Chapter 2 outlines the initial stages of the Christianisation of Alania. Instead of being the result of a top-down conversion by Byzantine missionaries in the 910s and 920s, it argues that Christianising styles of adornment, burial and worship were gradually adopted by Northwest Caucasian communities in the eighth and ninth centuries because they fit in with pre-existing perceptions of foreignising styles as socially prestigious. These styles were ultimately appropriated by the Alan kings in the 880s through a royal conversion with Abasgian assistance.

Chapter 3 examines the reason why claiming the ‘power of the foreign’ was an effective strategy in the North Caucasus. In order to do so, it reconstructs the politics of tenth-century Alania through an analysis of al-Masʿūdī’s Murūj al-dhahab (332–6/943–7) and analogic evidence. It argues that an aristocrat who could display that they had access to ‘the foreign’ could plausibly claim to be an impartial mediator in disputes between relatively autonomous sub-communities (as), which were the principal building blocks of North Caucasian society.

Chapter 1 addresses the geographical and economic context in which the the Kingdom of Alania emerged, and explains why this happened. It identifies the core territory of the kings of Alania as lying in the Upper Kuban region of modern Karachay-Cherkessia and eastern Krasnodar Krai. It also suggests that the Kingdom of Alania emerged because an aristocratic lineage from this region was able to leverage their transregional connections to extract recognition from the Khazar Khaqanate, granting them a ‘power of the foreign’ that no other aristocrats in the region could match.