It was during the sovereignty of the Khozars that the tyrant Justinian, sumamed Rhinotmitos, 'cut-nose,' was dethroned by Leo and exiled to the Tauric Chersonesus, where he continued his hateful practices to such an extent, as to have excited those inhabitants who suffered the greatest indignities at his hands, to
' Dubois BUies that Dorou signiliA! -aiood ax -uiooHtd, a name applicable to the nature of the country, vi. p. 334. Bruun suggests that ProcofHus may have quoted the name Domu from Doros, the name given by the Amiciiians lo the Taurus,
' Procop. Dt bdl. Cmh. iv. +
' The bishopric of Alania (Gothia) was ilxly-foutth in precedence, in the reign of Leo by Google
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
conspire against his life. Justinian, however, saved it, by flying (702) to the castle of Doros on the confines of Gothia, where he sought the protection of the Khagkhan of the Khozars, who received and entertained him hospitably, and eventually gave him his daughter Theodora in marriage, with the castle of Phanagoria for a residence.
The castle of Doros was probably afterwards relinquished to the Goths, for we read that while John, their bishop, was attending the council of Nicea, 787, the Khozars occupied it until recovered by the Goths, who were incited by the bishop upon his return, to revolt against their oppressors. It was during this period that the Khozars were converted to Judaism, and we have it on the authority of the Rabbi Phyrkovitch, that in the cemetery on Mount Baba was found a Tatar inscription in Hebrew characters, of the year corresponding to 866 A.D., on what is believed to have been the tombstone of a Khozar.' According to an old Hebrew MS,, the capital of the Goths was certainly at Mangoup in the ninth century.'
The dominion of the Khozars in the Taurida came to an end in 1016, upon the invasion of the peninsula by a general named Andronicus, who commanded the Imperial forces. They were succeeded in 1050 by the Comans, who also became the masters of the Goths, as were likewise the Mongols when they seized on Gothia in 1237. Then came the Genoese occupation of the seaboard, and the conquest of the Taurida by the Turks; yet, notwithstanding these frequent changes in their fortunes, the Goths, to some extent, preserved their language and religion. The monk Rubruquis, for instance, states that there were forty castles
' Chwolson, Ackbthtt Hebraucbe Craiuhrijlai, &c. p. 70. ' Bruun, Gatarit, &c. p. 65.
t, Google
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
between that city and the Chersonesus, in each of which a separate idiom was spoken, many of the men in them being Qoths whose tongue was a dialect of the Teuton; ' and there is the evidence, three hundred years later, of Ghislain de Busbecq, ambassador of the Emperor Ferdinand I., who conversed at Constantinople with one of the delegates of the khan in the Teuton tongue; he was a man with fair hair and blue eyes, and in no manner resembled a Tatar.*
The antiquity of the name Manfjoup is not known, but in 1380, the same year in which the sea coast of Gothia, which extended from Soldaya to Cembalo, was ceded by treaty to the Genoese, the title of Prince of Soudak, Mangoup and Caffa, was borne by one Stephen Vassflovitch, who went to Russia; and in 1396, another Prince of Mangoup, named Demetrius, was at the head of the Tatar forces.
The next record we have of a prince of Mangoup is in 1474,
when one named Isaac received the ambassador of John III., who demanded the daughter of ' the chief of the Goths ' in marriage for the son of the grand prince. The following year another embassy arrived at Mangoup, to ask what dowry Isaac would give his daughter; but the proposed alliance was frustrated, the Turkish forces after the fall of Caffa having invested and seized Mangoup,
and made the princes prisoners,* as also the Khan, Mengly Ghyrey,
I or a certain number of the fortj' caitles wbich Rubniquis dislinclly states were between Soldaya and the Chersonesus, Recueil, &c., p. 319, we probably see Che ruins at Soudak, Tcbobin-Kaleh, Tchoutna or Oulou-ou^yn, Aloushta, Kaslel, Partenile, Ghelym-kaya, GourEOufT, Nikita point, Paleocastro near Massaadra, Outchan-sou or Aoutka Yssar, Yssar at Kourouly, Ai'tudor, Yssar at Aloupka, Byouk Yssar, Koutchouk Yssar, Kaslropol, Yisarkaya, Kolyah VsEiar at cape Aia, Balaclava, and the old Chereo-
' Ijttra, &c. Letter of December 16, 1562, in Karamsin, iv. p. 381. * The Turlui sent into captivity or slaughtered all Ihitec inhabiiints who were unwilling 10 embrace Mahttmedanism.
t, Google
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]