The Khazar Economy: Economic Integration or Disintegration? 185
Black Sea due to the constant movement of peoples and tribes in the region.65
For the moment it is difficult, if not impossible to indicate specific features on
the basis of archaeological data, which could aid the ethnic distinction of the
various communities.
It can be assumed that the constant struggle for territories and pastures
forced parts of the population or even entire tribes to withdraw to the steppe
borders in the forest-steppe zone, the Crimea, the North Caucasus and
Dagestan. There they could not develop extensive stock-breeding and volun-
tarily or not, they began to settle down. Thus, in the fifth century, the Alans,
pressed by the Huns and other invaders, withdrew to the Northern Caucasus,
to the territory of the future Alania.66 It is hardly a coincidence that in the
Ecclesiastical History of Zacharias Rhetor (mid-sixth century) special attention
is paid to the Bulgars and Alans who had cities.67 The fact that they are men-
tioned among the peoples with a nomadic stock-breeding economy should
not be seen as contradictory. Rather, it shows a version of the agricultural and
stock-breeding economy that was typical for the Bulgars and Alans in the fol-
lowing centuries.68
65 For example, after the death of Attila, some of his subject tribes, led by his son Ernakh,
migrated from Central Europe towards the Northern Black Sea region. At the same time,
the Saragur, Urog/Ogur and Onogur tribes appeared north of the Caucasus and the Black
Sea. They came from the Volga region, pursued by the Sabirs. Not long thereafter (in the
early sixth century), came the Sabirs, pursued by the Avars, and settled in Eastern Europe.
The Avars themselves arrived by the mid-sixth century and conquered a large part of the
tribes that inhabited the Northern Black Sea region. Following immediately after them
came the Turks, who, while pursuing the Avars, managed to conquer most of the tribes
that lived east of the Don and in Dagestan (for a comment on the sources and an analysis,
see Artamonov 1962, 60–138). In Liapushkin’s opinion, the “lull” in migrations that came
in the seventh century aided the spread of agriculture in the steppe zone (Liapushkin
1958a, 145–147).
66 Kuznetsov 1962, 14. The main system of settlements, however, emerged in the late sixth
and early seveth centuries (Kovalevskaia 1984, 134–135 and 144; Arzhantseva 2007a, 75–77
and 2007b, 61–62).
67 Dimitrov 1987, 33; see the text of Zacharias Rhetor in Petrov and Giuzelev 1978, 57.
68 On the basis of the quoted account of Zacharias Rhetor, Stepanov 2003c, 38 assumes that
some of the Bulgars began to settle down already in the fifth century. Their economy
was “semi-agricultural and semi-nomadic, which was fitting for both the phase of their
development and the specific ecological conditions and climate in the lands north of the
Caucasian Ridge”. During this time period—“from the fourth to the sixth century, stock-
breeding in its various forms prevailed among the Bulgar tribes; by the seventh century
elements of a permanent sedentariness began to appear, which archeologists today most
often pinpoint to the region of the Crimean Peninsula. Already then, a specific type of