Khazars

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after a fixed period, or when his vitality is on the wane, so that the divine power may find a more youthful and
vigorous incarnation.**
It speaks in Istakhri s favour that the bizarre ceremony of choking the future King has been reported in existence
apparently not so long ago among another people, the Kok-Turks. Zeki Validi quotes a French anthropologist, St
Julien, writing in 1864:
When the new Chief has been elected, his officers and attendants ... make him mount his horse. They tighten a ribbon
of silk round his neck, without quite strangling him; then they loosen the ribbon and ask him with great insistence:
For how many years canst thou be our Khan? The king, in his troubled mind, being unable to name a figure, his
subjects decide, on the strength of the words that have escaped him, whether his rule will be long or brief.40
We do not know whether the Khazar rite of slaying the King (if it ever existed) fell into abeyance when they adopted
Judaism, in which case the Arab writers were confusing past with present practices as they did all the time, compiling
earlier travellers reports, and attributing them to contemporaries. However that may be, the point to be retained, and
which seems beyond dispute, is the divine role attributed to the Kagan, regardless whether or not it implied his
ultimate sacrifice. We have heard before that he was venerated, but virtually kept in seclusion, cut off from the people,
until he was buried with enormous ceremony. The affairs of state, including leadership of the army, were managed by
the Bek (sometimes also called the Kagan Bek), who wielded all effective power. On this point Arab sources and
*
The town was in different periods also mentioned under different names, e.g., al-Bayada, The White City .
Masudi places these buildings on an island, close to the west bank, or a peninsula.
!
Supposedly between AD 943 and 947.
�
Jewish Encyclopaedia, published 1901-6. In the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1971, the article on the Khazars by Dunlop is of
The Thirtheenth Tribe: Rise
modern historians are in agreement, and the latter usually describe the Khazar system of government as a double
kingship , the Kagan representing divine, the Bek secular, power.
The Khazar double kingship has been compared quite mistakenly, it Seems with the Spartan dyarchy and with the
superficially similar dual leadership among various Turkish tribes. However, the two kings of Sparta, descendants of
two leading families, wielded equal power; and as for the dual leadership among nomadic tribes,* there is no evidence
of a basic division of functions as among the Khazars. A more valid comparison is the system of government in Japan,
from the Middle Ages to 1867, where secular power was concentrated in the hands of the shogun, while the Mikado
was worshipped from afar as a divine figurehead.
Cassel41 has suggested an attractive analogy between the Khazar system of government and the game of chess. The
double kingship is represented on the chess-board by the King (the Kagan) and the Queen (the Bek). The King is kept
in seclusion, protected by his attendants, has little power and can only move one short step at a time. The Queen, by
contrast, is the most powerful presence on the board, which she dominates. Yet the Queen may be lost and the game
still continued, whereas the fall of the King is the ultimate disaster which instantly brings the contest to an end.
The double kingship thus seems to indicate a categorical distinction between the sacred and the profane in the mentality
of the Khazars. The divine attributes of the Kagan are much in evidence in the following passage from Ibn Hawkal:
The Khacan must be always of the Imperial race [Istakhri: & of a family of notables ]. No one is allowed to
approach him but on business of importance: then they prostrate themselves before him, and rub their faces
on the ground, until he gives orders for their approaching him, and speaking. When a Khacan& dies,
whoever passes near his tomb must go on foot, and pay his respects at the grave; and when he is departing,
must not mount on horseback, as long as the tomb is within view.
So absolute is the authority of this sovereign, and so implicitly are his commands obeyed, that if it seemed
expedient to him that one of his nobles should die, and if he said to him, Go and kill yourself, the man
would immediately go to his house, and kill himself accordingly. The succession to the Khacanship being
thus established in the same family [Istakhri: in a family of notables who possess neither power nor
riches ]; when the turn of the inheritance arrives to any individual of it, he is confirmed in the dignity,
though he possesses not a single dirhem [coin]. And I have heard from persons worthy of belief, that a
certain young man used to sit in a little shop at the public market-place, selling petty articles [Istakhri:
selling bread ]; and that the people used to say, When the present Khacan shall have departed, this man
will succeed to the throne [Istakhri: There is no man worthier of the Khaganate than he ]. But the young
man was a Mussulman, and they give the Khacanship only to Jews.
The Khacan has a throne and pavilion of gold: these are not allowed to any other person. The palace of the
Khacan is loftier than the other edifices.42
The passage about the virtuous young man selling bread, or whatever it is, in the bazaar sounds rather like a tale about
Harun al Rashid. If he was heir to the golden throne reserved for Jews, why then was he brought up as a poor Muslim?
If we are to make any sense at all of the story, we must assume that the Kagan was chosen on the strength of his noble
virtues, but chosen among members of the Imperial Race or family of notables . This is in fact the view of
Artamonov and Zeki Validi. Artamonov holds that the Khazars and other Turkish people were ruled by descendants of
the Turkut dynasty, the erstwhile sovereigns of the defunct Turk Empire (cf. above, section 3). Zeki Validi suggests
that the Imperial Race or family of notables , to which the Kagan must belong, refers to the ancient dynasty of the
Asena, mentioned in Chinese sources, a kind of desert aristocracy, from which Turkish and Mongol rulers traditionally
claimed descent. This sounds fairly plausible and goes some way towards reconciling the contradictory values implied [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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