Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/440

 4o6 The Killing of the Khazar Kings.

the vigour of his constitution, and the state of the weather ; for the inclemency of the seasons is imputed by many races to the defects of their ruler and is visited upon them accordingly.

In the accounts of the Khazar monarchy which I have quoted, certain discrepancies may be noted in regard to the constitutional check which regicide furnishes to the excesses or defects of kings. According to Ibn Foszlan, the king was regularly killed at the end of a reign of forty years ; according to Ibn Haukal and Abulfeda, he was put to death at the close of a period which, on being raised to the throne, he had himself determined under circumstances not altogether favourable to mature re- flexion ; and according to Mas'udy, he suffered the extreme penalty of the law whenever drought or any other public misfortune had proved his unfitness to grasp the reins of power any longer. Which of these accounts is ■correct we have apparently no means of deciding, perhaps all of them were true at different times ; for the Khazars may have allowed themselves a certain latitude in their application of the great principle of regicide, content with putting their effete kings out of the way, without rigidly observing a pedantic uniformity in the manner and time of taking them off.

The report which Ibn Haukal and Abulfeda give of the mode of determining the length of the king's reign finds a curious parallel, and perhaps a confirmation, in the account which Chinese historians give of the manner in which the Thou khiu, or Turks, settled how long a kakhan or prince should rule over them. " When they proclaimed a kakhan, the grandees carried him on a sheet of felt nine times in a circle, following the course of the sun ; at each circuit he was saluted by everybody. On the completion of these circuits, they mounted him on horseback and threw round his neck a piece of taffeta, with which they pinched him so tight that he almost expired. Then they slackened