In 965 the Rus of Kiev, allied with elements of the Oghuz, overran Atil and perhaps the fortress of Sarkel.[1] Muslim sources claim that the Khazar ruler then took Islam and came under the sway of the Khwarazmians.[1] A khaganate of a kind lived on for a few years. The end of the state is usually set in 969.

Signs of weakness

The Khazar state lived on trade. The Ḥudūd al-ʿālam says that the wealth and well-being of the king of the Khazars come mostly from the maritime customs. The more the state relied on this income, the more exposed it was when the income fell.[1] The signs of weakness add up in the ninth and tenth centuries. They are the Kabar revolt, the turn of Volga Bulgaria to Islam in the early tenth century and yearly wars with the Pechenegs. They also include Rus raids down the Volga into the Islamic lands on the Caspian, which took place apparently with Khazar consent.[1]

The raids began in the reign of the Tabaristan amir Hasan ibn Zayd, between 864 and 884, and went on in 910 and the following years.[2] The khagan received half of the booty. In 922 the Muslims of Khazaria, enraged, killed the Rus on their return from a raid.[2] Why the khagan allowed raids that cut into his own trade is unclear. A war with the Muslim ruler of Bab al-Abwab, going on since 901, may have played a part.[2] In 943 and 944 the Rus tried to take Bardha’a in Azerbaijan.[2]

Byzantium, hitherto an ally, now turned to the Pechenegs as its principal partner in the steppe, which meant an anti-Khazar stance.[1] By the first half of the tenth century the Byzantines may have worked to stir up the neighbours of the Khazars against them, according to the Cambridge, or Schechter, document. This has been connected with the anti-Jewish policy of Romanos Lekapenos.[1] About 960 the Khazar ruler Joseph wrote to a Jewish courtier in Spain about the Rus.[2] In his words: “I war with them. If I left them in peace for one hour they would destroy the entire land of the Ishmaelites up to Baghdad.”[2] The letter confirms the Rus and Muslim notices of serious fighting between Rus and Khazars.[2]

The campaign of 965

The Rus chronicles name one campaign, that of 965.[2] Sviatoslav, the ruler in Kiev, warred on the Khazars, overcame them and “took their city and Biela Vezha”, which is Sarkel.[3] The chronicle entry for 965 says more: Sviatoslav defeated the Khazars under their khagan and took their town of Biela Vezha.[4] He then subdued the Yasy and the Kasogs and returned to Kiev.[4] The chronicle says nothing of ships and does not record the fall of Atil.[4] Whether the “town” of the chronicle is Sarkel is itself disputed.[5]

The Oghuz took part. The Cambridge document shows that the Khazars had been at war with the Alans, the Oghuz and other neighbours for some time. Ibn Miskawayh and Ibn al-Athīr testify to the Oghuz share in the Rus campaign of 965.[6] According to one view the Oghuz were an unstable element, now enemies and now hired allies of the Khazars.[7]

The Muslim accounts

Ibn Miskawayh dates the attack to 354 of the Hijra, which is 965.[8] An army of “Turks”, whom modern accounts take to be the Rus, invaded Khazaria. The Khazars asked Khwarazm for help. The Khwarazmians first refused, because the Khazars were Jews. Whoever wanted help had to become Muslim. All but the king did so. Ibn al-Athīr adds that the king too became a Muslim later. Al-Muqaddasī, about 985, says that the inhabitants of Khazarān were no longer Jews but Muslims.[9] The account is to be treated with caution. Some scholars reject it as unhistorical, and others hold that this goes too far.[10]

Ibn Hawqal, writing about 977, says that the Russians sacked Bulghar in 358 and utterly destroyed Khazarān, Samandar and Atil.[11] He asked a man in Gurgan in 358 about Samandar, which had once held, it was said, forty thousand vineyards and gardens.[12] The man told him that not a grape nor a raisin remained, and that the Muslims and others who had lived there had emigrated.[12] The year 358 falls in 968 and 969.[12] The date may belong to the visit of Ibn Hawqal to Gurgan and not to the attack.[12] A second explanation sees two phases: Sarkel taken in 965 by the Rus of Kiev, and Atil and Samandar taken in 968 by others.[13] One standard history allows this view, but holds on balance that Khazaria was devastated once, in 965.[13]

After 965

The Khazars did not vanish. They lived on in greatly reduced form as a client state of Khorezm, while other Khazar areas fell to the Muslim rulers around them.[6] In 1016 a Khazar, Georgios Tzule, was attacked by a Rus and Byzantine force.[6] In 1023 the Rus prince Mstislav had Khazar allies.[6] In 1064 some three thousand households of the Khazars settled in Qahtan in the North Caucasus.[6] Khazars are named in Tmutorokan in 1079 and 1083.[6] Cairo documents mention messianic movements in “Khazaria” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.[6] The bulk of the people merged with the surrounding, largely Turkic peoples, and the nomads were absorbed by other tribes.[6]

It has been argued that after 965 one can no longer speak with confidence of an independent Jewish state on the Volga, and that the Khazar kingdom in its traditional form hardly survived the Rus invasion.[14] Al-Bīrūnī, who died in 1048, says that Atil lay in ruins.[15] None of the tribal unions that followed in the steppes of western Eurasia developed a full state before the Mongol conquest.[1]

Explanations

Scholars give five explanations of the fall.

The first sees outside force: the campaign of the Rus.[16] The Oghuz joined it, and the steppe peoples pressed on the khagans on the lower Volga.[6] The second sees structural weakness. The realm was an agglomeration of territories without natural frontiers and far from self-sufficient. It rested on tribute and customs, on military force and on a mixed population.[17] The Khazar economy, in this view, was highly artificial, since everything depended on political prestige and military strength.[18] The third sees an economic change. In the tenth century the flow of silver moved away from Khazaria. Th. S. Noonan took finds of dirhams as the measure of the change.[19] Alex M. Feldman holds that the customs, perhaps four fifths of the income by Noonan’s count, were lost when the Muslim trade routes turned away after the Volga Bulgar ruler Almush took Islam in the early 920s. The khagans could soon no longer pay their soldiers.[20]

The fourth looks at religion and politics. Feldman holds that the Judaism of the court weakened the tie to Byzantium, but that this is only part of the story.[21] One standard history finds it trifling to say that Judaism by itself led to a decline of national vigour.[22] No source traces the fall to religion, and religion is absent from the list of the signs of weakness above.[1]

The fifth names the environment. It holds that a rise of the Caspian Sea drowned Atil. Newer work does not firmly support a medieval rise of this kind.

A single summary names three causes together: the Kabar civil war, other domestic troubles that the sources do not record, and the pressure of steppe peoples whom the khagans on the lower Volga could less and less repel.[6]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Golden 1992, p. 243
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Sinor 1990, p. 268
  3. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 268–269
  4. ^ a b c Dunlop 1954, p. 241
  5. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 241–243
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Sinor 1990, p. 269
  7. ^ Golden 1992, p. 210
  8. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 244
  9. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 244–245
  10. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 245
  11. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 242, 246
  12. ^ a b c d Dunlop 1954, p. 242
  13. ^ a b Dunlop 1954, p. 243
  14. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 247
  15. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 248
  16. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 241–246
  17. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 233–235
  18. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 233
  19. ^ Noonan 1984
  20. ^ Feldman 2022a, p. 75–84
  21. ^ Feldman 2022a
  22. ^ Dunlop 1954, p. 223

Sources

Literature

  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
  • Douglas M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars (1954)
  • Th. S. Noonan, Why Dirhams Reached Russia: The Role of Arab-Khazar Relations in the Development of the Earliest Islamic Trade with Eastern Europe (1984)
  • Alex M. Feldman, The Decline and Fall of Khazaria – Might or Money? (2022)

Related

What links here5

States
Khazar Khaganate
Battles & Events
Kabar Revolt · Mission of Constantine to the Khazars (860–861)
Peoples
History of the Turkic peoples
Sources
Russian Primary Chronicle

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Fall of the Khazar Khaganate (about 965–969).” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/events/fall-of-the-khazar-khaganate/

Last revised: 8 November 2026