The Pechenegs were named in Arabic, Tibetan, Georgian and Greek texts
A semi-nomadic Turkic people from Central Asia, the Pechenegs dominated the steppes of southeast Europe and Crimea in the 9th and 10th centuries and raided the lands of Rus for over two hundred years. Their language has vanished, so much of what we know comes from outsiders who wrote their name a dozen different ways.
Arabic and Persian writers called them Bajanak, Tibetan documents Be-ča-nag, Georgian works Pačanak-i, and Byzantine authors such as Anna Komnene Patzinakoi. Hungarians still say besenyő. The name may come from an Old Turkic word for a brother-in-law or relative, hinting at an allied clan, though the historian Peter Golden doubts that derivation. The 11th-century scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari counted them as the 19th of 22 branches of the Oghuz Turks.
The first certain mention, according to Victor Spinei, is an 8th-century Uyghur envoy's report surviving in Tibetan translation, describing fighting between the Be-ča-nag and the Hor near the Syr Darya. Paul Pelliot suggested an even earlier trace in the 7th-century Chinese Book of Sui, but that link is uncertain. Omeljan Pritsak placed their homeland between the Aral Sea and the middle Syr Darya, astride trade routes linking Central Asia to Europe.
They were repeatedly pushed west. After the Turkic Khaganate collapsed in 744, the Oghuz, allied with the Karluks and Kimaks, defeated the Pechenegs near the Aral Sea before 850. Most moved to the land between the Ural and the Volga, where they raided the Khazars and their vassals and sold captives as slaves. A Khazar and Oghuz alliance then squeezed them again, and they crossed Khazar territory to drive the Hungarians from the Kuban and upper Donets. Scholars disagree on the date: Pritsak says around 830, Kristó not before the 850s.
Writing around 950, the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII described their realm, Patzinakia, as eight provinces ruled by eight great princes, four on each side of the Dnieper, reaching west to the Siret River. Three of these clans, the Kangars, were considered braver and nobler than the rest. Golden, following earlier linguists, reads each tribal name as a horse's coat colour joined to a ruler's title. Those who stayed behind in Central Asia were absorbed into the Oghuz federation.
Source: Pechenegs
