170 CHAPTER 3
although the 950s were only the beginning of this process. There is no evidence
that it affected the economy of Volga Bulgaria. Should it therefore be asserted
that this decrease in dirhams affected Khazaria, which had a lesser interest in
dirhams, at the very least because it did not mint its own coins or at least not
in such quantities? The question, therefore, is to what extent did the Khazar
economy depend on international trade during the tenth century?
According to T. Noonan, the viability of the Khazar Khaganate was based
on a profitable international trade and a well-developed internal market, and
the reason Khazaria survived for so long was that it had a mostly self-sufficient
economy, which did not rely on imports. He assumes nonetheless that the
shift of the main trade route from Khazaria towards Volga Bulgaria after 900
caused major losses for the Khazar treasury, thus undermining the political
power of the khaganate. The Khazar economy could not cope with the reduced
income from foreign trade.92 But we really have no idea as to the degree of the
khaganate’s influence on international trade and to what extent the Khazars
were “bypassed” by it in the tenth century! Crisis periods affect the develop-
ment and capabilities of one country or another, but are not the sole factor
that defines them. In this case, the crisis is general and refers to the supplies of
silver, which in Eastern Europe affected mostly Kievan Rus’ and Volga Bulgaria.
So the question essentially is: why did the relatively highly developed economy
of Khazaria fail to ensure the survival of the khaganate?
chapter on the Khazar economy, some of these commodities were produced in vari-
ous centers within Khazaria itself, from where they were distributed, together with the
imported goods, along the international trade roads (on the various sorts of necklaces
and beads, see for instance Kovalevskaia 2001 and 2002). On the slave trade, see Tortika
2006a, 347–429.
92 Noonan 2007, 243–244.