When Göktürk power in the western steppe broke apart in the middle of the seventh century, it left two states behind it: the Bulgar union and the Khazars. By the 670s the Khazars had beaten the Bulgars and held the Ponto-Caspian steppe, and they held it for three hundred years — longer than either Göktürk khaganate, longer than the Uyghurs. They are the reason this work does not end in the east. The house that ruled them is held, on grounds set out below, to have been the Ashina; if that is right, the family that took Ötüken in 552 was still reigning on the Volga when the Rus came in 965.
They are the third of four true steppe empires — after the Rouran and the Göktürk, before the Mongols.[1]
Name and origins
Neither question has an answer. The name appears in a dozen traditions — Arabic and Persian xazar, Hebrew, Syriac Kazārāyē, Greek Χάζαροι, Slavonic, Georgian, Armenian, Latin, Hungarian, and Chinese forms that came through an Iranian intermediary — and behind them all stands a Turkic *Qazar whose meaning is argued.[2] Németh derived it from qaz-, “to wander”; the form of the verb is itself uncertain. Bazin read it as an Oghuric variant of Qasar, a name known from the Uyghur runic inscriptions, and made the Khazars an Uyghur splinter that went west before 555; Senga answered that Qasar was not an ethnonym at all but the surname of a chief of the Sïkari, and that the search for Khazar origins among the Uyghurs is not plausible. Róna-Tas derived the name from Caesar, by way of Middle Persian kēsar. There are few reliable clues to be had from the name at all.[2]
The hypotheses about the people are as many: that the Khazars were the Akatzirs; that they were a union of Oghuric tribes and Sabirs with a western Göktürk ruling stratum over them; that they were Turkicised Ugrians; that they were Uyghurs; that they were Hephthalites who came to the Caucasus about 500 and joined with the Sabirs there. The second reading is the likelier: with the Göktürk conquest the Sabir union was reorganised and the Khazars emerged at its head, and Masʿūdī’s remark that the Khazars are called Sabīr in Turkic is a hint of it.[2] Who these Khazars were before that, and where they came from, he leaves open.
Question of Ashina descent
This is the question that brings them into this work, and it is worth setting out exactly what carries it and what does not.
The ruler who was Heraclius’s ally in the Byzantine–Sasanian war of 602 to 628 is named in the sources as the Yabgu Khan: Pahlavi (Sin)jēpīk, Arabic Sinjibū, Armenian Jebu Xakʿan, Georgian Jibgu, Greek Ziebēl and Sparzeugoun. That man is Tong Yabgu, and the Khazars of those years were still part of the Göktürk polity, brought into being by the Göktürk in all likelihood.[2] This work reads the same event from the other end: the Armenian historian Movses Kaghankatvatsi, writing under the later Khazar state, calls the Göktürk of 627 “Khazars”, which is an anachronism with a true core, because it was the campaign of Tong Yabgu and Börü Shad through Derbent and Tiflis that laid the ground on which the Khazar empire was built.
For the dynasty itself there are three arguments and three objections. Artamonov proposed that Yipishekui, a defeated khan of the Nushibi, moved to the Khazar lands about 651 and founded the ruling house there; It remains a hypothesis, and there are many problems with it.[2] The Ḥudūd al-ʿālam says the Khazar king is “one of the descendants of Ansā”, which Artamonov read as a garbling of A-shih-na, that is Ashina; Minorsky was uneasy about the reading and preferred to see in ʾnsā a corruption of ʾysā, the title išād, which would fit only if “king” there meant the sub-ruler and not the khagan. And the Chinese transcription A-shih-na is itself of uncertain reading; It may stand for *Āršila.[2]
The conclusion is nevertheless positive, and it rests less on any single text than on how the steppe worked: the khaganal rank itself, and the close connection of the Khazars with a ruler bearing that title in the Göktürk period, strongly suggest that their ruling house was of Göktürk royal origin, because that was the only source of legitimation the steppe had.[2] The investiture of the Khazar khagan points the same way. It included ritual strangulation and the ceremonies that the Chinese sources describe for the Ashina, and that is a tie to the Göktürk of Inner Asia.[2] The article on the title sets out the same rite for the Göktürk khans; the article on Kut sets out what the Khazar khagan was thought to hold.
Double kingship
Executive power in Khazaria sat in a double khaganate, and it is the sharpest surviving picture of what a steppe khaganate could become.
The khagan — the “supreme king” of the Arabic sources — was a sacred ruler, chosen from a royal clan, who reigned and did not govern: a living talisman whose presence secured Kut, the fortune of heaven, for the realm. His person was holy, no blood could be shed in his presence, and he could order the death of any of his servants. If he appeared to have lost the mandate, he could be killed. That is the doctrine of the Kut carried to its conclusion, and stated more plainly by outsiders about the Khazars than by the Göktürk about themselves.
The man who actually ruled was the qagan-beg, also called beg, shad or yilig; beneath him, by Ibn Faḍlān, stood a kündü qagan and a jāwshïghïr.[2] He had a paid guard of Muslim Khwarazmians, the Ors, beside the tribal levies, and the cost of the army was carried by the well-to-do. The state taxed its subjects and took a tithe on everything that crossed its land, which is why it could pay a guard at all. Ibn Faḍlān counts twenty-five subject peoples, each of which sent a bride to the Khazar ruler. They included Volga and Pontic Bulgars, the North Caucasian Huns, the Iranian Alano-As, Hungarians, Burtas and others; the realm reached from the middle Volga and Kiev to the Crimea, to Bab al-Abwab in the Caucasus and to the Khwarazmian steppe. The word elteber, the title the Göktürk gave to the kings of subject peoples, went with the institution: the Khazars took it over.
Wars with the Arabs and the Byzantine marriage
For a century the northern Caucasus was a war zone. Between 642 and 737 Arab and Khazar armies fought there almost without pause, and the goal on both sides was the passes. Neither side was simply the aggressor: the Khazars raided, but the Umayyads were at the same time taking North Africa and Spain, pressing into Central Asia and raiding Anatolia every year, and were every bit as rapacious.[2] The pressure told: Masʿūdī says the Khazars moved their capital from Samandar to Atil on the lower Volga because of it.
The war ended in 737 with the victory of the Umayyad general Marwan over the khagan, who was forced to convert to Islam — a conversion that lasted about as long as the Arab soldiers stood on Khazar ground. The Arabs held Transcaucasia and never got past Bab al-Abwab; in the same year they broke the Türgesh at Kharistan in Central Asia, which is why 737 stands twice in this work.
With Byzantium the relation was older and easier, inherited from the Göktürk period and held together by a common enemy. In 732 Constantine, son and heir of Leo III, married Čiček — Turkic for “flower” — the daughter of the Khazar khagan; the Byzantines conceded such marriages to outsiders very rarely. In 838 they helped the Khazars build the fortress of Sarkel on the Don, to watch the Hungarians moving into the Pontic steppe and the Pechenegs behind them.
Conversion to Judaism
The Khazar court took up Judaism, and the Khazars are the only steppe power of which that is true. The choice belongs in its context rather than in the class of riddles: after the forced conversion of the khagan to Islam in 737 the religious question was open among the elite, and Judaism, unlike Islam or Christianity, carried no implication of subordination to the caliph or the emperor.[2] He warns against making that the whole explanation, and against the assumption that the whole people followed; the Muslim merchants and the Ors guard were substantial, the Jewish communities of the Crimea influential, and beyond that, he says, we cannot go. What can be said is that the Hebrew alphabet was used in Khazaria beside a variant of the Turkic runic script, and that the courts reflected the mixture: seven judges, two each for Jews, Muslims and Christians, and one for the pagans.
The Khazars and the Uyghurs made the same kind of choice within a century of each other — a world religion with minority status, unencumbered by political baggage.
Decline and fall
The state lived on trade, and the Ḥudūd says plainly that the wealth of the king of the Khazars came mostly from the maritime customs; when that declined, the state was exposed. The signs accumulate through the ninth and tenth centuries: the revolt of the Qabars, Volga Bulgaria going over to Islam, annual war with the Pechenegs, Rus raids down the Volga that the Khazars apparently permitted, and Byzantium changing partners in the steppe from Khazaria to the Pechenegs. About 960 the Khazar ruler Joseph wrote to a Jewish courtier of the Spanish Umayyads that he was constantly at war with the Rus. In 965 the Rus, allied with Oghuz, overran Atil and probably Sarkel. A khaganate of a kind survived a few years more; this work follows the literature in ending it in 969.
Sources
The Khazars are known through Ibn Faḍlān, Masʿūdī, Ibn Rusta, al-Iṣṭakhrī, the Ḥudūd al-ʿālam, Theophanes, Constantine Porphyrogenitus and the Khazar Hebrew documents; none of them has an article of its own here, and the notes carry them.[2]
References
Literature
- Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
- Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
What links here8
- Persons
- Tong Yabgu
- Polities
- Byzantium · Western Göktürk Khaganate
- Places
- Derbent
- Peoples
- Avars
- Lineages
- Ashina
- Institutions and Titles
- Ilteber
- Sources
- Movsēs Dasxurancʿi
Cite this article
Yavuz, Emre-E. “Khazar Khaganate.” Turkic Atlas, revised 13 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/polities/khazar-khaganate/
Last revised: 13 September 2026