ‘the campaigns of the Rus to Gilan and to Azerbaijan were accomplished thanks to the support of the Judeo-Khazar government, which supplied the fleet with pilots and suitable ships’. According to Gumilev, the Khazar ruler had actually sent the Rus fleet against the Dailamites, a warlike Shia Muslim people of the south Caspian mountains who were playing an increasingly disruptive role in the turbulent politics of that region. Gumilev suggests that this Rus campaign may have been intended by the Khagan to punish the Dailamites for blocking the lucrative trade route between Khazaria and the heartlands of the Caliphate. However, the Rus raiders also attacked neighbouring Azerbaijan and parts of Armenia with which the Khazars perhaps had amicable trade agreements, thus ruining the Khagan’s strategic plans. Perhaps the Rus incurred the wrath of the Khagan simply by ignoring his instructions as to who they were to attack, and who to leave alone.
Gumilev is wrong in his suggestion that the Sunni Muslim Abbasid Caliphate was an ally of the Khazars. Islam was still a threat to the Khaganate, which would not allow Muslim scholars to carry Islam to the Volga Bulgars whose territory lay north of Khazaria. So why might the Khagan have decided to destroy the Rus army? Perhaps he thought that war was inevitable, and so decided to strike first, while also gaining some short-term benefit from portraying Khazaria as a defender of Muslims.
Only in the last years of the Khagan Aaron II’s reign did the Khazars’ mixture of cunning diplomacy and military force fail them. In 939 (see above, under ‘Campaigns also involving the Rus, AD 939–965’) the Rus saw an opportunity to avenge the disaster of 913–914 and, in alliance with the Byzantines, a Rus army struck at Khazaria just as a new ruler had either come to power or was about to do so◦– Joseph, the last effective Khagan.
Later, during the 950s, Joseph’s wide-ranging efforts to find allies would result in a correspondence between himself and Hasdai ibn Shaprut (Shafrut), a Jewish senior official in the government of the Umayyad caliph of the western Islamic state of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain and Portugal). This remarkable man, born in Jaen in southern Spain, was a physician, diplomat, and patron of science who wrote in Latin as well as Hebrew and Arabic. Though not a government minister, Hasdai negotiated alliances with sometimes distant powers on behalf of the Caliph of Andalusia, as well as being responsible for the collection of customs dues in Cordoba’s port. In 949 Hasdai had sent an embassy to the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, where it may have contacted Khazar officials or merchants. One way or another, a correspondence developed between Hasdai and Khagan Joseph, part of which survives embedded in other rare medieval Hebrew documents. In one of these Hasdai noted that Joseph was waging a ‘persistent war’ against the Rus, barring them from reaching Derbent overland or by sea. If the Rus had reached this point, Hasdai maintained, then they could have threatened the great Islamic city of Baghdad itself.
In practice, Khazar suzerainty over the Rus may have ended by 944, when the Rus agreed a new treaty with the Byzantine Empire. Just over 20 years later Svyatoslav I Igorevich, the ruler of Kievan Rus, launched a decisive campaign against Khazaria which destroyed the Khaganate. This time the Rus acted in concert with Ghuzz Turks, and possibly again with Byzantines. As a result, Tamatarkha (Tmutarakan) at the entrance to the Sea of Azov, as well as the major Khazar fortress of Sarkel, became part of Kievan Rus. Shortly afterwards Khazar lands along the lower Volga passed under the rule of Khwarazm, and were steadily Islamized. Around 985, Vladimir I of Kiev launched another sudden campaign against what was left of Khazaria, forcing the survivors to pay tribute. The Khazar Khaganate was finally dead.
PECHENEG-KHAZAR WARS, 9th–10th CENTURIES
The nomadic Pechenegs of the steppes had posed yet another threat to the Khazar Khaganate. Byzantine chroniclers maintain that there was almost constant hostility between the Khazars and these fellow Turks. (The Muslim chronicler al-Mas’udi states that Khazars and Pechenegs usually lived in peace, but since he wrote that the Pechenegs lived to the west of the Khazars he was probably confusing them with the Magyar Hungarians.)
Towards the close of the 9th century a local Khazar leader tried to block the Pechenegs’ migration, and formed an alliance with the Ghuzz Turks who lived south of the Ural Mountains. This resulted in a joint Khazar-Ghuzz army defeating the Pechenegs in 889, and forcing most of them to flee westward to the Black Sea steppes. In their place the Ghuzz took over the southern steppes of the Khazar realm, seemingly invited there by the Khazars.
As the Pechenegs moved westward they clashed with the Magyars who were, in turn, obliged to leave ‘Levedia’ (probably on the Don River) and migrate to Etelköz (Atelkuz), a territory between the Dneiper river and the Carpathian mountains. The Pechenegs also allied with the Balkan (as distinct from Volga) Bulgarian Tsar Simeon, who invaded Atelkuz in 895, slaughtering any Magyars he could find.
Thus, by the mid-10th century, the western steppes were occupied by nomadic Pechenegs who were nominally subject to the Khazar Khaganate. In reality, however, this Pecheneg migration had not only disrupted northern Khazaria, but also several Greek-speaking coastal settlements on the northern Black Sea (including the city of Phanagoria on the Taman pensinsula), several of which were abandoned. Furthermore, Pechenegs reportedly destroyed Bulgarian-Khazar settlements on the Crimean steppe. Ultimately the Pechenegs were among the main beneficiaries of the final collapse of the Khazar Khaganate, with domination of the steppes west of the River Volga passing to them after the 960s.