Cuman People - History

History

The Cumans originally lived east of the Yellow River, in China. The Cumans entered the grassland of Eastern Europe in the 11th century, from where they continued to assault the Byzantine Empire, the Kingdom of Hungary, and Rus - they became their arch enemies.

The vast territory of this Cuman-Kipchak realm, consisting of loosely connected tribal units who were the military dominating force, was never politically united by a strong central power. Cumania was neither a state nor an empire, but different groups under independent rulers, or khans, who acted on their own initiative, meddling in the political life of the surrounding states: the Russian principalities, Bulgaria, Byzantium and the Wallachian states in the Balkans, Armenia and Georgia (see Kipchaks in Georgia-but here we do not know if it was just Kipchaks, just Cumans, or Kipchaks and Cumans, discussed earlier) in the Caucasus, and Khwarezm, having reached as far as to create a powerful caste of warriors, the Mamluks and the Mamluk Sultanate.

The Cumans first encountered the Rus in 1055; this resulted in a peace agreement. In 1061, the Cumans invaded and devastated the Rus Pereiaslav principality

In 1068, at the Alta River the Cumans defeated the armies of the three sons of Yaroslav the Wise—Iziaslav Yaroslavych, Sviatoslav II Yaroslavych, and Vsevolod Yaroslavych. After the Cuman victory, they repeatedly invaded Ukraine, devastating the land, and took captives who became either slaves or were sold at slave markets in the south. the Most vulnerable regions were the principalities of Pereiasla, Novhorod-Siverskyi and Chernihiv. The Cumans were active in commerce with Central Asia and Venice.

In the Balkans, we find the Cumans in contact with all of the statal entities of that time, fighting with the Kingdom of Hungary, allied with the Bulgarians and Vlachs against the Byzantine Empire, and involved into the politics of the fresh Vlach statal entities. A notable Cuman leader in Europe, Thocomer, ( Toq-tämir- meaning‘hardened steel’) was possibly the first one to unite the Romanian (Vlach) states from the west and the east of the Olt River. Tihomir's son Basarab ("Father king" in the Cuman language) is considered the first ruler of the united and independent kingdom of Wallachia. This interpretation corresponds with the general view of the situation of the Romanian lands in the 11th century, with the natives living in collections of village communities united in various small confederacies, with powerful chiefs competing to create small kingdoms. Some of these Romanian chiefs paid tribute to the various militarily dominant nomadic tribes that surrounded them.

Ladislaus I of Hungary defeated the Cumans after they attacked the Kingdom of Hungary in 1089.

In 1091 the Pechenegs, a semi-nomadic Turkic people of the prairies of southwestern Eurasia, were decisively defeated as an independent force at the Battle of Levounion by the combined forces of a Byzantine army under Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos and a Cuman army under Togortok and Bunaq. Attacked again in 1094 by the Cumans, many Pechenegs were again slain. The remnants of the Pechenegs fled to Hungary, as the Cumans themselves would do a few decades later: fearing the Mongol invasion, in 1229, they asked asylum from Béla IV of Hungary.

In alliance with the Bulgarians and Vlachs during the Vlach-Bulgar Rebellion by brothers Asen and Peter of Tarnovo, the Cumans are believed to have played a significant role in the rebellion's final victory over Byzantium and the restoration of Bulgaria's independence (1185). Istvan Vassary states that without the active participation of the Cumans, the Vlakho-Bulgarian rebels could never have gained the upper hand over the Byzantines and ultimately without the Cumans’ military support, the process of Bulgarian restoration could never have been realised The Cuman participation in the creation of the Second Bulgarian Empire in 1185 and thereafter brought about basic changes in the political and ethnic sphere of Bulgaria and the Balkans The Cumans were allies with Bulgaria's emperor Kaloyan, who was also descended from the Cumans, in the Bulgarian-Latin Wars.

Although the Cumans initially had managed to defeat the Great Prince Vladimir Monomakh of Kievan Rus in the 12th century (at the Battle of the Stugna River) later they were defeated by the combined forces of Russian principalities led by Monomakh and forced out of the Rus borders to Caucasus. Many Cumans at that time resettled into Georgia where they achieved prominent positions and helped Georgians to stop the advance of Seljuk Turks. After the death of warlike Monomakh in 1125 Cumans returned to the steppe along the Rus borders.

Like most other peoples of medieval Eastern Europe, they put up resistance against the relentlessly advancing Mongols, led by Jebe and Subutai. The Mongols crossed the Caucasus mountains in pursuit of Muhammad II, the shah of Khwarazm, and met and defeated the Cumans in Subcaucasia in 1220. The Cuman khans Danylo Kobiakovych and Yurii Konchakovych died in battle, while the other Cumans, commanded by Koten, managed to get aid from the Rus’ princes As the Mongols were approaching Russia, Khan Koten fled to the court of his son-in-law, Prince Mstislav the Bold of Galich. He warned Mstislav: "Today the Mongols have taken our land and tomorrow they will take yours". However, the Cumans were ignored for almost a year as the Rus had suffered from Cuman raids for decades. But when news reached Kiev that the Mongols were marching along the Dniester River, the Rus responded. Mstislav gathered an alliance of the Kievan Rus' princes including Mstislav III of Kiev and Prince Yuri II of Vladimir-Suzdal, who promised support, together with Khan Koten's Cumans. The Rus princes then began mustering their armies and going towards the rendezvous point. The army of the alliance of the Rus and Cumans numbered around 80,000. The battle took place near Kalka River (Battle of Kalka River). Due to confusion from mistakes from the Rus and Cumans, the battle was lost - the Cumans and Rus were defeated (1223). The Cumans were finally crushed in 1238.

During the second Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe in 1237 the Cumans were defeated again. After the defeat some Cuman tribes followed Koten to Hungary and Bulgaria, where they became part of the local population; they were integrated into the élite and became nobles and rulers. In Hungary Cumans created two regions named Cumania (Kunság in Hungarian): Greater Cumania (Nagykunság) and Little Cumania (Kiskunság), both located in the Great Hungarian Plain. The Hungarian king, in return for their military service, invited the Cumans to settle in areas of the Great Plain between the Danube and the Theiss Rivers (today's Great Cumania and Little Cumania); this region had become almost uninhabited after the Mongol raids of 1241-1242 (Horvath 2001). The Cumanians lived there until their settlements were destroyed during the Turkish wars (16th-17th centuries) (Szakaly 2000). At the beginning of the 18th century the Cumanian territories were resettled by their Hungarian-speaking descendants of the Cumans (Meszaros 2000). In the middle of the 18th century they got their status by becoming free farmers, and no longer serfs (Lango 2000a). Here, the Cumans maintained their autonomy, language and some ethnic customs well into the modern era. According to Pálóczi's estimation originally 70-80,000 Cumans settled in Hungary. The Cumans were in every way different to the local population of Hungary - their appearance - attire and hairstyle set them apart. In Hungary, the Cumans were exempt from jurisdiction of country officials; the Cumans had their own representatives. The Cumans also participated in some of the early general assemblies of Hungary, the precusrors of its parliament. At the time of Elizabeth the Cuman, queen of Hungary, gifts of precious clothes, land and other objects were given to the Cumans with the intent to ensure Cuman support. By the fifteenth century, all the Cumans were permanently settle in Hungary, in villages whose structure corresponded to that of the local population, and were Christianized. The Cumans did not always ally to the Hungarian kings; they assassinated Laszlo IV. Both the royal and ecclesiastical authorities incorporated, rather than exclude, the Cumans. The Cumans in Hungary served as light cavalry in the royal army, as an obligation since they were granted asylum. Being very fierce and capable warriors (as noted by Istvan Vassary), the king lead them in numerous expeditions against neighbouring countries; most notably they played an important part in the battle of Rudolf of Habsburg and Ottokar II of Bohemia (1278) - king Laszlo IV and the Cumans were on Rudolf's side. Laszlo IV was particulalry fond of the Cumans, and abandoned Hungarian culture and dress for Cuman culture, dress and hairstyle (he spent a lot of time with them). Although the Cumans were defeated by the Mongols, the cultural heritage of the Cumans that remained in the Rus steppe (those who did not move to Hungary and Bulgaria) was transferred on to the Mongols. The Mongol élite adopted a lot of the traits, customs and language from the Cumans and Kipchaks; the Cumans, Kipchaks and Mongols finally became assimilated through intermarriage and became the Golden Horde. The Cumans, together with the Turko-Mongols, adopted Islam, in the second half of the 13th and the first half of the 14th century.

Previously, in 1229, they had asked for asylum from King Béla IV of Hungary, who in 1238 finally offered refuge to the remainder of the Cuman people under their leader Kuthen (Hungarians spelled his name Kötöny). Kuthen in turn vowed to convert his 40,000 families to Christianity. King Béla hoped to use the new subjects as auxiliary troops against the Mongols, who were already threatening Hungary. The king assigned various parts of central Hungary to the Cuman tribes. A tense situation erupted when Mongol troops burst into Hungary. The Hungarians, frustrated by their own helplessness, took revenge on the Cumans, whom they accused of being Mongol spies. After a bloody fight the Hungarians killed Kuthen and his bodyguards, and the remaining Cumans fled to the Balkans, pillaging and destroying many Hungarian villages in the way. After the Mongol invasion Béla IV of Hungary recalled the Cumans to Hungary to populate settlements devastated by war. The nomads subsequently settled throughout the Great Hungarian Plain. During the following centuries the Cumans in Hungary were granted various rights, the extent of which depended on the prevailing political situation. Some of these rights survived until the end of the 19th century, although the Cumans had long since assimilated with Hungarians.

Istvan Vassary states that after the Mongol conquest: "A large-scale westward migration of the Cumans began. In the summer of 1237 the first wave of this Cuman exodus appeared in Bulgaria. The Cumans crossed the Danube, and this time Ivan Asen II could not tame them, as he had often been able to do earlier; the only possibility left for him was to let them march through Bulgaria in a southerly direction. They proceeded through Thrace as far as Hadrianoupolis and Didymotoichon, plundering and pillaging the towns and the countryside, just as before. The whole of Thrace became, as Akropolites put it, a ‘Scythian desert’".

The pontic Cumania (Latin term for Deshti-Kipchak, not the Cumania in modern day Romania and Moldova), ceased to exist in the middle of the 13th century, when the Great Mongol Invasion of Europe occurred. In 1223, Genghis Khan defeated the Cumans and their Russian allies at the Battle of Kalka River (in modern Ukraine), and the final blow came in 1241, when the Cuman confederacy ceased to exist as a political entity, with the remaining Cuman tribes being dispersed, either becoming subjects and mixing with their Tatar-Mongol conquerors as part of what was to be known as the Nogai Horde, or fleeing to the west, to the Byzantine Empire, the Second Bulgarian Empire, and the Kingdom of Hungary, where they became kings and nobles with many privileges .

Cumans had served as mercenaries in the armies of the Byzantine Empire from the end of the 11th century and were one of the most important elements of the Byzantine army until the mid-14th century. They served as horse-archers and those in the central army were collectively called Skythikoi. In 1241, the Byzantines settled 10,000 Cumans in Thrace and Anatolia where they became hellenized. A Greek-speaking Cuman even became Megas Domestikos (Commander-in-Chief of the Army) under the Emperor Andronikos II.

The Cumans who remained scattered in the prairie of what is now southwest Russia joined the Golden Horde khanate and their descendants became assimilated with local Tatar populations.

The Cumans who remained east and south of the Carpathian Mountains established a county named Cumania, in an area consisting parts of Moldavia and Walachia. The Hungarian kings claimed supremacy on the territory of Cumania, among the nine titles of the Hungarian kings of the Árpád and Anjou dynasties were rex Cumaniae.

The Cuman influence in Wallachia and Moldavia was very strong, according to some historians who claim that the earliest Wallachian rulers bore supposedly Cuman names (e.g. Tihomir and Bassarab). This hypothesis is though disputed (Tihomir sounding like a Slavic given name), while the toponymy of the most densely populated regions of Romanian settlement shows strong evidence of Cuman place-names. In lack of convincing archaeological evidence of a Cuman civilisation, it appears the Cumans were just a minority within the local population, but they made up part of the ruling élite in Wallachia. As in the case of Bulgaria, they were assimilated by the majority, the present-day Romanians.

Basarab I, son of the Wallachian prince Tihomir of Wallachia obtained independence from Hungary at the beginning of the 14th century. The name Basarab is considered by some authors as being of Cuman origin, and meaning "Father King".

It is generally believed by Bulgarian historians that the Bulgarian mediaеval dynasties Asen, Shishman and Terter were Cumanian.

The Caucasian mummies found in China a while ago could have been Cumans, as it is stated that the Cumans originally came from eastern China before migrating to Europe.