Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/416

 THE KILLING OF THE KHAZAR KINGS.

BY SIR J. G. FRAZER.

a certain stage of social evolution not a few races appear to have been in the habit of putting their kings to death, either at the end of a fixed term, or on the failure of the king’s health and strength, or simply whenever a great public calamity, such as drought or famine, had befallen the country. Among the peoples who have practised this remarkable system of limited monarchy, and have elevated regicide to the dignity of a public institution, must seemingly be numbered the Khazars or Khozars, a nation of south-eastern Russia, who in the Middle Ages maintained their independence for many centuries alike against Persia and the Byzantine Empire, carried on a busy trade between the east and the west, and repelled the wave of Mohammedan conquest, which, but for their resistance, might have deluged Europe from the south-east. It is hardly too much to say that during those dark ages when the power of Christendom sank to its lowest ebb, and the power of Islam rose to its highest pitch, Europe was protected against the swelling tide of Moslem aggression by three great mountain barriers, the Caucasus on the south-east, the Balkans in the centre, and the Pyrenees on the south-west; and that the passes which led over these ranges into the heart of the continent were guarded by three peoples, the Khazars, the Byzantine Greeks, and the Spaniards. Of these three redoubtable champions of Christendom, the Khazars have long