Petcheneg - 894-1200
The Petchenegs were of old, as Constantine Porphyrogenitus relates, settled about the lower Ural and Volga, but were driven thence (894-899) by the Ghuzz (Ouzoi). A part of them returned afterwards to their ancient abode, but the great majority wandered westward and settled on both sides of the Dnieper, driving the Hungarians before them to the Carpathians. Here they annoyed the neighboring peoples by their raids, and engaged readily in the Russian expeditions against the Greek empire, till the policy of the Byzantine court incorporated large numbers of them with its own armies, sometimes with fatal result, as was experienced by Romanus Diogenes, when these auxiliaries passed to the camp of his antagonist Alp Arslan. At the period of the first crusade the Christian armies met with them on their march through Servia and Bulgaria; but the Petchenegs are not mentioned after the 13th century. The learning of Orientalists has discovered faint traces of the language once spoken by them in the Turkish dialect of the Bosnians.
Before the Coman invasion the country west of the Volga was occupied by the Khazars and the Petchenegs, the former a great and most interesting people, who long gave their names to a very wide territory-the laud of Khazaria, as it is called by Macoudi. The Petchenegs were a body of but recent origin, who were constantly fighting with the Khazars. In the earlier Coman invasions we generally find the Comans in alliance with the Khazars against the Petchenegs. Who, then, were the Petchenegs? Zeuss gives their various synonyms thus:-they were known as Patzinakitai to Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Pecenatici, Pizenaci, Pincenates, Pecinei, Petinei, and Postinagi, to the western writers, Peczenjezi to the western Slaves, Bisseni to the Hungarians. Behnakyeis their name in Ibn el Wardi, and Drewenses (i. e. woodmen, from drew or derew, a wood) in the Russian chronicles.
The ethnic affinities of the Petchenegs are clear enough. Nikon the chronicler associates them with the Torkmeni, Tortozy, and Cumani. Ibn el Wardi calls them a Turkish race. Anna Comnena says they spoke the same language as the Cumans. The Byzantines constantly confound the Cumans and Petchenegs under the common name of Uzi. All these facts confirm the position of most inquirers, that the Petchenegs were a horde of Turks belonging to a previous wave of invasion to the Uzi proper, less purely Turk, and more mixed with foreign elements.
Their former seats were situated at the foot of the Ural mountains; and they were very nearly related to the Baschkirs - a people whose language is Turk but whose blood is mixed. The name Baschkir suggests comparisons with Bessi and Bisseni of the Hungarians; and there is no other source whence the Turkish language of the Baschkirs can have been derived, if it were not from the Petchenegs or Cancalis. The Kangli or Cancalis had been an ancient foe of the Hoeitche on the other side of the Volga. When the power of the latter became settled, the Caucalis emigrated or were forced towards the west; they then drove out the inhabitants of Pascatir or Baschkir land, and caused them to migrate to Hungary.
They also broke the power of the Khazars, many of whom they also drove into Hungary. The Petchenegs occupied the vacant lands, and gradually pressed westward into the woods of Ukraine, whence they grievously afflicted the borders of the Greek empire and the Russians of Kief. With the Cumans they are described as a savage people, living on the flesh, milk, and blood of their herds; it was said they were an inferior race to the Comans, both in numbers and in appearance, and that they had a distinctive dress. Their chief town was called Korosten or Kourosteszov (i.e. wall of bark), also known as Nowopolci, on the river Tetera, famous for the death of Igor and the mound under which he was buried. Another of their towns was Ovroutsche, where Oleg was murdered.
The Petchenegs lived in tents, each of their eight tribes had a separate chief, and these tribes were themselves split up into forty lesser ones. The names of these eight tribes, as given by the Emperor Constantine, are Ertem, Tzur, Gyla, Culpee, Charoboe, Talmat, Chapon, and Tzopon; they divided their conquests into eight provinces corresponding to them - four east of the Dnieper, between the Russians and the Khazars, and four west of the Dnieper, in Moldavia, Transylvania on the Bug, and the neighbourhood of Kief.
The same writer places their first arrival at fifty years before his time, i.e. about AD 862. Rhegnion, who lived about 908, makes the date 889. Nestor mentions them first in Russia in 915; they occur in his pages very frequently. They killed Igor in 945, and in 968 laid siege to Kief. In alliance with the Russians they made constant raids on the Greek empire. From the Petchenegs the Russians bought their oxen, sheep, and horses, their country not producing these animals. In their hands, too, was the traffic with the Baltic coast for amber, and with Novgorod for all the products of the east.
From these seats they were driven by the Comans, some into Bessarabia, some into Hungary, where the Hungarian kings made them useful in settling them on the marchlands or frontiers of the Theutonici; others, again, coalescing with the Comans, became the ancestors of the Nogays. As I have already related, one of the western hordes of the Nogays is still called Budzuch, while one of their eastern ones retains the name of Mangut, applied to one of the divisions of the Cancalis. The Petchenegs who were left on the other side of the Volga in the great invasion were the ancestors of those Turcomans roaming between the Caspian and the Aral, known as Karakalpacs or Black-caps.
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