The crimean question, the Black Bulgarians, and the Russo-Byzantine Treaty of 944

In the treaty of 944 between the Russians and the Greeks, the clauses which can be referred to as political and military have created some important problems both in interpretation and implication. The most difficult questions have emerged because the treaty has seemed to imply extensions of Kievan sovereignty into the Crimea which it appears unlikely that the Byzantines would have permitted at any time. In addition, the questions of geography and ethnography, connected with the treaty, have proven difficult to reconcile with our existing knowledge of the steppe. In all of its activities related to the steppe in the tenth century, the Empire demonstrated an overwhelming concern for the safety of Kherson and the Climata in the Crimea which were important as bases for Byzantine diplomacy on the steppe. The political and military clauses of the treaty reflect the determination of the Byzantines to protect their Crimean possessions against any real or potential threat from the Kievan Rus', much as the instructions of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in the De administrando imperio document a similar effort with the steppe tribes. This concern for the Crimea as well as the fact that the terms of the treaty made the Rus' into allies (symmachoi) of the Empire serves as the essential background for a possible solution to the somewhat tangential but historiographically important question of the identification of the homeland of the Black Bulgarians whom the Rus' were to prevent from raiding Kherson and the Climata. The Black Bulgarians were one of those remnants of an earlier steppe migration who survived on the steppe between the Dnieper and Don rivers from where they raiced the Crimea. The apparent intention of the Byzantines, as reflected in the treaty, was that the Rus' were to stop the Black Bulgarians at the Crimean isthmus from which location the Rus' themselves would not become an important threat to the Imperial possessions.