Cuman-Kipchak confederation

A name strange to every neighbor

formationDrafted from Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927)

No Chinese, Arab or Turkish record uses the name by which the western world came to know these people. They called themselves Kipchaks, after the vast northwestern steppe - now the Kirghiz steppe - their tribes came pouring out of, pressed westward by the growing Naiman power on the Irtysh as the crowded Turkic world of Central Asia ran out of room. Every neighbor gave them a different name: Greeks called them Comans, Russians called them Polovtsy ("steppe folk"), the Saxons of Transylvania called them Valvi or Falben ("sallow people"), and Hungarians used both Kun and Palocz. Only the Arabs and Georgians used the name Kipchak itself.

Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927) · Nataliya Shestakova · CC BY 4.0

A path opened by two empires' collapse

For generations two great states had held the crowded Turkic hordes back from Europe: the Samanid emirate on the Oxus and the Khazar empire on the Volga. Both collapsed around the end of the tenth century, opening the way south for the Seljuks and north for the Kipchaks alike. Crossing into the grasslands between the Volga and the Don, the Kipchaks conquered what remained of the Khazars, drove the Alans south into the Caucasus, and swept up the Torks and Pechenegs who had already been broken by the Russians. Their advance moved fast: they reached the borders of Rus by 1054, crossed the Carpathians by 1070, and stood on the Danube by 1090.

Allies before they were enemies

The Kipchaks' first major action in Europe was fighting for, not against, a settled power. Having decisively broken the Pechenegs in 1087, they were called on by the Byzantine emperor Alexius to help meet a fresh mass of Pecheneg refugees threatening his own European territory, and shared in his great victory over them at Lebounion in 1091. The gratitude did not last. Having tasted the wealth of the grasslands and cities beyond their old range, the Kipchaks spent the next fifty years as one of the most persistent threats the Greek, Hungarian and Russian frontier provinces faced.

Bonyak the Scabby

peakDrafted from Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927)

Hungary held its own against the Kipchak advance - a mountain barrier, the province of Transylvania, and fierce Székely and Romanian frontier communities let King Ladislaus turn back repeated raids at Cserhalom and Lake Hód, reducing the Kipchaks to occasional raiders there after a string of decisive defeats. Russia had no comparable shield. Kiev, Pereyaslavl and Chernigov, its wealthiest cities, sat directly on the southern frontier, permanently exposed to a people who had come to regard Kiev itself - which they called Menkerman, "the great city" - as the center of their own world.

National Széchényi Library, Budapest · Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A monastery raided after Matins

No Kipchak khan matched the terror of Bonyak, called "the Scabby," "the godless," "the plunderer." He fought in the Byzantine campaigns, led expedition after expedition into Kiev's own territory, and in 1096 broke into the Pechersky monastery itself - an intrusion so shocking that the monk writing the Russian chronicle broke his own detached tone to record it happening "while we were in our cells resting after Matins." Bonyak's reputation ran deep enough both ways that Russian princes who spoke well of him before Monomakh's own son were exiled for it, and deep enough among his own people that his son, after Bonyak's death, was killed trying to strike his lance against Kiev's Golden Gate in imitation of his father's own gesture.

Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

Allies as often as enemies

Bonyak's value to the Russians was as real as his menace. His own forces helped Russian princes win a major victory over the Hungarians on the river San in 1097, one of several campaigns in which Kipchak horsemen fought beside, not against, the cities they otherwise raided. Other khans of the period - Tugorkan, Sharukan the Old, Altunopa, Ayepak - kept up the same steady pressure on the trade caravans that the wealth of the southern Russian cities depended on, without ever possessing the organization or resources to conquer Russian territory outright. What they could do, and very nearly did, was drive Russian settlement off the whole northern fringe of the steppe for good.

Vladimir Monomakh's revenge

contractionDrafted from Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927)

Vladimir Monomakh grew up at Pereyaslavl, the border principality his own father had ruled, and understood the Kipchak danger better than any prince further north. Across two terms holding that frontier throne, he built the region's defenses methodically: earthwork lines and palisades on the Sula and Trubezh manned by scouts, a war-band recruited from wider sources than any prince before him, and a renewed practice of hiring the broken remnants of earlier Turkic peoples - Berendians, Pechenegs, Torks - as auxiliary cavalry who knew nomad warfare from the inside. His deeper achievement was political: against Kiev's own weak prince Svyatopolk and his personal rival Oleg of Chernigov alike, Monomakh pushed relentlessly for a unified strategy against the common enemy, reviving a princely cooperation that had not existed since the days of Yaroslav.

Two campaigns that broke a generation of khans

At the Congress of Lubech, called mainly to settle disputes over succession, Monomakh maneuvered the assembled princes into an alliance against the Kipchaks instead. Renewed in 1103 after the crisis of Vasilko's blinding interrupted it, that alliance produced two offensive campaigns deep into the steppe. In 1103 the united princes marched east from the Dnieper rapids and crushed the main Kipchak force at a place called Suten, killing twenty khans including the redoubtable Altunopa. In 1111 a second campaign crossed the Sula, Psel and Vorskla, took towns in the Don basin, and won a decisive victory at the Salnitsa on 27 March - a battle fought far enough east that Vladimir's own son Yaropolk led a follow-up raid in 1116 that brought back an Alan princess as his bride.

Sixty years of quiet

The results were plain even where the chronicle's own details are scant. Most Kipchak khans were killed, captured or driven into exile; Bonyak escaped, though his own brother did not, and neither he nor Sharukan is heard of again in the record. Ayepak fled to the Volga Bulgars, who poisoned him. Vladimir made no attempt to hold new territory - Tmutarakan was never recovered - choosing instead to consolidate what the Russians already held. It worked. From Bonyak's own eclipse until the rise of Konchak two generations later, southern Russia's frontier saw scarcely a single serious violation for the better part of sixty years.

Sons of the khans who fled

contractionDrafted from Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927)

Driven off the northern grassland by Monomakh's campaigns, the Kipchaks fell back toward the Black Sea, tightening their hold on Crimea and the steppes of the Kuban and Kuma and turning south toward the wealth of the Caucasus instead. A Kipchak khan named Otrok fled to Abkhazia in the aftermath of Monomakh's victories and, after years in exile, returned to the steppe as the father of Konchak - the khan who would come to dominate the next generation's worth of Russian chronicles. A related figure, Atrak, entered Georgian service outright: his daughter married King David II, his own followers helped defeat the Seljuk sultan in battle, and later Kipchak mercenaries went on serving under George III and Queen Tamara, one of them, a general named Qubasar, achieving real distinction in both reigns.

A raid that outlived its own chronicle

In Russia, a succession struggle that ended in Kiev being sacked by its own Prince Andrew weakened the south for good and normalized Kipchak involvement in every princely quarrel that followed. Konchak stepped into the resulting vacuum, threatening the southern principalities for two decades in a manner the frontier had not faced since Bonyak's own day. His conflict with Prince Igor of Novgorod-Seversk, who set out in 1185 hoping to "drink the Don in his golden helm" as Monomakh once had, ended in catastrophe for the Russians - a defeat significant enough to produce both a detailed prose account in the Kievan Chronicle and the great medieval epic The Tale of the Host of Igor. The monkish chroniclers heaped Konchak with every abusive epithet reserved for a pagan enemy, even as intermarriage between Turks and Russians continued and the Druzhina class seems to have regarded him, in practice, as an honorable adversary.

A frontier that found a new direction

Serious danger from the Kipchaks eased after 1187, whether from Konchak's own death or from the pull of a new opportunity: in that same year the chronicle records that "the Polovtsy had gone to the Danube," drawn by the rise of a new Bulgarian state in which Kipchaks and their Wallachian subjects played a central role - the later Bulgarian king Tertery was, by the record, a Kipchak outright. That southward pull brought Kipchak riders up to the walls of Constantinople itself, where Western chroniclers like Villehardouin recorded them scouring the land "up to the gates" during the Fourth Crusade, "destroying the cities and castles" with a thoroughness the chronicler claims no one had ever heard the like of.

The river Kalka

endDrafted from Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927)

The blow that ended Kipchak independence came first from the south. A small, disciplined Mongol army under Jebe and Subutai, fresh from running down the survivors of the defeated Khwarazm-Shah's armies, was ordered to bring the Kipchaks back under a single Turkic authority. After defeating the Georgians and crossing the Caucasus, they met a coalition of Alans, Kipchaks and their Circassian and Lesgian allies - and broke it with characteristic diplomacy, persuading the Kipchaks to abandon their allies on the argument that Mongols and Kipchaks were brother Turks who had no real quarrel with each other.

An old enemy's warning goes unheeded

Konchak's own son Yury, ruling alongside a khan named Kotyan, saw through the maneuver too late to save the coalition, but in time to flee to the Russian frontier and beg help from the very princes his own family had spent generations raiding. The Mongols tried the same trick again, telling the Russians they had no quarrel with them either and only wished to punish their own runaway slaves. The Russians refused the offer - and were maneuvered instead into an unfavorable position on the river Kalka, where the combined Russian-Kipchak force was completely destroyed. The Mongol army withdrew north around the Caspian and home, its work in the region done for the moment.

Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A steppe reorganized under a new name

The respite did not last. When the Mongols returned in greater force, Kotyan fled west to Hungary with a large following of his own people, while another khan, Yunus, crossed the Danube to fight for the Latins still holding Constantinople against the Greeks. Scattered Kipchak resistance held out for a time on the Volga and in the Caucasus, but the whole of the steppe that had been theirs passed into Mongol hands and was reorganized as the Kipchak Khanate - the polity better known to history as the Golden Horde - under Batu, with a new capital at Sarai on the Volga. The grassland the Kipchaks had fought Russians, Georgians, Bulgarians and Greeks over for a century and a half now answered to a single Mongol dynasty instead.

Sultans who never forgot the steppe

afterlifeDrafted from Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927)

Enormous numbers of Kipchaks died in the Mongol conquest - the Franciscan traveler Carpini described bones and skulls strewn the entire distance from Kiev to the Mongol capital - but the survivors scattered into a wider range of foreign courts and careers than almost any defeated steppe people before them. Thousands were sold into slavery through Crimea by Venetian and Genoese merchants; a large group took refuge in Bulgaria and were gradually absorbed into the Bulgarian nation; and the main body, by every account, simply went on living on its old pasture lands under new Mongol masters, forming the demographic core of the Crimean and Nogai Tatars for centuries to come - the name Kipchak itself surviving among the Crimean Tatars, one Uzbek tribe, and one of the largest Kirghiz-Kazakh groupings.

A king who shaved his beard for them

Hungary took in the largest organized group of refugees, led by Kotyan himself, and treated them well enough that one Hungarian king was said to have "loved the Cumans more than was proper." Their descendants settled the Tisza valley in such numbers that two counties, Great and Little Kunság, still carried their name, and their own language survived there in daily use into the eighteenth century, recorded in the Codex Cumanicus. King Ladislas IV, himself half Kipchak, was rebuked by a papal legate for adopting Turkish weapons, speaking Turkish and shaving his beard in the Turkish fashion - and was eventually killed by Kipchaks himself, in a brawl, after deserting his wife for three Turkish women. Kipchak cavalry fought for Hungary at the decisive battle of the Marchfield in 1278, where the Czech king Otakar lost his life, and were still serving Poland against the Teutonic Knights at Płowce as late as 1331.

Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (1927) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

Thrones across half of Eastern Europe

Marriage carried Kipchak blood further than conquest ever had. Konchak's own grandfather Otrok's kinsman Kotyan married one daughter to a leading Russian prince and another to the king of Hungary, where she became regent and the mother of Ladislas IV; the Bulgarian adventurer Tertery married his own daughter to the king of Serbia. By the thirteenth century, rulers of Kipchak descent sat, at one time or another, on the thrones of Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Georgia and even the restored Byzantine imperial house - a dynasty scattered by conquest into becoming ancestors of half the royal houses of Eastern Europe.

Slaves who became sultans

The most striking Kipchak afterlife of all played out far from the steppe entirely. Kipchak boys sold into slavery in Egypt rose through the Mamluk military system to found a ruling dynasty of their own: Baybars, Qalawun, Lajin and others among them, Baybars greatest of all - not only one of the most formidable sultans Egypt ever produced, but the first general in history to defeat the previously invincible Mongol army in open battle. The Mamluk sultans never severed their own connection to the steppe, maintaining relations with the Golden Horde's own court for generations after the conquest that had scattered their ancestors in the first place - former slaves who ended up ruling an empire, still looking back toward the grassland their own people no longer held.