Cumania

Cumania is the Latin name for the lands of the Cumans and Kipchaks, Turkic nomads who dominated the steppes from the Black Sea to Central Asia from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Russian chronicles called them Polovtsy, and Persian writers called their lands the Dasht-i Kipchak, "the Kipchak steppe".

The Kipchaks came from the steppes of Siberia and Kazakhstan, where they had been part of the Kimek-Kipchak confederation. In the eleventh century, they and the related Cumans moved west, displacing the Oghuz and Pechenegs, and by the 1050s they reached the plains north of the Black Sea. The names Cuman and Kipchak are sometimes used for the same people and sometimes for western and eastern branches. Their language was Turkic, recorded in the Codex Cumanicus, a dictionary compiled by Italian merchants and German missionaries in the early fourteenth century.

The Cumans did not form a single state but a loose confederation of tribes and clans, each led by its own khan. They herded horses, sheep and cattle, moving between pastures. They fought as mounted archers and were also valued as mercenaries. They traded with the cities of Rus', the Crimean ports, Byzantium and Central Asia, selling horses, livestock and slaves.

Relations between the Cumans and the Rus' principalities alternated between raids and alliances. Rus' princes married Cuman princesses and recruited Cuman warriors in their wars against each other. In 1185, Prince Igor of Novgorod-Seversky led a failed campaign against the Cumans, the subject of the Tale of Igor's Campaign, one of the masterpieces of early East Slavic literature, which inspired Borodin's opera Prince Igor.

The Georgian king David IV the Builder married a Kipchak princess and, around 1118–1120, settled about 40,000 Kipchak families in Georgia, building a strong army that helped him defeat the Seljuks at Didgori in 1121. Cumans helped found the Second Bulgarian Empire in the 1180s, and the Asen dynasty may have had Cuman roots. They also fought for and against Byzantium and Hungary.

The Cumans worshipped the sky god Tengri and honoured their ancestors. They set up stone statues, sometimes called kamennye baby, "stone women", though they represent both men and women, on burial mounds across the steppes of Ukraine and southern Russia. Many survive today. Some Cumans converted to Christianity or Islam.

In 1223 the Cumans, allied with Rus' princes, were defeated by a Mongol force at the Kalka river. When the Mongols returned in 1236–1241, they conquered the steppe. The Cuman khan Köten led about 40,000 families into Hungary, where King Béla IV allowed them to settle, hoping to use them against the Mongols. Hungarian nobles distrusted them, and Köten was murdered in 1241, after which many Cumans left. Those who returned settled in the regions now called Kiskunság and Nagykunság, Little and Great Cumania, and gradually merged with the Hungarians. Béla's son, Stephen V, married a Cuman princess, and their son, Ladislaus IV, was known as "the Cuman".

Cumans and Kipchaks who stayed in the steppe formed much of the population of the Golden Horde, and their language became its main language. Many Kipchaks were sold as slaves to Egypt, where they became mamluks; the Mamluk sultans Baybars and Qalawun were Kipchaks. The Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages includes modern Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar and Bashkir.

Our maps show Cumania on the 1100 map. The basemap's outline, about 6.2 million square kilometres, is very broad, stretching across today's Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia and western China, well beyond the Cumans' own lands in the west, and covering the whole Kipchak world and its eastern neighbours. Almaty's and Novosibirsk's sites lie inside it.