36 chapter one
equally.^76 An element of rhetoric and didactics is certainly present in
this statement, but it is also apparent that the Chinese felt real fear
of the consequences of the broken status quo along the borders aft er
the help they got from the Uighurs in suppressing the rebellion of An
Lu-shan. However, the invasion of the Chinese otherness into the kha-
ganate and the Uighur one—into the Middle Kingdom (mostly with
the protection of the Manichaean communities there), were not equal.
Indeed, it soon turned out to be disastrous both for the Uighurs and
their state, even though their center was traditionally situated on the
sacred territory of Otüken, i.e. far away from the northern Chinese
border. For both the Turks and Uighurs ‘unlocking the door’ of the
sedentary Chinese civilization turned out to be disastrous as they had
at their disposal neither symbolic, nor economic resources to long
resist its civilization’s otherness and economic power.
Th e Khazars acted in a similar manner aft er the late eighth cen-
tury when they were only able to eff ectively control the territories to
the north of the Caucasus. Th ey ceased their attacks to the south of
Derbend and shift ed the center of their state from the region of the
Sulak and Terek Rivers (present-day Dagestan) and the old centers of
Samandar and Balandzhar to the far north, at the Volga River estuary,
where they established the large capital city of Itil.^77 Aft er the Arabs
‘blocked’ them, Derbend turned into a border again. However, it did
not prevent the intrusion of Islamic infl uences and the accompany-
ing otherness into the khaganate during the ninth-tenth century. Th e
merchants also played an important part in the process as in the early
mediaeval period Muslim and Jewish merchants enjoyed considerable
fame and prestige in Europe, the Near East and Asia. Due mostly to
their activity, the Khazar khaganate not only fl ourished during this
period but also ‘broke up’ the boundaries with the sedentary civiliza-
(^76) Bichurin 1950, 323–324. For the scale of the wealth that arrived at the Uighur
court one could take into account the information about the annual incomes in the
khaganate of silk products—in the course of the ninth century, the Uighurs received
from China almost half a million rolls of silk. Th is can be compared with that same
situation but referring to the Turks—the latter received for one of their horses 4 or 5
rolls only. For this with more details see, Mackerras 1972 (2nd ed.), 47–50; Barfi eld
1991, 39.
(^77) More see in, Golden 1980; Golden 1992, 237–238; Novosel’tsev 1990, 184, 190–
192; Pletneva 1976, Ch. 5: ‘Th e New geography of Khazaria’; Zakhoder 1962, 167–202;
Magomedov 1994, 69–82, especially for Itil—143–152.