4 introduction
the phrases “Pax Turcica” and “Pax Chazarica” for the Turkic and the
Khazar khaganate, respectively. While the primary meaning of ‘pax’ is
“peace,” the Turkic-Mongol word “el/il”, which was equally translated
as “peace” by West European authors writing in Latin in the aftermath
of the Mongol invasion, in fact refers to the political and military organ -
ization in the area onto which peace was imposed and in which law
was established by force. In other words, the correlate of the Turkic-
Mongol notion of “peace” was obedience (subordination). (In order
for “el” to exist, someone had to accept the political domination of
the respective khagan(ate), and not just the “peace” that polity pre-
sumably promoted. This terminological distinction is important not
just for drawing contrasts between sedentary societies and the ‘Steppe
Empires’, but also for gauging the degree to which misunderstanding
and mistrust dominated the relations between them). In this book, I
adopt a comparative approach, blending a global (Eurasia), regional
(Pax Nomadica/Steppe Empire, or following David Christian—“Inner
Eurasia”)^6 and local (ancient Turks, Uighurs, Bulgars, and Khazars)
perspective.
The phrase “steppe empire(s)” has already been used here in the
sense of what, ever since R. Grousset, was known as an “empire of the
steppes”. A ‘Steppe Empire’ in the early Middle Ages was the polity
of any one of the “imperial peoples” who, between the mid-sixth and
the tenth century (the ‘golden age’ of the ‘Steppe Empires’) established
large territorial polities: Turks, Uighurs, Khazars, and Bulgars. Con-
spicuously absent from my analysis are the Avars. The reasons are
quite obvious: unlike the other “imperial peoples,” the Avars left no
written sources, which could allow a glimpse into their ways of defin-
ing themselves. Moreover, the territories under Avar rule between
ca. 570 and ca. 820 were mostly in Central Europe, beyond what
ancient and medieval authors regarded as the traditional boundaries
of “Scythia”, especially the Lower Danube (together with the river’s
delta). In Antiquity, the Roman province between the Danube Delta
and the Black Sea was called “Scythia Minor”, because that region
was perceived to be very similar, in both landscape and living condi-
tions, to the “Great Scythia” of the steppe lands north of the Black and
Caspian Seas. It is not by accident that in his book “Nomads and the
Outside World ” A. Khazanov wrote of Pannonia (the lands in western
(^6) Christian 1998.