Early Khazar history is intimately tied with that of the Göktürk empire, founded when the Ashina clan had overthrew the Juan Juan in 552.

With the collapse of the Göktürk empire due to internal conflict in the seventh century, the western half of the Turk empire had split into a number of tribal confederations, among whom were the Bulgars, led by the Dulo clan, and the Khazars, led by the Ashina clan, the traditional rulers of the Göktürk empire.

By 670, the Khazars had broken the Bulgar confederation, causing various tribal groups to migrate and leaving two remnants of Bulgar rule—Volga Bulgaria, and the Bulgarian khanate on the Danube River.

The first significant appearance of the Khazars in history had been their aid to the campaign of the Roman emperor Heraclius against the Sassanid Persians.

The Khazar ruler Ziebel (sometimes identified, inconclusively, as Tong Yabghu Khagan of the West Turks) had aided the Romans in overrunning Georgia.

A marriage had even been contemplated between Ziebel's son and Heraclius' daughter, but never took place.

During these campaigns, the Khazars may have been ruled by Mo-ho-sahd and their forces may have been under the command of his son Buri-sad.

The Umayyad Caliphate has been attempting simultaneously to expand its influence into Transoxiana and the Caucasus.

The first war between Khazaria and the Caliphate had been fought in the early 650s and ended with the defeat of an Arab force led by Abd ar-Rahman ibn Rabiah outside the Khazar town of Balanjar, after a battle in which both sides used siege engines on the others' troops.

Several further conflicts would erupt in the in following the decades, with Arab attacks and Khazar raids into Kurdistan and Iran.

The Khazars counterattack around 685, penetrating southward of the Caucasus into present-day Georgia, and Azerbaijan.

The situation in the Eastern provinces of the Empire is stable due to the victoroes of Constantine, whose sixteen-year-old son succeeds him in September 685 as Emperor Justinian II.

After a preliminary strike against the Arabs in Armenia, Justinian manages to augment the sum paid by the Umayyad Caliphs as an annual tribute, and to regain control of part of Cyprus.

The incomes of the provinces of Armenia and Iberia are divided among the two empires.

The Penitents are a group of pro-Alid Kufans, led by a certain Sulayman ibn Surad, who wish to atone for their failure to assist Husayn ibn Ali in his uprising against the Umayyads, which had condemned him to death at the Battle of Karbala in 680.

With the outbreak of the Second Islamic Civil War and the collapse of Umayyad authority across Iraq in 683/684, Sulayman ibn Surad had begun in November 684 to call upon his fellow Kufans to avenge their failure.

Although some sixteen thousand had pledged themselves to support him, only some five thousand show up at their mustering place.

Undeterred, they move up the Euphrates towards the Jazira.

At Qarqisiya, the Qaysi refugees from the Battle of Marj Rahit aid them with supplies and advice but refuse to join them, seeing no hope in their endeavor.

The Penitents press on to 'Ayn al-Warda (identified with Ra's al-'Ayn), where they meet an Umayyad army of twenty thousand under Husayn ibn Numayr.

Although the Penitents hold the upper hand in a first skirmish, over the next two days the numerical superiority of the Umayyad army begins to prevail.

Finally, the Penitents are surrounded and almost annihilated, with only a few survivors escaping under the cover of night and making it back to Kufa.

Marwan is able to arrange the succession of his son 'Abd al-Malik by eliminating all other contenders for the caliphate.

His short reign is a period of continuous battle between various factions for the caliphate.

He strengthens the foundations of the Umayyad house and concentrates more power in the hands of the caliph.

An old man in poor health when he ascends the throne, Marwan dies of illness less than a year later.

Abd al-Malik becomes caliph and attempts to unify the fractious Arab tribes, now split between various northern and southern factions.

The forces opposing the Umayyads are still formidable.

There are, first, the northern Arab tribes who, under their leader Zufar, are holding out in northern Syria and Iraq.

The second focus of resistance is in Iraq, where three main groups, opposed to each other but united in their resistance to the Umayyads, hold sway: the Kharijites, the Shi'ah, and the forces of the anticaliph 'Abd Allah ibn az-Zubayr, who is proclaimed caliph in Mecca in 685 and receives at least nominal allegiance from many provinces.

Constantine of Mananalis, a dualistic community near Samosata, had studied the Gospels and Epistles, combined dualistic and Christian doctrines, and, upon the basis of the former, vigorously opposed the formalism of the church.

Regarding himself as called to restore the pure Christianity of Paul, he had adopted the name Silvanus, one of Paul’s disciples, and about the year 660 had established his first congregation at Kibossa, near Colonia in western Armenia thus founding the Paulician sect.

Constantine-Silvanus directs the Paulician movement until his death in 684, which occurs by stoning after his arrest by soldiers sent by the emperor Constantine IV to suppress heresy.

Having insisted that the New Testament (as he interpreted it) should be the only written source of religious guidance, Constantine-Silvanus leaves no known writings.

His duality of names will be imitated by subsequent Paulician leaders.

Simeon, the court official who had executed the order, is himself converted, and, adopting the name Titus, becomes Constantine’s successor.

The dualistic sect, holding Gnostic and Manichaean beliefs and subject to sporadic persecutions, flourishes between 650 and 872 in Anatolia, spreading from Armenia to the Eastern Themes of the Empire.

The Gnostic dualistic sect called Bogomilism, the synthesis of Armenian Paulicianism and the Bulgarian Slavonic Church reform movement, would emerge in Bulgaria between 927 and 970 and spread throughout the Empire into Serbia, Bosnia, Italy and France; Bogomilism will eventually morph into Catharism, a name given to a religious sect with Gnostic elements that will appear in the Languedoc region of France in the eleventh century and flourish in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The North Welsh in Strathclyde, Scots (Irish) in Dal Riada (Argyllshire) and indigenous Picts fight for supremacy in Scotland, being left free to contest their own fate by rivalries among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to the south.

The Northumbrians have been gradually extending their territory to the north, their constituent kingdom of Bernicia having in around 638 captured Edinburgh from the Gododdin.

They had established political dominance during the ensuing thirty years over the Kingdoms of Strathclyde and Dál Riata, as well as Pictish Fortriu.

The Picts, under overking Bridei, have warred since 672 against Stratchclyde.

With the settling of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy into a pattern of relative order in 685,  the Northumbrian ruler Ecgfrith marshals a huge army, apparently to stop the Picts from raiding to the south.

Ecgrith’s force against the advice of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne advances through Lothian and reaches a site known as Nechtan’s Mere (present Dunnichen in Angus), where he engages a Pictish force of equal strength, led by Bridei.

The Picts defeat the Northumbrians, killing Ecgfrith, and take from the weakened Northumbrian kingdom all its territory beyond the Firth of Forth.

An Umayyad attempt to recover Iraq under former governor Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad is defeated by pro-Alid forces under al-Mukhtar near Mosul in August 686.

The Picts in the seventh century recognize a single king, Bridei III, who halts the encroachment of the Scots from the kingdom of Dalriada (Argyll).

His claim to the Fortrean Kingship comes through his paternal grandfather, King Nechtan of the Picts.

Nennius' Historia Brittonum tells us that Bridei was King Ecgfrith's fratruelis, i.e., maternal first cousin.

Bridei's mother was probably a daughter of King Edwin of Deira.

Bridei is one of the more expansionary and active of Fortrean monarchs.

He had attacked Dunnottar in 680/681, and had campaigned against the Orcadian sub-kingdom in 682, a campaign so violent that the Annals of Ulster said that the Orkney Islands were "destroyed" by Bridei ("Orcades deletae sunt la Bruide").

It is also recorded that, in the following year, in 683, war broke out between Bridei and the Scots of Dál Riata under Máel Dúin mac Conaill and Bridei's Picts.

The Scots attacked Dundurn in Strathearn.

Dundurn was Bridei's main power base in the south, a great 'nuclear' hilltop fortress.

The Scots apparently did not take Dundurn, and Bridei backed up with an attack on Dunadd, the capital of Dal Riata.

We do not know if Bridei took Dunadd, but the presence of Pictish-style carvings of that time period in Dunadd may mean that he took and occupied Dunadd.

The lack of reputable contemporary sources of this conflict means that not much is known about the Scottish-Pict war of 683, but it is clear that, Bridei, from his base in Fortriu (or Moray), was establishing his overlordship of the lands to the north, and those to the south, perhaps putting himself in a position to attack the Anglian possessions (or overlordship) which existed in the far south.

It is very possible then that Bridei was regarded by Ecgfrith as his sub-king.

The traditional interpretation is that Bridei severed this relationship, causing the invervention of Ecgfrith.

This led in 685 to the famous Battle of Dun Nechtain, in which the Anglo-Saxon army of Ecgfrith was annihilated.

One Irish source reports that Bridei was "fighting for his grandfather's inheritance,” suggesting that either Ecgfrith was challenging Bridei's kingship, or more likely given Bridei's earlier campaigns, that Bridei was seeking to recover the territories ruled by his grandfather in Fife and Circinn, but since taken by the English.

The consequences of this battle were the expulsion of Northumbrians from southern Pictland (established through, for instance, the Anglian "Bishopric of the Picts" at Abercorn) and permanent Fortrean domination of the southern Pictish zone.

Justinian II, at the beginning of his reign, had made a treaty with the Arabs whereby they pay increased tribute and …

…in 687, as part of Justinian’s agreements with the Caliphate, he removes from their native Lebanon twelve thousand Christian Maronites, who have continually resisted the Muslims.