Steppe Cumans became kingmakers from Hungary to Georgia
The Cumans, western wing of the Cuman–Kipchak confederation, were Turkic nomads of Cumania north of the Black Sea and along the Volga. Rus’ writers called them Polovtsy, westerners said Cumans, easterners Kipchaks—and their horsemen shaped politics from the Balkans to Khwarazm.
Related to Pechenegs, they meddled in Caucasus and Khwarazmian affairs while pressing medieval Balkan states. Cuman settlers and mercenaries left marks on Kievan Rus’, Galicia–Volhynia, the Golden Horde, the Second Bulgarian Empire, Serbia, Hungary, Moldavia, Georgia, Byzantium, Nicaea, the Latin Empire, and Wallachia, often assimilating into local nobilities.
After Mongols smashed Kievan Rus’ in 1237, many Cumans fled into Hungary, joining communities already planted there. They also mattered inside Bulgarian, Byzantine, Latin, and Nicaean armies, including Anatolian campaigns. Their tongue is unusually well attested for an early Turkic language thanks to the Codex Cumanicus, a missionary phrasebook for Catholic priests working the steppe edge.
Nearly every name for them means pale. Turkic qu or quman signifies pale yellow or yellowish grey, usually taken to describe hair, though the Turkologist Imre Baski floated cream-coloured horses such as the Akhal-Teke, or a water vessel called a quman. The Rus' name Polovtsy comes from a Slavic root for light yellow or blond, Germanic writers used Folban or Valwe from a root meaning pale, and Adam of Bremen simply called them the Blond Ones. Yet most Kimek–Kipchaks were probably dark-haired and brown-eyed, and a Slavic word for field offers another possible origin.
Their early history is murky and their first homeland unknown. Around 1120 the writer al-Marwazi described a Turkic Qun people arriving from the northern borders of China and driving out the Śari. From the late 800s to 1230 their influence reportedly stretched from the Altai to Crimea and the Danube, and seven Cuman tribes eventually settled in Hungary. Long after their power faded, travellers still spoke of Cumania: Ibn Battuta found a treeless grassland crossable only by wagon, and Hamdallah Mustawfi praised its pasture and herds.
Source: Cumans
