Volga Bulgaria

The name my father gave me

formationDrafted from others, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North (2012)

Almish, king of the Bulghars on the middle Volga, had written to the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir asking for teachers of Islamic law, a mosque, a minbar so the Friday sermon could be read in his name, and a fortress against the kings who threatened him. The caliph agreed, and the embassy that carried his answer - a party that included the diplomat Ahmad ibn Fadlan, whose own account of the journey survives - reached Almish's camp after a journey of many months, on 12 May 922. Four kings rode out to escort the travellers in; the next day Almish himself rode out to meet them, dismounted, and prostrated himself before the caliph's letter, scattering coins over his visitors as a sign of welcome.

A sermon read wrong

The party rested four days while Almish summoned the leaders of his people to hear the letter read. It was only once the formalities were under way that Ibn Fadlan discovered a problem: the Friday sermon at Almish's own camp had been calling him "King Yiltawar," a form of royal address Ibn Fadlan judged inappropriate, since in his view only God should be addressed as king from a pulpit. He told Almish the caliph's own preferred formula named the caliph as God's servant and slave, never as a king in his own right, and asked what name should be used for Almish instead. Almish's answer went further than Ibn Fadlan had expected.

Ja'far, son of Abd Allah

Almish refused to have his own father's name read out, because his father had died an unbeliever, and asked instead for the caliph's own name, Ja'far. Told he could take it, he chose it on the spot, naming his father Abd Allah - "servant of God" - in place of the name his unbelieving father had actually held. The sermon was corrected on the spot: "O God, preserve in good health your slave Ja'far, son of Abd Allah, amir of the Bulghars, client of the Commander of the Faithful." It was a small change in wording, made in an afternoon, but it bound the Bulghar kingship formally to Baghdad rather than to the customs of the steppe kings around it - the same investiture that had already brought Almish an official mosque and the right to have his own minbar built.

A market becomes a city

expansionDrafted from others, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North (2012)

When Ibn Fadlan visited in 922, Bulghar was a seasonal market three miles from the Volga's eastern bank, with no permanent buildings at all - only the felt yurts of a still semi-nomadic people, and a king who was himself a vassal of the Khazars, his own son held hostage at the Khazar court in Itil. The Rus destruction of the Khazar khaganate in 969, and the sack of Khazaran and of Bulghar itself that came with it, might have been expected to end the kingdom outright. Instead the Bulghars used the vacuum the Khazars' fall left behind to extend their own reach south, eventually as far as Saqsin, the city that grew up on the old Khazar capital's own site.

The leading fur market in the world

By the time the traveller Abu Hamid al-Andalusi lived at Bulghar in the 1130s, the transformation was complete. The yurt-camp Ibn Fadlan had described was gone; in its place stood a walled city of wooden houses ringed by an oak stockade, with villages in its own countryside and a king who levied tribute on what Abu Hamid called "infinite peoples" to the north. Bulghar had become the leading fur market in the world, sending beaver, sable and mink in enormous quantities to buyers across the Islamic world, India and China.

others, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North (2012) · Ivan Shishkin · CC BY-SA 4.0

Winter raids and the slave trade

Some things had not changed. Slaving remained a central part of the kingdom's economy exactly as it had been in Ibn Fadlan's day: when the rivers froze hard enough to cross, the king led raids north against pagan peoples beyond his own tributaries, seizing their women, children and horses and selling them on at Bulghar for distribution through the cities of the Islamic heartland. Two centuries after Almish's embassy to Baghdad, the memory of Ibn Fadlan's own visit had faded into legend - Abu Hamid records a different, garbled story of the Bulghars' conversion, in which a travelling healer cured the king and queen on condition of their becoming Muslim - but the kingdom the embassy had once recognized was, by any material measure, at the height of its own power.

A glorious campaign

contractionDrafted from Rambaud, History of Russia, from the Earliest Times to 1880, Volume I (1879)

By the second half of the twelfth century Bulghar's most active neighbor to the west was no longer Kiev but Suzdal, a principality on the upper Volga whose princes had turned their ambitions inward rather than toward the old Dnieper capital. Andrei Bogoliubsky, prince of Suzdal from 1157 to 1174, was of a different temper from the "joyous," easygoing princes the sources describe at Kiev - an ambitious, restless and imperious ruler who built up Vladimir and his own new settlement of Bogoliubovo rather than compete for a Kievan throne he had come, by the end of his reign, to regard as worth plundering rather than holding.

Rambaud, History of Russia, from the Earliest Times to 1880, Volume I (1879) · Unknown artist · CC BY-SA 4.0

A reputation built on Bulghar's account

It was against this newly assertive Suzdal that Bulghar found itself tested. Andrei is credited with a campaign against the Volga Bulghars substantial enough to raise his own standing across Russia - called only "glorious" by the chronicler who preserved word of it, with no further account of its course, its targets, or its outcome for Bulghar itself, and no precise year attached to it beyond its place within his seventeen-year reign, before the sack of Kiev that closed it. It stands as the clearest sign that Bulghar's long-standing relationship with the Rus principalities to its west had shifted, by this point, into open military contest with a rising Suzdalian power that the kingdom's own earlier trading partners at Kiev had never quite posed.

The road Ibn Fadlan took

endDrafted from others, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North (2012)

The Mongol advance into the lands Ibn Fadlan's embassy had once crossed began at the western end of the same road. In 1220 the geographer Yaqut, then sheltering at Gurganj - the Khwarazmian capital where Ibn Fadlan's own party had once waited three frozen months for the ice to break before pushing north to Bulghar - heard rumours of the Mongols' approach and fled for Aleppo in time. The following year the Mongol army razed Gurganj to the ground and flooded the ruins by turning the Oxus itself against the city.

others, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North (2012) · Hans Birger Nilsen · CC BY-SA 2.0

The kingdom Ibn Fadlan had recognized

The Bulghar kingdom that had received Ibn Fadlan's embassy three centuries earlier, survived the Rus sack of 969, and grown by the 1130s into the leading fur market in the world did not escape the same armies for long. In 1237 the Mongols conquered the Volga Bulghars outright, ending Bulghar kingship on the middle Volga less than two decades after the embassy road itself had been broken at its western end. The kingdom that Almish had bound to Baghdad with a change of wording in a Friday sermon ceased, after that, to answer to a king of its own.