Pechenegs

The Pechenegs, called Patzinakoi by the Byzantines, were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who moved from Central Asia into the steppes north of the Black Sea in the 9th century. For roughly two hundred years they controlled much of the steppe of south-eastern Europe and the Crimea, raiding and allying in turn with Byzantium, Bulgaria, the Hungarians and the Rus', until a crushing defeat in 1091 broke their power. Their descendants were absorbed into the peoples of south-eastern Europe.

Medieval writers knew them by many names: Bajanak in Arabic and Persian, Be-ča-nag in a Tibetan document, Pizenaci or Bisseni in Latin, Pečenegi among the East Slavs and besenyő in Hungarian. The linguist Max Vasmer and others derived the name from an Old Turkic word for an in-law, though the historian Peter Golden considered this far from certain. Their language, known only from scraps such as tribal names, was Turkic; scholars have assigned it to the Kipchak or the Oghuz branch. The 11th-century scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari counted the Pechenegs as a branch of the Oghuz.

Their early homeland is usually placed between the Aral Sea and the middle Syr Darya. After the Turkic Khaganate collapsed in 744, a coalition of Oghuz, Karluks and Kimeks drove them out, in a battle fought near the Aral Sea sometime before 850, al-Masudi reports. Some stayed behind and joined the Oghuz; most moved to the lands between the Ural and the Volga. Pressed again by the Khazars and the Oghuz, they crossed into the western steppe and pushed the Hungarians from their grazing lands. When this happened is disputed: Omeljan Pritsak proposed about 830, while Gyula Kristó argued for no earlier than the 850s. In the 890s, acting with the Bulgarian ruler Simeon I, they drove the Hungarians out of Etelköz, after which the Hungarians moved west into Pannonia.

Writing around 950, the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII described a Pecheneg land stretching west towards the Siret and divided into eight provinces, four on each side of the Dnieper, each under a great prince and subdivided into some forty clans. Three of these groups formed an elite known as the Kangars. Byzantium valued the Pechenegs as a counterweight to the Rus' and the Hungarians.

From the 9th century the Pechenegs fought a long series of raids and wars against Kievan Rus', broken by temporary alliances. They besieged Kiev in 968 and in 972 ambushed and killed Prince Sviatoslav I; the Primary Chronicle says the khan Kurya had a cup made from his skull. Vladimir I founded Pereyaslav on the site of a victory over them, and Yaroslav the Wise defeated them near Kiev in 1036. After this the Cumans and Torks took their place on the Pontic steppe, and many Pechenegs moved across the Danube.

In Byzantine lands the Pechenegs were both enemies and mercenaries. In 1091 the emperor Alexios I Komnenos, with Cuman allies, destroyed them as an independent force at the Battle of Levounion, then settled survivors in Moglena as a military unit. Byzantium defeated them again at Beroia in 1122. Pechenegs also served in the Byzantine Empire's Italian wars as late as 1155.

Over time the Pechenegs south of the Danube merged mainly with Romanians and Bulgarians. In the Kingdom of Hungary they settled around 150 villages, and an office of Count of the Pechenegs survived for at least two centuries. Place names from Hungary and Romania to Poland and Turkey still recall them. Some historians also link Pechenegs who returned to the Aral region with the formation of the Karakalpaks, a hypothesis rather than a settled conclusion.

Our 900 and 1000 maps label the Pecheneg lands "Peshemegs", a wide band of steppe from the lower Danube towards Central Asia. Our 800 map gives much of this steppe to the Khazars, and by 1100 it is part of Cumania.