Cities of Khazaria. Kromos Estatium
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The khazar cities here include not only those cities that were built by the khazar architects, but also those that were built before the arrival of the khazars, were used by the khazars for their needs and tasks for a long time.
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Sarkel Leftbank on the Don **
Also White Vezha. The city of the khazars. Sarkala the karaites. Sarkel among the greeks. Also Sh-r-kil or Sharkil khazar reading.
The settlement that is now attributed to this khazar city is located at the mouth of the Tsymli river on the left bank of the Don and on the very edge of the Popov farm.
The existence of the city of Sarkel on the Don was reported by the Khazar King Joseph in the middle of the 10th century, although, according to archaeologists, the city by that time no longer played a major role in the trade and politics of the khazars. Joseph placed Sarkel 30 farsakhs from Itil, which exactly corresponds to the distance between these cities, expressed in the metric system.
Karamzin, based on Pimen's data, placed the Sarkel near the village of Kachalinskaya, in the place of the greatest convergence of the Don with the Volga. But this was long before the excavations on the left bank settlement.
According to indirect sources cited by the researcher Koestler, after the destruction of Sarkel, and then Belaya Vezha, the khazars built a city with the same name near Chernigov.
But neither version has yet received archaeological confirmation. The most likely version of finding the Left-bank Sarkel is the ancient settlement, which is now located at the bottom of the Tsimlyansk reservoir, which Artamonov excavated.
Naming Sarkel comes from the word «sarygsin», that is, Yellow grave, manifesting themselves oghuz language form.
According to the khazar-bulgarian transcription, the word «sarkel» means White city, and the arabic name of Sarkel also leads there, which sounds like al-Beidao, al-Beida, also a White city.
It can point to the Hebrew meaning of the word «sar», meaning King, that is, the Royal city.
If we take the khazar pronunciation of Sharkil, then its naming consists of two words: the word «shar» means white, and the word «kel» means «house» or «fortress» in the iranians.
The name of the city in greek sounds like Sarkel. The old russian name of Sarkel sounds like White Vezha, where the word «vezha» is considered a word of iranian origin and means settlement, fortification, tower. According to these values, Sarkel was a cross between a fortress and a city. Although in russian translation, this name is closer to the concept of «White House».
According to the karaite chronicler and researcher M. Agha, the karaite word «sar» means to weave, knit, braid, and the word «kala» means fortress. In karaite, the spelling of Sarkel will be like Sarkala. The karaites also have the word «kel», which means to come, to arrive, to arrive. In this case, Sarkel will mean a wicker fortress connected to other cities by a single chain of strongholds.
Kevin Brook, believes that many khazar cities had jewish communities, especially those where khazar Kings and nobles resided. In Sarkel, too, there was such a community and it could participate in the addition of the name of the city, insisting on the presence in the naming of the city of the word «sar», that is, the King, because the King at that time was Obadiah, a jew by faith, although not a jew, but from the glory-seeKing russian-slavic landless Princes, or from the Black Princes.
Bayer and Lerberg translate the word «sarkel» differently, Bayer believes that it is a White City, Lerberg contradicts him, believing that it is a Yellow city. The name White city meant that the main chiefs of the country, its nobles, and nobles lived here. The name Yellow city meant that the city was built from local loam, which turned yellowish when fired. This meant that travelers could call the city by its appearance. The rulers of the city had a different name for the city.
Gumilev believed that the word «Sarkel» is the only word left from the khazars. At that time, he didn't know anything about the Princess Ateh that Pavich had unearthed somewhere.
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The beginning of the history of Sarkel of the Left bank is connected with the end of the history of Sarkel of the right bank, which was one of the three main cities of Khazaria, despite the fact that there was no Kagan or King in the right bank. Around 832, it was defeated by the Magyars during the reforms initiated by King Obadiah, although its defeat is also attributed to the pechenegs, who by that time were just beginning to establish a system of Khan's administration.
A major khazar nobleman who owned a city on the right bank dared to oppose the appearance of the Tsar's headquarters with a fortress on the left bank, which would take away most of the revenue from the transport across the Don and across the Volga river.
After a brutal demonstration of the destruction of the population of the right-bank city, its Owner bowed his head before the Khazar King and joined his retinue. After that, the Kagan and the King asked for help from Byzantium, which sent its important official Petronas, under whose supervision a new fortress was built on the left bank, the Kagan named it Sarkel, apparently not without a hint from the King of judea, who knew that the jews have the word «sar» means King, by the way, this position was also known to the byzantine greeks, who did not object to this name. Perhaps the right-bank fortress had a similar name.
Historians believe that the destruction of the right-bank city and the brutal massacre of its civilians, and then the subsequent construction of the left-bank Sarkel, were the two final and interrelated chords in the establishment of new rules by King Obadiah and his brother Hanukkah.
There is a version that the construction of Sarkel was connected with the problems of judaization of the highest nobility of the Khazarus state. In this regard, it is not clear that Byzantium participated in the construction of a fortress for the jewish state, because Byzantium has always opposed the religion of Moses. Although, from the point of view of foreign policy, it was not important for the byzantines who their partner in religion was, it was important for them to have a reliable trade route from Central Asia and China to Europe.
It is also important to note that Obadiah, allowing the greeks from Byzantium to be present on the Don under the guise of builders of Sarkel, did not give them the opportunity to build a Christian Temple, although Theophanes counted on this, paying for the presence of his diplomatic mission so much money that they were enough to build the largest fortress in the history of the Don on its
It should be noted that the new fortress on the left bank was not very conveniently located, so that it could be used to control the transfer from the Don to the Volga.
Constantine Porphyrogenitus believed that the location of the new Sarkel on the left bank protected Khazaria from the increasing pechenegs, who at that time were stationed to the west of the Don and on its left bank. The same is noted by George Kedrin.
In the first third of the 9th century, the center of the Khaganate of Rus was far from the lower reaches of the Don, which is why it could not take operational military participation in this part of the Don, although there were many artisans of russian-slavic origin. After the destruction of the right-bank fortress, the Khagan, with the help of Byzantium, builds the left-bank fortress of Sarkel, which was commissioned in 837. At that time, the military task of this fortress was directed against the nascent movement of the pechenegs, the western enemies of the khazars, with an eye to opposing the rising future multi-ethnic giant, Rus.
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The main architect of the city according to the greeks was the architect, spafarokandidat from Byzantium, the greek Petronas Kamatir, who at the request of the Khagan was given to the khazars by the Emperor Theophilus.
Petronas placed a new fortress city on the left bank of the Sarkel to control the land road with a crossing to the right bank. This new strategy was prompted by new circumstances in connection with the strengthening of nomads in the north-west, where this road led from the center of Khazaria Itil on the Lower Volga.
At the beginning of the 9th century, except for the Khazars, no one else sailed along the Don, except for the phoenicians, who two thousand years earlier wandered here on their moners. Here phoenicians created trading posts together with the greeks. The local population found several moners literally soldered into the river loamy sand, which remained here as a monument to outstanding navigators, no otherwise than the cossack phoenician type. Maybe they even stayed here themselves to establish a stable Cossack community in the 15th century.
The unfortunate location of the left-bank Sarkel, from the point of view of controlling the movement of ships to the Volga river and back, was explained by the fact that the fortress was not built to control the river. And it was built to control the land road when crossing the Don. The fortress was to strengthen the position of the khazars in the west and in the north, in the direction of the pecheneg varangians, in the direction of Kiev and in the direction of Itil. The river in this case served its garrison as an additional protection from the rear.
Among khazarologists, there is an opinion that Byzantium was interested in the construction of Sarkel, since it was not averse to providing its own possessions in the Black sea region with someone else's hands.
On the other hand, the khazars did not feel much pressure to control the Northern Black sea coast and the Dnieper Region, there were no rivals for the khazars.
From the end of the 7th century to the middle of the 9th century, the Khazarus state remained the master of the south of Eastern Europe, preventing nomads from passing through the Ural-Caspian gate towards Europe. Here, too, Khazaria did not need much help from Byzantium.
Only by the middle of the 9th century, the magyars and then the pechenegs began to enter the territory adjacent to Byzantium, which could have worried the Byzantine Emperor Theophanes, who allocated funds for the construction of Sarkel.
The Byzantines already knew that a strong state was beginning to form in the north, where the powerful and wise Prince Gostomysl ruled Severskaya Rus, to whom the greeks sent their intelligence under the guise of merchants.
They have already experienced an attack on the Crimea of Varangian Rus under the leadership of the legendary Prince Bravlin.
The Khagan managed to convince the Emperor of Byzantium of the need to join forces to protect the borders on the middle Don from the attacks of the new enemy against the correct arrangement of people's lives and against quiet trade.
So strengthening the influence of the khazars in the western direction with the help of a new fortress on the Don provided control over the restless tribes of the Black sea region, as well as protecting the approaches of any enemies from the West.
At the beginning of the 9th century, few people sailed on the Don at all. Everything changed from the second half of the 9th century, when the arab chronicler Ibn Khordadbeh discovered Russian boats coming to the Don via the Dnieper and the Black sea.
Control over the crossing allowed indirectly to keep under their eye all communications related to it. The Don-Tanais river itself protected Sarkel from the rear.
According to the reports of the greeks themselves, they arrived in 837 on helandii to Kherson, and from there sailed on large khazar ships along the Tanais river to the site of the fortress construction. Here the greeks built on the spot all the necessary mechanisms, tools, and kilns for firing bricks from a mixture of lime and small river shells.
According to the khazars plan, the fortress was to control both the river route from east to west and the caravan road from south to north.
In 839, the construction of the fortress was completed. The fortress is garrisoned by three hundred soldiers.
Apparently, the left-bank city was built during the formation of the pecheneg khanates and their settlement in the Northern Black sea region. Previously, ugric people, who were represented by magyars, roamed here. And the first defenders of the fortress were recruited from the magyars. Only after the appearance of the pechenegs did relations between the magyars and the khazars deteriorate, as the khazars began to accept the pechenegs for military service.
By the 850th Sarkel had grown several times due to posads with a large number of different crafts, which were brought by the russian-slavs. Sarkel becomes a trade and craft city, the largest in the Volga-Don interfluve. At this time, the garrison of the Sarkel Citadel consisted of pechenegs and related to them guzs.
They lived as nomads, they were in the Citadel, and did not have capital dwellings, preferring yurts. Arab and persian writers of those times noted that the villages were inhabited mainly by alans and Rus, who built semi-dugouts. The alans, in their opinion, worked in foundries, blacksmiths, and potteries. There were also caravan-serays of turks, mostly pechenegs, who were used to recruit troops for the garrison.
Modern archaeological research adds to these reports with new facts, according to which the city was inhabited by a mixed ethnic polyphony consisting of turks, pechenegs and Rus, mostly christians. There were also christian priests who performed services not in church slavonic, but in russian folk languages.
The arabs believed that in the 10th century, the garrison of Sarkel had larsi, arsi, al-arsi, muslims by religion. But this was not a long period of time in the life of the city, during which the muslims left almost no cultural traces on the site.
There were never many people in Sarkel. All its inhabitants were placed inside a brick fortress. The population of the city is divided by historians into two distinct ethnic groups, one of which represented local residents, and the other group was from nomads, who may have been sent by Theophilus, the Emperor of Byzantium.
As for the composition of the population, some travelers of that time called the main part of the bulgars, slavs and Rus lived separately from them, and guzs and khazars lived in the Citadel.
One ethnic union represented the population of the Volga-don interfluve of the saltov-mayatsk culture, whose people actually lived on the posad, although they were also inside the fortress, which was an almost sedentary tribe with stationary dwellings with stoves and pottery production on the circle.
Settlements of this group are now known almost throughout the Don basin, as well as in the Taman and Eastern Crimea. These people were differ by the fact that they were sedentary and engaged mainly in agriculture.
Another ethnic group, essentially a military garrison, was a nomadic tribe with yurts and hearths right on the ground. People of this group made handmade utensils, they lived in a Citadel with a central high tower. This population did not belong to the saltov culture.
Mercenaries in those days were considered the dignity of a multi-ethnic state, which was also the khazars. It is difficult to recruit a regular army in such a state, which will subdue the rebels the forces of their children. So it is not surprising that in Sarkel, which was one of the capitals of Khazaria, there was a mercenary army of three hundred warriors of an ethnic group that did not belong to the Khazar Khaganate, but was dependent on it, which is why travelers considered them khazars.
In the 9th century, the garrison in Sarkel and in a number of other Khazarian fortresses, as well as in small numbers on simple settlements, consisted of guzs, pechenegs, and people of the mongoloid type, as evidenced by the cultural remains of warriors.
Constantine Porphyrogenitus noted that the garrison of the fortress consisted of 300 people. It changed from year to year. Along with this change, there was a gradual change in the ethnic composition of the garrison, which was initially composed of khazars with the addition of another tribe loyal to the khazars, always from the turks. This is confirmed by special burials in the burial ground next to the fortress.
For the most part, the burial grounds are burial mounds in which there were burials together with parts of horses, which corresponds to the saltov cult rules of the pechenegs and guzs.
Petronas put the fortress on a coastal promontory, separating it from the mainland with two deep ditches, so that an artificial island was created. Another moat Petronas placed on the river side, where the fortress itself was located, designed in plan as a quadrangle with brick walls and towers that stood not only at the corners, as in later russian fortress architecture.
The fortress was not particularly pretentious and aesthetic. It was strictly a military structure.
The area of the fortress was 2.5 hectares. The wall and interior structures were made of baked bricks. The walls had no foundation. The wall was up to 10 meters high and 3 meters wide. Towers and buttresses were built into the walls. The fortress had a main gate to the floor side, and there were also small, secret gates to the river side.
Another wall was built inside the fortress, dividing the fortress into two parts. The Inner cross wall of the fortress, which divided it into two parts, was also ogo-go, three meters wide. There were also dividing walls inside each half. Although, if the enemy got through the first, outer wall, then it would not be difficult for him to climb over the second one. But the suicide bombers have enough time to pray to their gods.
The smaller part behind the inner wall was a Citadel with no exits outside the fortress and a main tower, from which all the surroundings were viewed.
In several of these neighborhoods there were no entrances at all, only through the wall could one get to their territory, through the observation towers, the last refuge and stronghold of the besieged.
The area of the city inside the rampart was used for caravans passing through Sarkel, and cattle were driven there during the defense against nomads.
In the south-western part, judging by the cultural remains, there were bulgars, opposite them there was a russian-slavic group of artisans. In the Citadel itself there was a garrison of mercenaries, both local tribes and from the outskirts of Khazaria, but mostly it was guzs, khazars, pechenegs who guarded the city, and also were a kind of customs officers who collected taxes from merchants, because the road from south to north passed by Sarkel. These funds were used to pay for the garrison.
In the city there were visiting or passing merchants and tradesmen’s who dealt with local potters, jewelers, blacksmiths. Their products were distributed among the local population.
Garrison, trade crossroads, craft, stay in the city of the khazar nobility, all this turned the fortress in the north-west of the kagan domain into a flourishing city.
The role of the Byzantines and Petronas in the construction of the left-bank Sarkel was quite limited. There were very few similarities with Byzantine architecture. Even the bricks are not at all like the greek ones, either in size or in other qualities, they are thicker and smaller. The only difference from other khazar fortresses was that the walls were made of brick.
But the brick material, firing technology, location, and appearance only repeated what the khazars had already done a hundred years before Petronas. Apparently, Constantine Porphyrogenitus somewhat exaggerated the mission of Petronas.
Some of the preserved bricks have letters, signs, and outlines of images of animals and people that relate to the khazar culture and confirm that they have a script that comes from the orkhon script two hundred years ago, which confirms the connection of the khazars with the places where they came from. There are inscriptions in cyrillic characters that have not yet been deciphered.
The dwellings of artisans on Sarkel were almost identical to those in the city of Itil on the Volga. This may mean that the sedentary part of the inhabitants of the city of Sarkel left with the Kagan.
All the rough work was done by local artisans and builders, future architects of Rus. Petronas provided only general guidance. But its main mission was to collect information about the prospects of the route from the Don to the Volga and further to the Caspian sea. No wonder Petronas had titles in Byzantium not only as an architect, but also as a politician and diplomat.
The greeks brought marble columns and capitals to Sarkel, as well as some other decorations for the church, but only half of the set, and the rest were damaged on the way. All this remained lying on the construction site. The khazars had their own interests in the construction of the fortress. Here Constantine Porphyrogenitus in his historical essays strongly painted the role of the greeks in the construction of Sarkel and its further use.
The khazars were able to build a fortress themselves, as they have demonstrated dozens of times before and since. It was important for the khazars to demonstrate to all their neighbors that such a strong military-political and commercial player as Byzantium was actively involved in their affairs along the Dnieper, Don and Volga.
In the mid-10th century, Sarkel and its districts were subjected to russian-slavic colonization, ably directed by Prince Igor of Kiev and then his wife Princess Olga. By the time Svyatoslav arrived there, there were already ethnic settlements of Rus around Sarkel, Rus were also among the craftsmen of the settlement, as well as among the soldiers of the Sarkel garrison, and Rus among themselves already called this city White Vezha, which speaks not only of the ethnic, but political colonization of the Don region.
Elements of old russian architecture appear in Sarkel, which is represented by semi-dugouts with a log top, with a stone stove and muromka in the corner of the house, and the manufacture of stucco dishes of the romny type.
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In 965, 130 years after its foundation, Svyatoslav, passing the rapids of the Dnieper, going out into the Black sea and bypassing the Crimea, went up the Don on oars to Sarkel, on the way agreeing with the alans and kasogs, and not without the help of the russian-slavs of belovezh, occupied the fortress, where he put the first outpost of the old russian type on the Don.
The city came under the rule of Rus, a russian garrison was stationed there, and the city was named Belaya Vezha. We must assume that this recording was made much later than the actual event, by which time Sarkel had long been called Belaya Vezha, an interpretation of the old name in a new way.
After the departure of the Khagan and the King from the city to Itil, Sarkel became empty, and houses began to collapse. Partly on the territory of the city and next to it, a new city appeared, Belaya Vezha, which at first seemed to belong to the Khaganate, and then to Kievan Rus, the Russian Empire, and the USSR. Now the city is located at the bottom of the Tsimlyansk reservoir.
For some time after the exodus of the Tsar and Kagan from it, Sarkel was for some time under the rule of Rus, which until the middle of the 11th century transmitted its contacts through Sarkel to Tmutorokan.
Since the end of the 10th century, mainly Russian settlers from all the surrounding lands have been drawn here. They proved to be much more effective than the saltovites in developing natural resources, so they quickly assimilated the local population of both former Sarkel ethnic unstable associations.
Only in the fortress remained several hundred families of turkic content, which, apparently, supported the Kievan Principality, perhaps in order to gain the loyalty of local militant nomads-steppe dwellers.
For several more decades, these turks, guzs and pechenegs preserved their cultural traditions in the form of yurt-type dwellings with sandalwood hearths, family and ancestral stucco ceramics, and burials of the undergrowth type with horses or their parts.
The Nijnedonskoy, scientifically Elivkinsky, variant of the saltov-mayatsk culture in the region of Sarkel ceased to exist with the collapse of the Khazar Kingdom under Svyatoslav, when after the capture of Sarkel, russian-slavs began to settle here, who quickly assimilated both ethnic groups of the White Vezha, the former Sarkel. By this time, the Saltov culture had already been replaced by others, which indicated the collapse of the Khazar sociocult proper.
Ibn Ruste reports that Sarkel was the most significant fortified point on the western outskirts of Khazaria, on its Don border, where relations between the khazars and the magyars, who were supported by the kabars, were not easy. Some historians attribute the destruction of the right-bank fortress that stood opposite the future Sarkel to the magyars.
The christianization of Khazaria, conceived by Byzantium, was not carried out in full, but it succeeded in relation to Alania, which caused relations between the alans and the khazars, who remained in the old faith, to worsen. Constantine Porphyrogenitus claimed that the alans caused serious difficulties to the khazars, hindering the progress of khazar trade and diplomatic missions from the Volga to the Middle and Lower Don. The main road from the capital Itil to the west of Khazaria led here and further to the Crimea and the Black sea.
By the 11th century, Belaya Vezha, the former Sarkel, became a typical city of ancient russian culture by its architectural and cultural traditions.
At the beginning of the 11th century, Sarkel was filled with russian-slavs, who completely replaced the industrial cult of the artisanal type with a developed craft industry, where trade was not limited to the local framework and was focused on the vast territory of the nascent Rus.
After the fortress was abandoned by the Khagan and the khazar military contingent, bricks were removed from the walls of the fortress and used in the villages around the fortress, which continued to function for some time.
On the territory of the fortress, inside the ramparts and ditches, active life continued for several decades, there were traces of cattle and caravan sites.
There are traces of numerous crafts in the town, such as potters, goldsmiths, bone cutters, blacksmiths, weavers who served both soldiers and the local population.
Trade and craft, supported by the presence of nobles, ensured the prosperity of Sarkel.
As for posad, the main substance of it, which was a pottery, founded on a potter's wheel, which was typical of the saltov-mayatsk culture of the Don. This part of the artisans represented the agricultural saltov culture, which was located at the outer gate, the busiest part of the city.
Another group of landers was a nomadic culture that lived in yurts or light ground-type dwellings with prefabricated hearths made of large bricks. The pottery production of their artisans was primitive, hand-sculpted. They served mainly the Citadel portion of the Sarkel host.
In 1103, Vladimir Monomakh took the pechenegs and torks from the fortress to Rus. To avoid disputes between the citizens, Monomakh put the ruso-slavs in the settlements, and he put the steppe dwellers on the protection of the fortress and urban settlements.
In 1117, the city was suddenly attacked by the polovtsians and completely destroyed. Since that time, the inhabitants left it, moving to the depths of Rus.
Since the end of the 16th century, Sarkel was almost wiped out by numerous Cossack predatory quarries..
Since the mid-19th century, attempts have been made to identify the location of Sarkel. Most often, it was associated with the places where the Don and Volga are closest to each other. Only in 1934, during the construction of the Tsimlyansk reservoir, Artamonov and a group of archaeologists managed to finally determine the location of Sarkel.
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