Having analysed the monotheisation of Khazaria, this chapter embarks on similar analyses of other case studies in eighth- to eleventh-century Pontic-Caspian Eurasia. Considering nationalist, Soviet and other scholarship, we will re-examine the relationship between sedentarism and nomadism, monotheism and polytheism, and economic maturation from essentially looting, to collecting tribute, to taxation of local tribal populations in Pontic-Caspian Eurasia.

Can we assume local populations had inherent allegiances to one suzerain or another? Did these populations regard themselves as united just because they were all bound to the same suzerain, whether Khazar, Volga Bulgar, Magyar, Pečeneg or Rus’? Alternatively, was sharing an assumed common language with the suzerain, an imagined ethnolinguistic affiliation, an expression of loyalty to a given suzerain, as maintained by traditional scholarship?

It cannot be assumed that the local populations which had earlier paid tribute to Khazaria (Slavic-speaking or otherwise) would eventually become Russian, or that other populations in what later became Volgia Bulgaria or the kingdom of Hungary bore loyalty to a given leader from some ethnolinguistic allegiance imagined by modern scholarship.