OMG Khazars Part 3

What Up, Nerds?

So we had the Khazar Khaganate. It was a Jewish feudal state that dominated the pontic steppe of south Russia for maybe a hundred to a hundred and fifty years. And for that century and a half, there was peace. But like all things, that would eventually come to an end.

The Khazar peace was built on the same principle that most national stability is based on: overwhelming power. The Khazars could whip any of the other steppe tribes who tried to cause trouble. And to protect their trading wealth, the Khazars did whoop anybody who seemed like they were going to disturb the peace. So nobody in south Russia was willing to make trouble, and things were tranquil.

The Khazar Khaganate at around 850 AD is at the top.
To the south are surrounding Empires, and around Khazaria are the tribes who the Khazars dominated.

And then in the late 800's,there was a revolt among some of the Khazars. The revolt was put down, but the Khazar war drove the Pecheneg tribe off their traditional land in the Khazar orbit. The homeless Pechenegs in turn drove out the Magyars. The Magyars wandered around eastern Europe and stirred up trouble until they eventually settled in modern Hungary and became today's Hungarians.

Still, the first dominos had fallen, and the vassal tribes had begun to slide towards turmoil. More and more tribes were buffeted and forced to move around. The peace and the stability of Khazaria began to break apart. As certainty fell away, the people began to think that the Khazars might not stay in charge forever. And people started to think they could take the Khazars' power for themselves.

Then the Eastern Romans decided to go after the Khazars too. They might as well seize what they could since the Khazars were getting weak. After a war, subterfuge, and a sponsored rebellion the Eastern Roman Empire walked away with the Crimean peninsula.

But the final destruction of the Khazars was coming from another direction.





We start in the late 700's and 800's AD. The Viking age was already in full swing in western Europe. Danish and Norwegian bands were ravaging and settling Ireland, Great Britain, and the Carolingian empire. But the Vikings on the Baltic shore of Scandinavia decided to go the opposite direction. These were the inhabitants of modern Sweden, the Swedes, the Goths, and other less well-known tribes. While the western Scandinavians became famous for pillaging the west, the eastern Scandinavians decided to trade to the east.

The viking way of trade was not what you might call peaceful.

Scandinavian settlers sailed up and down the river systems of Eastern Europe. They searched out good places to both settle and to trade.

Who were they trading with? With the great Eastern Roman Empire and Islamic Caliphate to the south. Then they went back out the Baltic rivers and traded with other Scandinavians as far away as Ireland and Britain. On top of all this, they could extract valued trade goods like amber and furs from the natives of the east European forests.

When they found a good place to build one of their trading towns they would construct well defended commercial forts like Novgorod and Beloozero. Then they struck out from these forts with fire and swords. They subjugated the native peoples and exploited them as best they could to turn an even larger profit. They didn't just take amber and fur, they also took food and slaves.

Rough extent of Scandinavian settlement at the time of initial Rus' colonization.

The Eastern Romans called these trading Vikings the Varangians. But the more famous name of their tribe is the Rus.

This Russian civilization started out relatively weak. We think the early Rus lacked a real central authority, and that as a consequence they were a fairly weak group. The Khazars may have ultimately been the ones who imparted a stable government to them. In any case, a Rus Khaganate eventually arose.

The new Russian Khagans lead several attacks south across the black sea against the Eastern Roman Empire. The Romans were busy fighting off the sudden rise of Islam at the time. So the Russian Vikings got as far as Constantinople without a fight. They took a look at the city's impressive Theodosian Walls, pillaged the suburbs and then headed back to Russia. So Russia became something of an international power. Briefly. 

Well, visiting Constantinople's been nice but I think it's about time we go home.

The Russian ascendancy was short because a rebellion of the native Slavic people took down the Rus Khaganate and drove them back to Sweden in AD 862. The trading forts and viking towns were gone. Russia was almost a very short story.



According to the Russian records, a power vacuum followed the Russian retreat back to the Rus homeland in Sweden. Many Slavic, Baltic, and Finno-Ugric tribes immediately launched wars against and amongst each other. And in the ensuing chaos, a few of the tribes began to wish the old Russian overlords would come back and put things back to the way they used to be. So some of them went to Sweden and asked.

Of course the Rus were invited into Russia.

There were more then a few Rus who were happy to oblige. The possibly mythological viking leader Rurik (this is all still according to those Russian records) assembled a force of fighting traders and settlers and sailed a Russian invasion right back up the rivers into Slavland. When Rurik's troops landed they whooped the fractured native tribes, and they reestablished some of the old Rus cities. The great hub at Novgorod was rebuilt and was made the new Russian capital.

The Russians traded out around the north and west of the Khazar Khaganate, going right back to their old commercial ways, but this time they were less eager to sack and ravage the empires than to trade with them. Arab and Roman traders noted the return of their old trading-partners, and wrote about them. The Arabs particularly called the Rus "smelly and unwashed". But they also thought the Russian men were built spectacularly strong and tall. They had ruddy faces and striking blonde hair. They were, in short, stereotypical vikings.

Plus, like most vikings, they shared a particular sense of style. In western Europe they were considered to be dandies and fops. They combed their hair regularly and bathed significantly more often then the few times a year that the English, French, Spanish, or Italians did. So they didn't seem as barbarous as they might have, and the rival imperials were still happy to trade with them in any case.

Hägar the Hawtness

Around AD 880 prince Oleg of Novgorod succeeded to Rurik's old position as Prince of Russia. He was eager to extend the borders of his domain, so he led his warriors on a campaign south from Novgorod. They conquered native cities like Smolensk, subjected native tribes, and made their way down the Dneiper River. City after city fell, until in 882 he conquered the great city of Kiev and made it his new capital.

After taking Kiev he spent a few years completing the conquest of all the tribes around his new capital and between it and the old capital at Novgorod. Then he led a war against the Eastern Romans with eighty thousand warriors and two thousand ships. There was no conquest, but he managed to impose a tribute upon the Romans, as well as a commercial treaty, before he eventually died in 912.

Prince Oleg's campaign to conquer Kiev.
The view is facing towards western Europe from central Russia.

Oleg's new Kievan Russia would survive his death and even thrive on the land's rich resources and trade. These Russians even began to assimilate to Slavic Culture.

Then Sviatoslav the Brave rose to the throne of Kiev.

Prince Oleg had undoubtedly encroached on Khazaria. Kiev used to be well within the Khazar sphere of influence, and was just across the river from the Khazar Khaganate proper when Khazaria was at its height. But Khazaria had been weakening and retreating, leaving Kiev fairly open to Oleg's conquest. And now the new king Svitoslav had designs on the rest of the country.

Sviatoslav's ultimate objectives were the rich trade routes all the way down the Volga. If the Khazar capital happened to sit on the Volga, that was just too bad.

As his name suggests, Sviatoslav was a Slavicized ruler of Russia, possibly the very first one. He used this identity to his advantage. His first step in taking on Khazaria was to bring all the Khazars' subject Slavs to his banner. He sent out the call and received the backing of the Slavic tribes with only a little bit of difficulty.

He next aimed his warriors at Volga Bulgaria, which was the Bulgarian Kingdom dominating the upper Volga River above Khazaria. The Volga Bulgars had been vassals of the Khazars, but were not overly attached to their masters. After all the Khazars had destroyed their former kingdom of Old Great Bulgaria. Nevertheless, they fought alongside the Khazars. Then when the Khazar-Bulgar coalition lost they began to send Sviatoslav tribute. The Russians had conquered the Upper Volga, and they were ready to head downriver.

The extent of Kievan Russia when Sviatoslav came to the throne is in dark green.
Sviatoslav's campaign to crush the Khazars is marked by the arrows.

But first Sviatoslav made a short detour across Khazaria to the Don river. Here he laid siege to the Khazar Fortress of Sarkel, which lay at the heart of the former great Kingdom of Khazaria. He destroyed old Sarkel but left behind Russian Settlers to establish a new fort, which he called Belaya Vyezha. In the Khazar language, "Sarkel" had meant "White Tower," and Belaya Vyezha was the Slavic translation. Sviatoslav intended to re-settle and remake the pontic steppe to his benefit.

Only one target remained for Prince Sviatoslav.

By the time the Russian army reached the Khazar capital at Itil, the Khazar Army was totally beaten. The Russians attacked the city, and they destroyed it. A visitor to the site a short while later said that after the Russians attacked there was no grape or raisin or leaf on a branch remaining in the city. The capital of the Khazars—the heart of the Khazar Khaganate—was dead.

Sviatoslav had secured the Volga River for Russia, and he headed home after the destruction of Itil. He made a stop to conquer the Ossetians on his way home, but he declined to mop up and occupy every corner of Khazaria. Subsequently small Khazar kingdoms would pull themselves and putter along for a few more years, but would eventually fall prey to Pecheneg and Cuman conquerors.

The Khazars had been great rulers and traders at the height of their power barely a century before. But they had been shaken by war and broken by the Viking Russians in quick succession. And so the story of the second Jewish nation in history came to an end.

Of course, the history of the Russian nation had only just begun.






Sources:
Britannica Online Encyclopedia
Khazaria.com
Larry Gonick's  Cartoon History Series
JewishEncyclopedia.com
JewishVirtualLibrary.com
and of course, Wikipedia


Fun fact: If you google "Rus," you will find a million links to "Toys R' Us." Dammit.

OMG the East is Corrupt (N.C.3)

What Up, Nerds?


So. In 1729 the British Empire partitioned North and South Carolina into separate crown colonies. From that point on North Carolina really began to take off. There was only one little and pretty strange issue.


Back in 1729 when the eight original owners were asked to sell their shares of the Carolina Colony back to the king, one of the eight refused. Owning seven eighths of Carolina was good enough for the king though, so the government went ahead and divided North and South Carolina and started to rule them as royal colonies.


But that eighth owner who didn't sell the land back still wanted his share. For quite a while this man, the Earl of Granville couldn't do anything about the issue. He was too tied up in England where Granville's chief rival had become Prime  Minister and was busily attacking him. Until in 1742 he finally freed himself up to claim his share. The British government agreed to let him take his share out of northern North Carolina. North Carolina was a sizable and populous place, but it lacked the ports and infrastructure to substantively and directly trade with anybody but nearby colonies. Because its trade with England wasn't as important as Virginia's or South Carolina's, the Brits figured they wouldn't miss it too much. Two years later Granville had surveyed his land.


And he took the whole northern part of North Carolina.

This goddamn much.

That was a damn big chunk of the colony to just up and take. But that didn't exactly bother Granville. The government of the rest of the colony was unhappy about Granville's aquisition. The setup of Granville's grant was such that the Earl got all the revenue from taxes and tariffs from the District. But the government of the rest of the state still had to pay for the upkeep and the security of the district, because it was the government. The southern half of the colony was being forced to pay for the business of the whole thing. This made people pretty upset.


Things weren't much better in the north. As time went on the officials the British sent to the District became corrupt and ineffective. Sometimes they'd collect a tax twice and pocket the proceeds, sometime's they wouldn't collect any tax at all from their friends.


When Granville died in 1763 things only got worse. The people were ready to do something about this corrupt government of overseas Englishmen. The storm that had been brewing for the last twenty years was about to break.






But trouble in the District was only half of the foul political weather that was converging over North Carolina.


Since the early 1700's a lot of people had started immigrating to North Carolina. In the beginning they all settled along the coast. Most of these immigrants were English and Scots-Irish. Lots of them were religiously Quaker. Most of them were small farmers. But the richest of them set up plantations. The demands of both groups meant that a significant number of enslaved people got brought in to work on both the small farms and plantations. Slave labor based farming would expand so much that around mid century about a quarter of the population was enslaved black people.


This early American slavery was not as you might imagine it. The image of a large plantation with dozens of enslaved people living in shanties who are forced to labor in the fields all day is, in fact, mostly wrong. There were a few large plantations. But for quite a while during the youth of the colonies the more common experience for slaves and for slavers was the small farm with perhaps one slave on it.


In both North and South Carolina slaves were bought by masters with small holdings. They'd live lives on the rough and tumble frontier. The enslaved man and the master would cohabit. They would be each other's primary companion. They'd cooperate to get the food they needed to survive. And they had to  cooperate on any number of physical tasks, too.


For instance a frontier sawhorse only works with the skilled cooperation of both men on either end. The necessary cooperation and proximity improved the lives of many enslaved people in the period. This "sawhorse equality" did not amount to equality over the law. But it did transform the master and slave into two men alone together in the woods and struggling to survive.

See if YOU can do it on your own.

But over time the number of plantations grew. And with that growth, so too grew chattel slavery. Conditions worsened.


By mid-century and later the eastern part of North Carolina acquired a slave holding elite population. Perhaps because of the relative importance of those elites, the east maintained a fairly efficient and prosperous government.

The settlers in the east weren't all British though. The very important city at New Bern was founded and settled by Germans and Swiss-Germans. Soon this little frontier German burg gre to be North Carolina's biggest and most important town.






And then in the west settlement was a different story too. There were indeed many English settlers of the region. But these were tempered with the addition of Scots-Irish and many more German immigrants who came from Europe via Pennsylvania. They settled mostly small farms. And though slavery sometimes happened there was no real plantation economy. These immigrants soon started to fill the west of the state. By 1752, the population of North Carolina reached 100,000. By 1765 the population was 200,000.


Remember the east of the state, by virtue of its elite position, had secured for themselves a government relatively free of corruption. But the royal and British officials sent into the west had no such elite population to deal with. They abused their powers and made themselves the new elites.


They started to exploit their power in the west in much the same way that the Granville District officials abused their power. They'd extract taxes multiple times. They'd refuse to barter goods as taxes when the west suffered from an acute cash shortage. And then they'd import lawyers to sue and confiscate the farms of those who couldn't pull together the hard cash. The most prominent of them was a man named Edmund Fanning who was caught embezzling but was part of the courts system and so was only fined one penny per guilty charge.

You have to follow laws? How quaint!
(Pic from Wiki)

The westerners couldn't change the tax laws because the eastern elites denied them equal representation in the assembly. When extended droughts hit, the situation worsened and more people still began to lose their farms.


And then the Governor built himself a new mansion at the Capital at New Bern this looked like just one more sign of eastern decadence and exploitation of the west. So many of the westerners refused to pay the tax that would pay for the building. They were itching for a fight, and another political storm started to brew in the west of the state.


In 1768 the poor westerners who opposed the corrupt officials and wanted to lower taxes met in Hillsborough, NC.


And so the storm broke.

OMG Carolina Colony Part 1

What Up, Nerds?




Between 1658 and 1660 eight men risked their lives working in a movement that was trying to replace the heir of an ambiguously benevolent dictator with the heir of their old de-throned king. They succeeded when they put the new king, Charlie Two, on the throne of England. Once king Charlie was secure in his place these eight men expected him to reward them for their part in helping to give him England.


They got their reward. It was a pretty expansive one, too. Three years after his coronation the king gave these three men a present. What was that gift?

It was all the land in blue.
I wouldn't mind finding THAT under a Christmas tree.

The king wanted to use the gift to honor his dethroned and decapitated daddy, king Charlie One. So he called it the Carolina Colony--so called because Carolus is how you say Charles in Latin, and because "Charlolina" sounds stupid. One of those eight men who were given the colony was named Lord Shaftesbury. He had his favorite secretary draw up a constitution for the Colony. And that secretary? He was none other than John Goddamn Locke, the political-philosopher and father of liberal democracy. Locke, Shaftesbury, and a friend drew the document up, and this wonderful new transcontinental colony was bequeathed a constitution.


And so the Carolina Colony got off to a great start.


There was only one problem. There were not a lot of people who thought king Charlie had owned the land in the first place. Charlie had basically only called "dibs" on the area. And that weak claim was even weaker because the Spanish had already claimed it a hundred and seventy years earlier. Never mind the local American Indians who had also already dibs-ed it long before that.


The question is that of who supported Carolina's claim to the land?


Did the inhabitants of Carolina think that the English owned the land? Nope. There were enormous numbers of people who lived in the lands that Carolina Colony occupied. But they were the American Indians who'd been hanging out on the continent for a few tens of thousands of years already. They had very little reason the care what some guy named Charlie across an ocean declared about their land.


Did any other European countries think Charlie Two owned the land? No. People either recognized the Spanish right to that land or claimed it themselves. And there were actually Spaniards living in the territory to enforce Spanish rule.


But at least the English agreed that the territory belonged to England, belonged to the king, and belonged to those eight men. Those Englishmen were willing to fight to support their King's claim. And those who lived in Carolina could fight to enforce English administration. Surely there must have been at least a few Englishmen somewhere in this huge swath of land. Right?




Well. Let's look at the land's history.


Way back in the day the English had built Lost Colony at Roanoke within the bounds of Carolina Colony. That had disappeared mysteriously, but in the far northeast corner of the territory  a small community of Englishmen had recently appeared. Ten years before Carolina Colony was chartered, there had been a few rapscallions in Virginia and other British colonies who had decided that the ungoverned Virginia frontier just had too much Johnny Law for them. So they picked up, left, and settled themselves on the inland shore of the Albermarle sound. This settlement is located in the northeast of modern North Carolina. Because of these settlers' dispositions, the Virginians called their settlement "Rogues' Harbor." That small Virginian frontier community constituted all of the Englishmen in Carolina.


So what the eight men had been given was actually lordship over these few citizens in Rogues' Harbor, and the right to fight off the Spanish and the local Indians before trying to colonize the rest.

You know what? Could I actually have a different reward?
Please? Any different reward?

Except it was an even worse deal than that. Because the king had messed up and drawn the border so that Rogues' harbor was actually just outside of the Carolina border to the northeast.


That meant that the number of Englishmen who actually lived in Carolina Colony was officially zero. The eight men had been given no citizens to live in their vast tract of territory.


So the king decided to be a little more generous, and in 1665 he added a little more land to Carolina. He added everything in the light blue below. This larger grant included the Spanish City of St. Augustine, in Florida. Needless to say, the Spaniards living there did not feel very Carolinian. Indeed, they still insisted the King of Spain's dibs from a hundred and seventy years earlier meant the whole continent belonged to them. And they were well enough armed to fight over the point. Undoubtedly the eight recipients of Carolina were somewhat less than overjoyed at this.

Oh yay, more of a reward I really don't want.

It is hard to imagine that the colony was the world's most attractive gift. But when your king gives you something you don't tell him "no." So the eight men accepted this vast swath of earth that several other people already owned. And they started planning how to make something out of it.


They decided that the first necessary step in improving Carolina was to try and get a few more Englishmen living in it. At least then they'd have somebody to rule. One man established the town of Clarendon near modern Wilmington, NC. But that town town didn't really take off though. It suffered from the northern Carolina problem of bad ports. And for the next five years Clarendon just puttered along and communed with Rogues' Harbor.


In 1670 the eight men decided to try to settle the colony again. They sailed a boat to the geographical center of the colony's east coast where they discovered a good harbor at the mouth of two rivers. They set up a new town on the edge of the wilderness there, and it flourished. They named the two rivers after one of the eight: Lord Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury's real name was Anthony Ashley Cooper. So one river was named the Ashley and the other was named the Cooper. They named the town after the king, and called it Charleston.


Charleston was a good place for a port and the city grew and flourished. Before long it was the biggest city in all of Carolina. But the success of this big old town was going to lead to some problems between the north and the south.