Cumans

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cumans fought a war against the princes of Kievan Rus' that lasted 175 years. That conflict began in 1061, when a Cuman force under the chieftain Sokal invaded and devastated the Pereyaslavl principality. Before it was over, the Cumans would topple empires, crown kings, sell captives into slavery, and produce sultans in Egypt. They were a Turkic nomadic people from Central Asia, the western branch of the Cuman-Kipchak confederation, known by entirely different names depending on who was writing about them: Polovtsy to the Rus', Kipchaks to Eastern sources, Cumans to the West, and "Blond Ones" to the German chronicler Adam of Bremen. What made them so difficult to stop? How did a people who never formed a single unified state come to shape the politics of medieval Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Byzantium, and Georgia all at once? And what happened to them when the Mongols arrived?

• 2. A Name With Many Faces

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  Pliny the Elder, the Roman natural philosopher who lived in the 1st century AD, mentioned "a fortress, the name of which is Cumania, erected for the purpose of preventing the passage of the innumerable tribes that lay beyond" when describing the Gates of Caucasus. The Greek geographer Strabo, who died around 24 AD, called the Darial Gorge the Porta Cumana. Whether that ancient fortress gave its name to the Cumans, or the Cumans eventually gave their name to the geography, remains an open question.

  In Turkic languages, the word qu, qun, quman, or qoman means "pale", "pale yellow", or "yellowish grey". The Turkologist Imre Baski proposed that the name might refer not to the people's hair color, but to the cream-colored horses of Central Asian breeds such as the Akhal-Teke, or possibly to a traditional water vessel called a quman, or even to a Turkic word for "force" or "power".

  The East Slavic term Polovtsy appears to derive from a root meaning "pale" or "light yellow", and the Rus' also called the western Cumans Sorochinetses, apparently from the Turkic phrase for "yellow-haired". The Germanic-language names Folban, Vallani, and Valwe all trace back to a Proto-Germanic root meaning "pale", the same root that gives English the word "fallow". Scholar György Györffy tried to connect the Hungarian exonym Kun to the Huns rather than to the Cuman self-appellation, but István Vásáry rejected that hypothesis, arguing that the Hungarian name must go back to one of the Cumans' own self-designations.

  The name Kipchak carried its own contested etymology. A folk tradition among the Kipchaks held that their name meant "hollow tree", pointing to an ancestral origin story. A Siberian dialect attests a word qïpčaq meaning "angry, quick-tempered". One scholar links it to a word for "unlucky", while another sees a better match in a word for "good fortune". Scholar Peter Golden noted that the ethnonym's original form and meaning "remain a matter of contention and speculation".

• 3. A Confederation Without a State

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  The 12th-century Jewish traveler Petachiah of Regensburg wrote of the Cumans: "they have no king, only princes and royal families." That observation cuts to the heart of how the Cuman-Kipchak confederation actually worked. Their vast territory stretched from the Danube in the west to Taraz in Kazakhstan in the east, held together not by a central government but by loosely connected tribal units.

  The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, writing in the 14th century, described Cumania as a green and grassy wilderness "with no trees, nor hills, high or low", where wagons were the only practical means of travel. The Persian historian Hamdallah Mustawfi noted that the region had excellent pasturage and numerous cattle and horses. Their territory was not empty: the Cumans had a commercial interest in Crimea, taking tribute from its cities, and the Cuman language became Crimea's lingua franca, later adopted by Karaite Jewish and Crimean Armenian communities.

  Geographer al-Idrisi described a city of Cumania that gave its name to the whole people. The confederation's territory was divided among tribes identified by their geography: "seashore" tribes occupied the steppes between the mouths of the Dnieper and the Dniester; "coastal" tribes lived on the Sea of Azov; "Dnieper" tribes settled both banks of the Dnieper Valley; and "Don" Cumans lived in the Don River Valley. Five separate independent Cuman groups are identified by D. A. Rasovskii.

  Robert Wolff argued that it was discipline and cohesion that permitted the Cuman-Kipchaks to conquer such a vast territory despite never forming a true state. This political looseness may have worked in two contradictory directions at once: it may have extended their existence by making them harder to destroy root and branch, while also quickening their destruction by preventing them from mounting a unified defense when the Mongols arrived.

• 4. Warriors on the Steppe

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  The knight Robert de Clari described the Cumans as nomadic warriors who raised horses, sheep, goats, camels, and cattle, moving north with their herds in summer and returning south in winter. Horses were not merely livestock but the central pillar of Cuman culture. They attached feeding sacks to their horses' bridles, allowing the animals to eat while covering great distances on campaign. Cuman warriors could travel light and carry everything they needed.

  They wore sheepskin and fought with composite bows and arrows. De Clari reported that the typical warrior wore a sleeveless sheepskin vest over a tunic that extended to the mid-calf, splitting in the front and back between the legs. Men wore trousers and a kaftan fastened by a belt; women wore caftans, pants, dresses, and shorter tunics. Clothing was commonly colored deep crimson.

  The fundamental unit of their society was the family of blood relatives. Families grouped into clans led by a chief; clans grouped into tribes led by a khan. Clan names derived from objects, animals, or a founder, and the names of clan and tribal leaders often ended in "apa" or "aba". Cumans lived together in movable settlements that Kievan Rus' chroniclers called "Cuman towers".

  A typical Cuman diet included soup with millet and meat, beer, curdled mare's milk, kumis, and bread, though bread could be scarce depending on location. Like the Bulgars, the Cumans were known to cut a vein in their horse and drink its blood when water ran out far from a source. They prayed to the first animal they saw in the morning, a shamanist practice, though the Cumans tolerated all religions and Islam and Christianity spread quickly among them. Rock figures called stone babas, found throughout southern Ukraine and areas of the Russian steppe, were closely connected with the Cuman religious cult of shamanism.

  Khan Konchek, in the years before the Mongol invasion, managed to unite the western and eastern Cuman-Kipchak tribes into a more cohesive force, a feat that required changing the old system of government whereby rulership passed to the most senior tribal leader. Konchek instead passed power directly to his son Koten.

• 5. The Mongol Catastrophe

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  In 1220, as the Mongols crossed the Caucasus Mountains in pursuit of Muhammad II, the shah of the Khwarezmid Empire, they met and defeated the Cumans in Subcaucasia. Cuman khans Danylo Kobiakovych and Yurii Konchakovych died in that battle. The surviving Cumans under Khan Koten fled to the court of his son-in-law, Prince Mstislav the Bold of Galich, bringing with him "numerous presents: horses, camels, buffaloes and girls" and a warning: "Today the Mongols took away our land and tomorrow they will come and take away yours."

  The Rus' were slow to take the threat seriously, having suffered Cuman raids for decades. But when news arrived that the Mongols were marching along the Dniester River, a council of war convened in Kiev, attended by Mstislav Romanovich, Prince Yuri II of Vladimir-Suzdal, and Mstislav Svyatoslavich of Chernigov. The combined Rus'-Cuman force numbered around 80,000. After crossing the Dnieper and pursuing a small Mongol contingent eastward for nine days, they realized too late that they had been drawn into a false retreat. At the Kalka River in 1223, the alliance was crushed. The Cumans managed to retreat; the Rus' failed to regroup and were destroyed.

  The second Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe in 1237-1240 finished the work. In the summer of 1237, a wave of Cuman refugees crossed the Danube into Bulgaria. Tsar Ivan Asen II could not contain them, and they pushed through Thrace as far as Hadrianoupolis, pillaging as they went. As the Byzantine writer Akropolites described it, all of Thrace became a "Scythian desert." The final blow came in 1241, when the Cuman-Kipchak confederation ceased to exist as a political entity. Some tribes mixed with their Mongol conquerors and became part of the Golden Horde. Cuman captives sold as slaves in Egypt went on to become Mamluks, and some of those Mamluks, led by Sultan Baibars, would eventually defeat the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut.

• 6. Refuge and Betrayal in Hungary

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  In 1238, King Béla IV of Hungary offered refuge to the remainder of the Cuman people under their leader Khan Koten, who vowed to convert his 40,000 families to Christianity. Béla hoped to use them as auxiliary troops against the Mongols. The Mongol leader Batu Khan sent an ultimatum ordering Béla to stop sheltering the Cumans, noting pointedly that the Cumans could easily ride away if attacked, while the Hungarians could not.

  Béla rejected the ultimatum. But the Hungarian barons were hostile to the Cumans, noting that some Cumans appeared in the Mongol armies without understanding that those men had been conscripted. On the 10th of March, news arrived that the Mongols had attacked the Carpathian passes. On the 14th of March, the passes fell. Duke Frederick of Austria, who bore a personal grudge against Béla, arrived and deliberately stirred up anti-Cuman sentiment.

  On the 17th of March 1241, a group of barons had Khan Koten assassinated in Pest. The Cuman response was described as erupting with "Vesuvian intensity." They slaughtered large numbers of Hungarians and left for the Balkans, going through Hungary with destruction described as equal to anything Europe had seen since the Mongol incursions. Within a month Hungary was destroyed by the Mongols, having just killed its most capable ally.

  After the invasion, a penniless and humiliated Béla IV begged the Cumans to return. He invited them to settle the Great Plain between the Danube and the Tisza, a region that had become almost uninhabited after the raids of 1241-1242. The Cumans eventually created two regions bearing their name: Greater Cumania, known in Hungarian as Nagykunság, and Little Cumania, Kiskunság. In 1270, Elizabeth the Cuman, daughter of the Cuman chieftain Seyhan, became queen of Hungary. Her son Ladislaus IV, who abandoned Hungarian culture entirely for Cuman dress, hairstyle, and customs, and whose Cuman concubines were named Küpçeç, Mandola, and Ayduva, was later assassinated. The Cumans paid 3,000 gold bullions a year to the king, maintained their own priests, were exempt from port and customs dues, and had their own legal jurisdiction appealing directly to the king.

• 7. Language, Memory, and Legacy

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  The Cuman language is attested in several medieval documents and is considered the best-known of the early Turkic languages. The Codex Cumanicus was a linguistic manual written to help Catholic missionaries communicate with the Cuman people. A Cuman-language version of a Christian prayer was preserved in the TRT Documentary Özü Türk program, transcribed in its damaged original, then reconstructed, showing the effort made to Christianize the Shamanist Cumans who had settled in Hungary.

  By the 15th century, the Cumans in Hungary had permanently settled in villages whose structure matched that of the local population, and they had converted to Christianity. Some rights from their original asylum agreement survived until the end of the 19th century, even as the Cumans had long since assimilated with Hungarians. On the 6th of May 1745, through cooperation between the Cumans and Jasz people, and through the material strength of their communities, they officially bought their freedom by paying over 500,000 Rhenish florins and by arming and sending to camp 1,000 cavalry.

  In Romania, Cuman place-names survive in the Wallachian Plain in villages and localities such as Comana, Comanca, Câmpia Comancei, and Vadul Cumanilor near Calafat. Toponyms pointing to Cuman settlement are preserved across southern Ukraine. Some Cumans who settled in western Anatolia during the reign of Emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes of Nicaea are considered the ancestors of a part of the community called Manavs living in northwest Anatolia today. Today there are still villages in Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine founded by Cumans. The estimate of how many originally settled in Hungary varies widely, between 70,000 and 200,000 according to different scholars.