120 THE SILK ROADS

were being sold but also freemen. The Venetians were accused of willingly selling the subjects of neighbouring lands, whether Christians or not.36

Eventually, the slave trade began to dwindle-at least from eastern and central Europe. One reason for this was that the Viking Rus' shifted their focus from long-distance trafficking to the business of protection rackets. Attention focused on the benefits that the Khazars enjoyed from the trade that passed through towns like Atil, thanks to the levies raised on all merchandise transiting Khazar territory. The famous Persian geographical treatise Hudiid al- Alam states that the very basis of the Khazar economy lay in

its tax revenues: "the well-being and wealth of the king of the Khazars are mostly from maritime duties."37 Other Muslim commentators repeatedly note the substantial tax receipts collected by the Khazar authorities from commercial activities-which included levies charged on inhabitants of the capital.38

Inevitably, this caught the attention of the Viking Rus', as did the tribute paid to the khagan by the various subject tribes. One by one these were picked off and their loyalties (and payments) redirected to aggressive new overlords. By the second half of the ninth century, the Slavic tribes of central and southern Russia were not only paying tribute to the Scandinavians,

but were being forbidden to make any further payments "to the Khazars, on the grounds that there was no reason for them to pay it." Payment was to be made to the Rus' leader instead.39 This mirrored practices elsewhere-such as in Ireland, where protection money gradually replaced human trafficking: after being attacked year after year, records the Annals of St. Bertin, the Irish agreed to make annual contributions, in return for peace.40

In the east, it was not long before the increasingly heavy presence of the Rus' resulted in outright confrontation with the Khazars. After launching a series of raids on Muslim trading communities on the Caspian Sea that "spilled rivers of blood" and continued until the Viking Rus' were

"gorged with loot and worn out with raiding," the Khazars themselves were attacked. 41 Atil was sacked and completely destroyed in 965. "If a leaf were left on a branch, one of the Rus' would carry it off," wrote one commentator; "not a grape, not a raisin remains [in Khazaria]."42 The Khazars were effectively removed from the equation, and profits from trade with the Muslim world flowed in even greater volumes towards northern Europeas the quantities of coin hoards found along the waterways of Russia show.43

From:

Frankopan, P. (2018). The Slave Road. In Silk Roads: A New History of the World (pp. 114-120). New York, NY: Vintage Books.