as a vassal Qağan for it to have any legitimacy. Golden concluded that the Rus' Khaganate was a puppet state set up by the Khazars in the basin of the Oka River to fend off recurring attacks of the Magyars. Golden r However, no source records that the Rus' of the 9th century were subjects of the Khazars. For foreign observers (such as Ibn Rustah), there was no material difference between the titles of the Khazar and Rus' rulers. Anatoly Novoseltsev hypothesizes that the adoption of the title "khagan" was designed to advertise the Rus' claims to equality with the Khazars. This theory is echoed by Thomas Noonan, who asserts that the Rus' leaders were loosely unified under the rule of one of the "sea-kings" in the early 9th century, and that this "High King" adopted the title "khagan" to give him legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects and neighboring states. According to this theory, the title was a sign that the bearers ruled under a divine mandate. Omeljan Pritsak speculated that a Khazar khagan named Khan-Tuvan Dyggvi, exiled after losing an internecine war, settled with his Kabar faction in the Norse-Slavic settlement of Rostov, married into the local Scandinavian nobility, and fathered the dynasty of the Rus' khagans. Zuckerman dismisses Pritsak's theory as untenable speculation, and no record of any Khazar khagan fleeing to find refuge among the Rus' exists in contemporaneous sources. Nevertheless, the possible Khazar connection to early Rus' monarchs is supported by the use of a stylized trident tamga, or seal, by later Rus' rulers such as Sviatoslav I of Kiev; similar tamgas are found in ruins that are definitively Khazar in origin. The genealogical connection between the 9th-century Khagans of Rus' and the later Rurikid rulers, if any, is unknown at this time. See also Arsania Caspian expeditions of the Rusʹ Garðaríki Rus'–Byzantine War (disambiguation) Notes References Bibliography Ahmed ibn Fadlan. Ibn Fadlan's Journey to Russia: A Tenth-Century Traveler from Baghdad to the Volga River. Frye, Richard Nelson, ed. and trans. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005. Ahmad ibn Umar ibn Rustah. al-Alaq al-nafisah: Maruf bih Ibn Rustah. Tarjamah va taliq-i Husayn Qarah'chanlu. Tehran, Iran: Amir Kabir, 1986. Александров (Aleksandrov) А.А. Остров руссов. [The Rus' Island]. St. Petersburg-Kishinev, 1997. Artamanov, M.I. "Prevye Stranisky Russkoy Istorii ve Archeologicheskom Osveshchenii." Sovietskaya Arkheologica. Vol 3, 1990. pp. 271–290. Brutzkus, Julius. "The Khazar Origin of Ancient Kiev." Slavonic