The Ideology Of The Ninth And Tenth Centuries 61
al-ʿAlam, as Isha (Shad) is as unlikely as interpreting it as Ashina.185 And yet,
assuming that the shad title did not exist in Khazaria, could it be possible that
during the whole period of the Khazar dual kingship the vicegerent bore the
bek title? Sources from different traditions and with different origins mention
a person with the tarkhan title as the king of the Khazars. In Hudud al-ʿAlam it
is the tarkhan-khagan who is a descendant of Ansa.186
People bearing the title of tarkhan and in one way or another connected
to Khazaria and the Khazars come up in sources from the period between
the seventh and the first half of the ninth centuries. In 630, the Khazar (pos-
sibly) military commander Chorpan Tarkhan was sent by the Turkic khagan to
Armenia. Avchi Tarkhan is mentioned in 683 among the subjects of Alp Ilitver,
ruler of the “Kingdom of the Huns” in Dagestan and a vassal to the Khazar
khagan. Alp Tarkhan was a Khazar military commander whose army joined
forces with the Khazar khagan in 716. In 737, during the campaign of Marwan,
turned devastating for Khazaria, a forty thousand-strong selected army (“sons
of tarkhans”), led by Khazar Tarkhan, faced the Arabs in the Volga Region. He
was killed and his forces were defeated. It is after this defeat that the khagan
was forced to sue for peace and convert to Islam. In 758, a Khazar princess
and daughter of the khagan, accompanied by tarkhans, married the Abbasid
governor of Armenia. The Life of St. Stephen of Sourozh (the eighth century)
mentions Tarkhan George.187
All these accounts depict the tarkhans in Khazaria during the eighth century
outside the context of the kingly title. In Khazaria, the tarkhans were part of the
high nobility. They were military commanders, of elite and selected forces at
that, but they also made up the entourage of a Khazar princess. The inscription
of Mojilian (Bilge) Khagan (684–734), ruler of the Second Turkic Khaganate,
provides an interesting parallel with regard to the tarkhans’ elevated status and
their possible connection to the beks. In it, the eastern beks (i.e. those with a
higher rank) were ruled by an apa tarkhan and the southern ones—by a tam-
gan tarkhan and boila baga tarkhan.188 Given that these tarkhans were part of
the “Tolis-Tardush” system, typical for the Turkic khaganates, and that the suc-
cession to the throne in the khaganates was linked to the so-called “appanage-
rota” system, in which the separate high-ranking positions and vicarages were
held by “princes by blood”,189 it would be safe to assume family ties between
185 Golden 1980, 207 and 219–220; Novosel’tsev 1990, 137–138.
186 Zakhoder 1962, 189 and 206; Golden 1980, 219; Novosel’tsev 1990, 134.
187 Golden 1980, 150, 154, 176, and 181; Dunlop 1967, 179 and 252; Artamonov 1962, 219.
188 Iordanov 1996b, 55 and 1997, 91.
189 Iordanov 1996b, 54–55 and 1997, 89.