Madjar on the Kuma-river

Cities of Khazaria. Kromos Estatium
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     The khazar cities here include not only those cities that were built by the khazar architects, but also those that were built before the arrival of the khazars, were used by the khazars for their needs and tasks for a long time.
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Madjar on the Kuma-river **
     Also Holy Cross, Large Madjars, Small Madjars, Olu hungarians, today the town of Budenovsk.
     It was a well-developed city with a considerable population of the huns, Khazar Khaganate, and the Golden Horde. The city is known mainly from archaeological materials, myths, tales and legends, as well as from the results of historical analysis of all information about the surrounding area.
     People have lived on the site of the future city since ancient times, but permanent settlements here begin to appear in the gothic era, and the first proto-urban structures appear here with the arrival of the Kingdom of the huns.
     According to legend, in 858, Constantine and Methodius went to the khazars by the ancient greek-khazar road and visited all the capitals of the Khazaria, they were also in Madjar, where, with the permission of the Khagan, they baptized the slovenian Rus and others who lived there.
     Madjars Upper and Madjars Lower on some maps are designated as alan cities that stand apart from the Madjars, the foundation of which dates back to the 7th century, at the time of the end of the Great migration of peoples, when they settled in the foothills of the Caucasus.
     From the fortified part of Madjara, which was located on a high promontory of the Kuma river, there was a wide staircase down, paved with tiles. A staircase led to the lower part of the city, where there were crafts and trade. Apparently, this is why the ancient chroniclers when describing Madjar divided it into Lower and Upper, then into Small and Large Madjar.
     According to the history of Derbent, the fortress in the city was founded by the khazars in the 8th century on the steep bank of the Kuma river, in the historical Kumyk plain. This fortress was called Small and Large Madjars. In ancient persian texts, the city was called Belendjer, meaning Big Madjars, which leads to Belendger, the location of which has not yet been established.
     Since this city is often mentioned in persian chronicles and literary works, historians believe that the foundation of a fortified settlement on Kuma could have been the persian Kings of kings, Shahinshakhs Anushirvan and Kavad, who sought to strengthen their positions on the Kumyk tract, where caravans from Central Asia along the Great Silk Road passed from the 2nd century to the New Faith.
     In the 5th century after the birth of Christ, the undivided supremacy of the persians here began to be disputed by the savir-bulgars of the Kingdom of the huns, and then the Western Turkic Khaganate. In the 6th century, Shahinshah Kavad commissioned 360 fortresses on the strategic road from Derbent through the Kumyk tract to the Don. He stayed in one fortress every day, spending exactly a year on the acceptance of all the fortresses.
     As for the name of Madjar, many agree that It was assigned to the city in the early middle ages, when a military garrison of uyghurs-magyars was put here. Many alans, jews, and local mountaineers lived in the city at this time. Many local researchers are inclined to believe that it was from this mixture of peoples that the population of the Balkar society began to grow. And the balkars took their name from a certain leader named Malkar, who brought here savir-bulgars from the Kingdom of the huns.
     Among the karaites, Madjar or Magyar in other words, means a cart drawn by oxens, as well as a driver with a cart. Only the karaites know the meaning of this symbol, because they were the ancient witnesses of the foundation of the city of Madjar. The madjars also called bulgarini burtases.
     Hungarians believe that the founder of this city is considered to be their national hero Major, who married an alanian Princess, the daughter of the alanian Prince Dula. From their marriage, the entire Magyar, majorese family descended.
     Many mountain clans consider themselves genocultural heirs of the ancient Madjar, Madjar of the first Millennium, which in their legends appears not only as a city, but also as a certain land, region. So says digorskiy famali Bodilatov. This is the opinion of many families of balkars, chechens, urusbievs, kumyk-tyumens of Mozdok, kumyk-braguns
     The memory of the city of Madjar is preserved in the naming of many places, toponyms, and hydronyms. The circassians have a settlement called Madjar-oune, which means houses in Madjar. In North Ossetia is the toponym named Madjar. In Abkhazia remained hydronym Majorca. In Kabarda, the madjars are called a chain of mounds. In Stavropol Krai there are Madzharskiy salt lake and the village of Burgun-Madjars. According to legend, somewhere near Astrakhan were Mozhar hungry fields, through which in 1569 the turks and crimean tatars fled after an unsuccessful raid on Astrakhan.
     After the arrival of the Horde in Madjar in the 13th century, many people who lived in it, chose to leave the city and go to the place where their kindred peoples lived, to settle among the mountain peoples of the Caucasus.
     During the Golden Horde era, Madjar received additional incentives for development, since it was located at the intersection of almost all trade routes of the North Caucasus, Transcaucasia, the Northern Black sea region, and the Volga region, and was included in the trade of the huge Golden Horde Empire.
     There were many crafts here, Madjar, starting from the reign of Khan Tokhta, under Khan Uzbek, and under Khan Janibek, minted his own coin.
     After 1312, both cities of Madjar, both Small and Large, belonged to the right limit of the Jochi ulus of the Golden Horde.
     The population in the city was mixed, there were turks, russians, alans, and jews. Famous travelers visit the city and mark it in their memories. This includes Abu'l-Ghazi Khan in 1282, Abu'l-Fida in 1321, and Ibn Battuta in 1333.
     In the middle of the 14th century, the city became one of the main residences of the Horde under the leadership of Khan Janibek, under whom the city developed socio-cultural complexes of various directions, including monastic centers such as khanaki, where there were mosques, schools, places for trade and meetings, inns. People of all nationalities and faiths were free to enter and leave this community.
     In 1357, Janibek is killed, and a time of troubles begins in the Horde.
     In 1361, Madjar was taken over by Kildibek, but after his death in battle against Murid Khan, Madjar was ruled by the elders of the city, switching to the system of self-government. At the same time, its multidirectional socio-cultural development continues to persist, which attracts people of different cultures, artisans, and free traders to the city.
     Coins from the most distant countries were used here, even persian and indian ones, which indicates the presence of corresponding diasporas in the city, among which this money had a turnover. The city was located on one of the trade routes of the Great Silk Road.
     In 1373, the city was captured by Mamai, who managed to subdue the western part of the Golden Horde.
     In 1380, Mamai stayed in Madzhar, from where he then went to Kulikvo field, where he suffered a crushing defeat from the troops of Rus. In the same year, the city has a new ruler, Mamai's rival Tokhtamysh.
     Despite the frequent change of Rulers, Madjar retains its relative independence, thanks to a well-developed system of self-government, in which all the main professions, diasporas, and merchants participated, and whose opinion was also taken into account by the Tatar khans.
     In 1395, the city was severely damaged as a result of the conflict between Tamerlane and Tokhtamysh. Tamerlane did not spare Madjar, which for almost 20 years was one of the main support bases of Tokhtamysh, from which came provisions, military arsenal and hired soldiers. The destruction of the city was led by Miranshah, one of Tamerlane's generals.
     However, the city comes to life, and artisans and merchants return. They do not care who pays the bribe, as long as security and order in the city are ensured, which Tamerlan did well.
     In 1457, Russia was united and separated from the Horde. Having lost one of its main sponsors in a political Union called the Golden Horde, this Union is dissolved in 1459. The city of Madjar is part of the tributary cities of the Astrakhan khanate.
     But this Astrakhan Union of disparate, multi-lingual, multicultural khanates gradually weakened, so that in 1556, a thousand well-organized cossacks took the residence of the Astrakhan Khan in Astrakhan, putting an end to the Golden Horde.
     Madjar was free again. But, having lost a political sponsor, the local government was not able to provide a fair interfaith and social court. Urban economy is gradually falling into decline. Madjar is only interested in pilgrims who come here to the ancient mausoleums to honor the memory of their ancestors.
     Since the beginning of the 19th year, a new socio-cultural phenomenon called the Holy Cross has appeared near Madjar. The stone structures of Madjar are gradually dismantled and new houses are built from them in a new architectural christian culture.
     There was a well-developed architectural corporation in Madjar that developed several technologies for the production of building materials, the quality of which is comparable to modern ones, and the secret of producing mamai bricks has not been revealed yet. After several hundred years, it still retains its fortress, despite the fact that it has been repeatedly used in various designs. The same brick is found also in Rus at that time, used in the construction of stone churches in place of wooden ones.
     Local artisans had a variety of furnaces, in which they prepared bricks from a variety of compositions and different shapes.
     Houses in Madjar were built of red-hot bricks for the rich citizens, and of raw bricks for the poor. At the same time, all of them were faced with glazed tiles of different colors in a kind of plant, geometric or star ornament. On the walls of mosques and madrassas, small tiles were laid out quotes from the Koran.
     Rich merchants of non-local diasporas could use stone material that is not found in the local mountains. However, the wall coverings made of imported material were designed in the local artistic style, which indicates the strong influence of the madjar architectural corporation.
     The houses had heating, since the furnaces were located in the hall and the floors were heated by chimneys under the floors.
     In the quarters of rich businessmen, there was a self-flowing ceramic water supply from burnt clay pipes in brick trenches.
     There were many socially significant structures in the city, where there were public baths, schools at madrasas, and places for holding meetings. At the same time, the architecture of these structures was special, its own, madjar, which in its main elements was not repeated anywhere else.
     Outside of the craft city, Lower Madjar, there were a large number of agricultural settlements that served both the city itself and its commercial life, which was not limited to either Khazaria or the Horde. The city had a large number of crafts that were engaged in both repair and manufacture of agricultural tools.
     Artisans worked on stone millstones, and on sledges, and on sickles with ploughshares, and on scythes. And not far from the Lower town, several chigir irrigation systems of local design were found.
     Since there were always military detachments in Madzhar, both in the khazar and alan, and even more so, in the tatar-horde, there were artisans in abundance for various types of weapons. Here they made figurative knives, agricultural tools, metal utensils, castles, and so on, everything that was in use in the cities and territories of Khazaria, Alania, the Golden Horde, and even Rus.
     In the auls, or in russian in villages, in the madzhar district, there were many cattle, whose bones were used by city carvers to make small needles, bones for games, caskets, boxes, and carved ornaments. There is no particular culture of bone carving found here. These are mostly crafts and replicas.
     Since the time of the Khazar Khaganate, products and goods from China, Khorezm, Europe and Rus have been traded in the Madjar marketplaces.
     Arab travelers of the 14th century, in particular Ibn Battuta, noted the turkic nature of the urban sociocult, despite the presence of merchants, artisans, and soldiers from different countries of the non-turkic world. They also noted a predominantly islamic religious cult above all others. But this remark can be attributed to the attitude towards islam of the arab writers themselves, who had to note in their reports the breadth of the spread of islam throughout the world.
     Nevertheless, islam in the 14th century is really put forward in the North Caucasus as one of the dominant religions, which in Madjar could be accepted as the basis for the world order in the city. At that time, according to Ibn Battuta, there was already a Cathedral mosque in Madjar, where the elders of the city also came.
     In the bazaars of the city, you could meet spanish jews, arabs, chinese, greeks, and Novgorod merchants. It follows that local diasporas that had their say in the council of elders also had their own cultural centers for prayer, communication, and learning.
     The existence of christian churches is indicated by iron crosses found during the Golden Horde, as well as stone panels depicting christian saints. These panels were built into the walls of residential buildings. Apparently, after the abandonment of Madjar by the authorities, all the construction materials of religious centers were taken by residents to their courtyards, to the delight of modern archaeologists.
     It is also interesting that none of the arab, persian, сhinese travelers do not note the presence in the city of Madjar the Khan, or his any special influence. All of them noted the existence of a public management system.
     There is a legend that the body of the Holy Prince Mikhail of Tver, who was martyred on the orders of Uzbek Khan, was brought from the Horde through Madjar in 1319. The body was purchased by the Moscow boyars Georgievs. The local christian nobility greatly revered the deeds of Michael and prayed over him all night in the Temple while the procession rested in the city. At the same time, the city was illuminated all night by a shining pillar that rose to the very heavens.
     The reality of this event is indirectly confirmed by the fact that in 1884, local Christians built an Orthodox male Mamay-Madjar resurrection monastery. Until now, it has not stood, it was destroyed in 1930 due to the weakness of its structures. Builders tried to build the walls of the Temple from the so-called mamai bricks, but the technology was not followed, and after 50 years the bricks began to crumble.
     In the 14th century, several small churches with сatholic monasteries operated in the mountains of the North Caucasus. In Florence, there are documents according to which a certain elder and city administrator Madjar Gayerityan appealed to the Roman throne with a proposal to establish a сatholic diocese in Madjar, not the first, by the way, on the territory of future Rus.
     In 1330, Thomas Mankazol, Bishop of Samarkand, was sent to Madjar with the bulla of Pope John XXII, with the dedication of the organization of the diocese of Madjar. Bulla turned to some earth Euritania and lived there the hungarians, malcaits and alans.
     The existence of a Catholic Department in Madjara is also mentioned in a bulla of 1402 by Pope Boniface IX. At the same time, travelers traveling from Transcaucasia through Derbent to Bulgaria visit Madjar on the way and find a Catholic Episcopate there, whose priests read in the local dialect and urge them to be firm in their faith. And many of their people are baptized, thinking that they are entering into their ancient faith.
     Already in the middle of the 16th century, only legendary memories of Madzhar remain in the songs of akyns and сossack boyans, which spoke from the words of tatar old-timers about the free and magnificent for its beauty, but abandoned city of Madzhar, in which сhristians, muslims, and tengrians peacefully coexisted. There were mountaineers, steppe сossacks, merchant greeks, and northern peddlers.
     These chants, mostly of cossack steppe origin, dated to the end of the 16th century, noted that the townspeople stood for the greek faith. It is a plausible version of the last decades of Madjar, since the stone tombstones found in the city with images of christian symbols of the byzantine type carved on them are younger than the graves of other faiths.
     In 1830, nothing of this magnificent and large city, according to the descriptions of those who visited it at the time of its splendor, nothing at all remained.
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