Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World Read online

  Then there was the Khazar influence on the Hungarians. The Magyar tribes originally lived in the Khazar sphere of influence on the steppe. In around A.D. 800 one of the Khazar tribes, the Kabars, fled from the Khazar heartland after a disagreement with the Khazar king. This tribe, as part of the Khazar nation, was almost certainly Jewish, and it became the leading group among the early Magyars.

  Then, fifty or so years later, the Khazar monarch, as overlord of the Magyars, gave them the right to choose their own king. By 900, other tribes, the Pecheneg Turks, had forced the Magyars to migrate west to what is now Hungary.16 But the old Magyar-Khazar link continued, and in c. 950 groups of Khazars (presumably Jews) were invited into Hungary by the Hungarians. In the fourteenth century many Hungarian Jews were still being officially categorized as Khazars.17

  Cuman pressure in the early twelfth century on the Khazars themselves almost certainly led to a major new Jewish settlement being set up in what had once been Khazar land and was now the Viking principality of Kiev. This new town, established by c. 1117 and known as Bela Vezha (the same name as the Khazar empire’s greatest fortress, just north of the Caspian Sea), was located near Chernigov, 90 miles north of Kiev. There must already have been a substantial and long-established Jewish community in the Kiev area, because tenth-century letters that refer to it still survive. Indeed, Kiev itself was probably founded by Jewish Khazars in or prior to the ninth century—well before it was taken over by the Vikings in 882.18

  It was not only some Cuman and Oghuz tribes that seem to have become at least partially Judaized by their Khazar overlords or neighbors. Some north-Iranian-speaking Tat tribes of the Caucasus Mountains are still Jewish today, although academic opinion is divided as to whether their Jewish identity was derived from the Khazars, derived from the Iranian Jews, or influenced culturally or ethnically by both. A Russian chronicle of 1346 actually describes the eastern Caucasus as the “Land of the Jews.”

  Lastly, there are the ancient Jewish communities of Crimea (the Krimchaks), which are probably partially Khazar-derived or -influenced; although the original Jewish presence in Crimea had certainly started in pre-Khazar times. After the demise of Khazar power elsewhere, some sort of Jewish political survival probably continued in Crimea, for some Crimean Khazars tried to seize control of part of the Crimean peninsula as late as 1079, and the area was actually known as Gazaria (Khazaria) and the Jewish population as Gazari (Khazars) up till the fifteenth century. What’s more, several Khazar Crimean fortress towns survived as Jewish centers into later medieval and early modern times.19

  Of long-term significance was the Khazar empire and the Judaization of substantial numbers of Turkic and other peoples? The effects were twofold.

  First, the Khazar empire—and the fact that it was monotheistic—prevented the westward spread of Islam. If it had not been for the military might of the empire, Islam would likely have rolled west into pagan eastern Europe and possibly even into pagan Scandinavia in the eighth and ninth centuries A.D.20 The Vikings, who later ended up as Christians, could well have become Islamicized instead if the Khazar block on Islamic expansion had not existed. Theoretically Poland, Hungary, Romania, eastern Austria, the Czech and Slovak lands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Viking eastern England could all have become Muslim. If the Khazar empire had not prevented Islamic expansion, it is even possible that the Normans (originally Vikings from Denmark) might have already been Muslims for two hundred years by the time they conquered England in 1066. What’s more, if the Arabs had occupied what is now the Ukraine and Russia, a Viking people known as the Rus would never have been able to push south and east from the Baltic to establish Russia.

  But blocking the Islamic advance was not the only long-term historical role played by Khazaria. The Jewish empire’s other legacy was the creation of a large pool of Jews of ethnically non-Jewish origin who subsequently became a major part—perhaps even the numerically dominant part—of northeast European Jewry and subsequently of world Jewry.

  World Jewry was, and still is, divided into a number of distinctly different traditions, chief among which are the Sephardim (Spanish Jews) and the Ashkenazim (northern European Jews). By far the largest number of Ashkenazim originate from eastern Europe—especially Lithuania, Poland, and Russia—and almost certainly have a large Khazar or Khazar-influenced (i.e., ethnically Turkic, Slav, and Magyar) genetic component.

  Potential physical evidence for this has recently been discovered by geneticists. DNA tests on Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews have revealed the possibility that at least one key section of the latter community may have genetic evidence of a potentially large-scale or even mass conversion which must have taken place sometime after around A.D. 700—the time when the ancestors of the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities started to become geographically differentiated. Historically it is known that such mass conversions have never occurred in western Europe and that in eastern Europe (including Russia and the Ukraine) no such conversions have occurred since at least A.D. 1200. This suggests that any such conversion must have taken place sometime between 700 and 1200 in eastern Europe—and the only known mass conversion within that time frame and in that geographical area was that of the Khazars in the eighth century. Significantly, the section of the Ashkenazi community whose DNA may suggest a partially convert origin is that section which up till now had traditionally been said to be wholly descended from the Assistant Priests of ancient Israel. This group, according to tradition, comprises the majority of the descendants of the ancient Israelite tribe of Levi—people who today still bear the name Levi or Levy. Significantly, it does not include a Levite subgroup—the Priests themselves—who often have the name Cohen. The Levi name, identity, and, even today, the Assistant-Priest status and role are only passed down in the male line, as is a specific piece of genetic material, the Y-chromosome—the DNA strand that actually determines maleness.

  Genetic codes on the Y-chromosome are therefore inherited from a man’s distant male-line ancestors. By analyzing Y chromosomes from a sample of both Levite and non-Levite populations in both Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities, geneticists have discovered that an astounding 30 percent of Ashkenazi non-Cohenic Levites have a particular combination of DNA material on part of their Y-chromosome that is not shared to any extent by either non-Levite Ashkenazi Jews or the Sephardic community as a whole.22

  This genetic marker does not even show up among the Cohens (descendants of the ancient Israelite Chief Priests)—but only among the descendants of Assistant Priests, and then only within Ashkenazi (northern European) Jewry.

  What seems to have happened is not only a potentially large-scale conversion of non-Jewish people, almost certainly Khazars, to Judaism, but also the adoption of Levite (Assistant Priest) status by a substantial number of the Khazar converts. This interpretation is implicitly supported by textual evidence that has survived from Khazar times. A tenth-century letter of recommendation from the Jewish community of Kiev to Jewish communities outside Khazaria was signed by Jews with traditional Turkic names whose almost certainly Turkic Khazar ancestors had adopted Levitical second names—in both cases the name Cohen (a Levite subgroup)—indicating that they saw themselves as descendants or close associates of the ancient tribe of Levi.

  If some top Khazars were adopting Cohenic Levitical status (i.e., Chief Priest status), then it is more than likely that others—a larger number—were adopting ordinary Levitical status (i.e., Assistant Priest status). Adoption of Cohenic or ordinary Levitical status by converts was and is expressly forbidden by rabbinical law, so the Khazars had to develop a mythic national history that gave them the right to Levitical status. They claimed that they were the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel and were not converts at all but merely returnees to Judaism. Furthermore, the tribe they claimed ancestry from was that of Simeon, the brother of the founder of the tribe of Levi; in the Bible (Genesis 49) it is made clear that the descendants of Simeon and Levi were to have a common destiny. P
robably it was the old pre-Jewish Khazar priests—the qams—who at the conversion had become Levites en masse while the rest of the ethnic Khazar population (and probably some other Khazar-influenced peoples) had become ordinary non-Levitical Jews.

  In the tenth and eleventh centuries, as the Khazar state disintegrated, and into the thirteenth century, as the Cuman and Mongol hordes pushed large numbers of refugees westward, Khazar and Khazar-influenced groups professing Judaism—including the probably highly committed Levites—migrated into eastern Europe, where they mixed with other Jewish groups moving east from Germany and north from Italy. As a result, many different peoples with different languages had to adopt a lingua franca, and that language became Yiddish—a composite language with a medieval German base but also including Slavic, Romance, Hebrew, Aramaic, possibly Turkic, and other lexical and syntactical components.

  In time, the Ashkenazim became the dominant tradition in world Jewry, but the numerical strength that allowed them to achieve that status almost certainly derived, at least in part, from the Jewish empire of Khazaria, a state that vanished from the world stage a thousand years ago and has been forgotten even by most of the world’s history books.

  Thus did the climatic and consequent political events in sixth-century Mongolia lead, via Turkic expansion and the subsequent formation of the Khazar empire, to both the non-Islamic nature of Europe and the size, ethnic makeup, and predominant cultural orientation of world Jewry.

  Courtesy of the climatic chaos of the mid–sixth century, Avars, Slavs, Arabs, Turks, and Khazars changed Europe’s history forever.

  PART SIX

  WESTERN

  EUROPE

  13

  D I S A S T E R I N

  B R I T A I N

  The climatic problems of the sixth century—both directly and through the medium of the plague—were also inducing fundamental change, bringing ancient western Europe to an end and ushering in its protomodern successors. Many of the modern states of western Europe owe their genesis to the climatic and epidemiological turmoil of this period. It was, for example, arguably the single most pivotal era in British history, for it witnessed a decisive change in the balance of power between the island’s two major ethnic groups.

  Prior to the fifth century, Britain had been a predominantly Celtic (native British) land. Then, in the 440s, substantial numbers of Germanic peoples had crossed the North Sea and settled in parts of what is now eastern and southern England. Over subsequent decades, hundreds of tiny Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were established. Some then amalgamated to become slightly larger units—Sussex, Surrey, Kent, Essex, early Wessex, East Anglia, and early Mercia. By the early sixth century (perhaps by 510 or 520) Anglo-Saxon expansion had virtually ceased in the face of Celtic resistance. This was the period normally associated with the quasi-legendary figure of King Arthur, a successful pan-British war leader. The Germanic east and the Celtic west then began to develop independently and separately.

  The historical evidence shows that on the whole the British disliked the Anglo-Saxons so vehemently that normally they did not wish to mix or even trade with them, and the archaeological evidence confirms that there was indeed virtually no trade (and therefore probably little personal contact) between the Celtic west and the Germanic east.¹ In physical terms, vast forests separated the two peoples along most of what had become by the early sixth century a relatively stable frontier. And yet, by the early years of the following century, the Germanic Anglo-Saxons had taken over vast tracts of Celtic land, were engaged in further aggressive expansion, and had become the dominant geopolitical force. All this came about as a result, both direct and indirect, of the same worldwide climatic chaos that caused famines in China, snow in Mesopotamia, the first emergence of plague in East Africa, and the darkening of the sun, as reported in Constantinople.

  Tree-ring evidence from Britain shows that tree growth slowed down significantly in 535–536 and did not fully recover until 555. The concentration of major climatic problems in the period 535–555 was seven times greater than in any other equivalent period during the rest of the 170-year span between 480 and 650.² Irish annals say that in Ireland there was a famine (“a failure of bread”) in 538, almost certainly due to climatic problems. The Meteorological Office survey of British weather—A Meteorological Chronology up to A.D. 1450—reveals that there were “floods in the Tweed with heavy casualties” in 536; that in 545 there was an “intensely cold winter”; that in 548, 250 people were killed in a “storm in London” in which “many homes were thrown down”; that in 550 “large hail stones like pullet’s eggs fell in Scotland”; that in 552 there was “violent rain in Scotland for five months”; that in 554 “the winter was so severe with frost and snow that the birds and wild animals became so tame as to allow themselves to be taken by hand”; and that in 555 there were “severe thunderstorms all over Britain.”

  The significance of this information lies not in each individual entry but in the statistical concentration of them in the years 535–555, compared with the rest of the period. Yet despite the apparent severity of the climatic conditions and despite the famine (538 or possibly 536 in Ireland and almost certainly also in mainland Britain) associated with their onset, these events probably did not have any lasting impact, at least not directly. Interestingly, however, the period of the famine was much later (possibly as late as the mid–tenth century) reported—or more probably “selected”—as the death-date of King Arthur, A.D. 537. It was instead an indirect effect of the 530s climatic chaos which was to wreak major and permanent change on Britain.

  In c. 549 the bubonic plague, having swept up from East Africa and across the Middle East and Europe, finally reached the shores of the British Isles. In Ireland, the Annals of Ulster record that “a great epidemic” (a “mortalitas magna”) broke out. Of the aristocracy, at least six important figures—Finnia, Moccu, Telduib, Colam, Mac Tail, Sinchell, and Colum of Inis Celtra—are said to have perished. In Wales, the Welsh Annals also reveal that in 547 (corrected to 549 by some modern historians) the king of Gwynedd, a powerful monarch called Maelgwn, died of plague.³

  The plague (which, as already described, had started in East Africa a decade earlier) almost certainly entered Britain on board ships that had come from either southwest France or, more likely, from the Mediterranean itself. As elsewhere, the carriers of the dread disease were stowaway black rats. There would have been plenty of opportunity for the epidemic to enter Britain because trade between the Mediterranean and the western part of the British Isles flourished in the first half of the sixth century, right up to the time of the plague.

  Two key locations stand out as the most likely initial points of entry for the disease: Tintagel, on the north Cornish coast, and Cadbury Congresbury, on the river Yeo, two miles from the Bristol Channel. Both places were likely to have had direct contact with ships originating in the Mediterranean.

  Tintagel—the mythical place of King Arthur’s conception—appears to have been a royal citadel in the fifth century and the first half of the sixth. A substantial number of stone buildings from the period have been discovered on the site, as have considerable quantities of imported Mediterranean pottery. Excavations so far—in a relatively small percentage of the site—have unearthed three thousand fragments, and it is likely that tens of thousands more shards still remain to be discovered. An analysis of this unearthed material reveals that the royal elite at Tintagel were importing fine tableware from Phocaea in what is now western Turkey, other tableware items from the Carthage area (now Tunisia), jars from Sardis in western Turkey, and olive oil or wine amphoras from both Cilicia (southern Turkey) and the Peloponnese in southern Greece.

  The Mediterranean influence at Tintagel may have gone even deeper than merely satisfying exotic tastes for fancy tableware and wines. Traders or even diplomats from the Roman world may well have lived at the royal court there. Excavations at a churchyard near Tintagel have unearthed two indications of a more pervasive Mediterranean influen
ce—slate tablets bearing stylized crosses of a type more usually found in the Mediterranean region, and remarkable evidence of graveside funerary feasts—again, things more normally associated with Mediterranean (specifically North African) practice.4

  Thus mercantile and cultural contact was fairly strong. The Roman Empire, which was pushing west at this time, may even have viewed western Britain as simply a semidetached part of the Roman domain. Yet by the second half of the sixth century, Tintagel was substantially deserted. Almost certainly the culprit was the plague. The date fits, and the opportunities there for contact with the disease were probably the greatest in Britain.

  A second mainland British entry point for the plague was probably the small town of Cadbury Congresbury on the river Yeo in Somerset. Excavations there have, as at Tintagel, produced evidence of trade with the Mediterranean. Fragments of wine amphoras from southern Greece, fine plates from western Turkey and North Africa, and olive oil amphoras from southern Turkey have been unearthed on the site. All date from the first half of the sixth century A.D.—and again, during the second half of the century, the site became deserted.

  Additional British Isles entry points for plague rats may have included a coastal settlement north of Dublin called Lough Shinney, which ceased to exist in or immediately after the mid–sixth century; the fortress of Garranes near Cork, which also ceased to function then;5 the north Welsh coastal site of Deganwy, a probable fifth- or sixth-century royal center associated with the known royal plague victim, King Maelgwn; and, also in Wales, the Porthmadog/Borth-y-gest area at the northeast corner of Cardigan Bay.