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him. And the Kagan said to him: We have sent for you for this reason: that, since you are well-born and
wise and brave and the first of the Magyars, we may promote you to be the ruler of your race, and that you
may be subject to our Laws and Orders.
But Lebedias appears to have been a proud man; he declined, with appropriate expressions of gratitude, the offer to
become a puppet king, and proposed instead that the honour should be bestowed on a fellow chieftain called Almus, or
on Almus s son, Arpad. So the Kagan, pleased at this speech , sent Lebedias with a suitable escort back to his people;
and they chose Arpad to be their king. The ceremony of Arpad s installation took place after the custom and usage of
the Khazars, raising him on their shields. But before this Arpad the Magyars never had any other ruler; wherefore the
ruler of Hungary is drawn from his race up to this day.
This day in which Constantine wrote was circa 950, that is, a century after the event. Arpad in fact led his Magyars in
the conquest of Hungary; his dynasty reigned till 1301, and his name is one of the first that Hungarian schoolboys
learn. The Khazars had their fingers in many historic pies.
8
The second episode seems to have had an even more profound influence on the Hungarian national character. At some
unspecified date, Constantine tells us,23 there was a rebellion (apostasia) of part of the Khazar nation against their
rulers. The insurgents consisted of three tribes, which were called Kavars [or Kabars], and which were of the Khazars
own race. The Government prevailed; some of the rebels were slaughtered and some fled the country and settled with
the Magyars, and they made friends with one another. They also taught the tongue of the Khazars to the Magyars, and
up to this day they speak the same dialect, but they also speak the other language of the Magyars. And because they
The Thirtheenth Tribe: Decline
plus the Kabars], and leaders in war, they were elected to be the first horde, and there is one leader among them, that is
in the [originally] three hordes of the Kavars, who exists to this day.
To dot his i s, Constantine starts his next chapter with a list of the hordes of Kavars and Magyars. First is that which
broke off from the Khazars, this above-mentioned horde of the Kavars. , etc.24 The horde or tribe which actually calls
itself Magyar comes only third.
It looks as if the Magyars had received metaphorically and perhaps literally a blood transfusion from the Khazars.
It affected them in several ways. First of all we learn, to our surprise, that at least till the middle of the tenth century
both the Magyar and Khazar languages were spoken in Hungary. Several modern authorities have commented on this
singular fact. Thus Bury wrote: The result of this double tongue is the mixed character of the modern Hungarian
language, which has supplied specious argument for the two opposite opinions as to the ethnical affinities of the
Magyars. 25 Toynbee26 remarks that though the Hungarians have ceased to be bilingual long ago, they were so at the
beginnings of their state, as testified by some two hundred loan-words from the old Chuvash dialect of Turkish which
the Khazars spoke (see above, Chapter I, 3).
The Magyars, like the Rus, also adopted a modified form of the Khazar double-kingship. Thus Gardezi: & Their
leader rides out with 20000 horsemen; they call him Kanda [Hungarian:
Kende] and this is the title of their greater king, but the title of the person who effectively rules them is Jula. And the
Magyars do whatever their Jula commands. There is reason to believe that the first Julas of Hungary were Kabars.27
There is also some evidence to indicate that among the dissident Kabar tribes, who de facto took over the leadership of
the Magyar tribes, there were Jews, or adherents of a judaizing religion .28 It seems quite possible as Artamonov
and Bartha have suggested29 that the Kabar apostasia was somehow connected with, or a reaction against, the
religious reforms initiated by King Obadiah. Rabbinical law, strict dietary rules, Talmudic casuistry might have gone
very much against the grain of these steppe-warriors in shining armour. If they professed a judaizing religion , it must
have been closer to the faith of the ancient desert-Hebrews than to rabbinical orthodoxy. They may even have been
followers of the fundamentalist sect of Karaites, and hence considered heretics. But this is pure speculation.
9
The close cooperation between Khazars and Magyars came to an end when the latter, AD 896, said farewell to the
Eurasian steppes, crossed the Carpathian mountain range, and conquered the territory which was to become their lasting
habitat. The circumstances of this migration are again controversial, but one can at least grasp its broad outlines.
During the closing decades of the ninth century yet another uncouth player joined the nomad game of musical chairs:
the pechenegs.* What little we know about this Turkish tribe is summed up in Constantine s description of them as an
insatiably greedy lot of Barbarians who for good money can be bought to fight other Barbarians and the Rus. They
lived between the Volga and the Ural rivers under Khazar suzerainty; according to Ibn Rusta,30 the Khazars raided them
every year to collect the tribute due to them.
Toward the end of the ninth century a catastrophe (of a nature by no means unusual) befell the Pechenegs: they were
evicted from their country by their eastern neighbours. These neighbours were none other than the Ghuzz (or Oguz)
whom Ibn Fadlan so much disliked one of the inexhaustible number of Turkish tribes which from time to time cut
loose from their Central-Asiatic moorings and drifted west. The displaced Pechenegs tried to settle in Khazaria, but the
Khazars beat them off. The Pechenegs continued their westward trek, crossed the Don and invaded the territory of the
Magyars. The Magyars in turn were forced to fall back further west into the region between the Dnieper and the Sereth
rivers. They called this region Etel-Köz, the land between the rivers . They seem to have settled there in 889; but in
896 the Pechenegs struck again, allied to the Danube Bulgars, whereupon the Magyars withdrew into present-day
Hungary.
This, in rough outline, is the story of the Magyars exit from the eastern steppes, and the end of the Magyar-Khazar [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]