Today we will discuss the fascinating story of the Khazar Khaganate’s conversion to Judaism. The Khazars were a nomadic Turkic people that ruled the steppe north of the Caucasus from a city called Atil located on the mouth of the Volga (Itil) River. This khaganate formed an obstacle to Arab […]
This week we continue on our theme of the Reconquista with the discussion of an unlikely Portuguese romance associated with a very famous pilgrimage site. Although the medieval Iberian peninsula saw much conflict between Christian and Muslim kingdoms, there was also much interaction between Christians, Muslims, and Jews who lived […]
The Sarmatians were an Iranian-speaking group of nomadic tribes that invaded the Roman Empire beginning in the 2nd century AD. Between the 2nd and 5th centuries BC, Sarmatians spread out from Southern Russia and Ukraine throughout Roman Empire. Tribes such as the Roxalani served in the Roman army as auxiliaries […]
As I discussed in the last post, the Umayyad consolidation of power in Iberia ran into problems following the debacle outside Toulouse. When the governor of Anbasa raised taxes, he had to respect treaties that had been made with conquered Visigothic nobles in 711, limiting his ability to tax them […]
The Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal are today overwhelmingly Catholic. For part of the Middle Ages though, much of their current territory fell within various Muslims states that medieval sources collectively referred to as al-Andalus. At one point, virtually all of the peninsula fell under the rule of the […]