The Pechenegs were a Turkic-speaking confederation of tribes, perhaps eight of them, who in the 10th to 12th centuries had numerous contacts with the Rus and Byzantines in eastern and central Europe, as enemies or allies and trading partners. (The Byzantines called them Patzinakoi, possibly from the Arabic Badjanakia, a name that evolved into Patzinaks.
They were known to the Hungarians as Besenyo, or in its Latin form Besseni.)
ORIGINS
The original homeland of the Pechenegs is not known. By the eighth century c. e. they had broken off from other Turkics and inhabited territory between the ural and Volga Rivers in present-day western Russia. in the late ninth century they were pressured by other steppe peoples, among them the Khazars, and migrated westward. in the 10th century they controlled the territory north of the Black sea between the Don and Dnieper Rivers in present-day southwestern Russia and eastern ukraine, including the Crimean Peninsula.
LANGUAGE
The now-extinct Turkic dialect of the Pechenegs, known as Pecheneg, is of the Northwestern (Kipchak; Ogur) language group.
HISTORY
The Pechenegs became known as both fierce warriors as well as trading partners, providing horses, cattle, and sheep to more sedentary peoples. in the late ninth century they became renowned for their fierceness, fighting as mercenaries for the Bulgars against the Magyars, driving them westward into present-day Hungary.
In 944 the Pechenegs allied with the Rus to invade Byzantine lands. The Byzantines bought them off with rich bribes to induce them to attack the Bulgars instead. The first eight chapters of De administrando imperio, (On the administration of the empire), written by Emperor Constantine Vii (Constantine Porphyrogenitus) in about 950—for his son, giving guidelines on ruling the Eastern Roman Empire—concern the importance of the alliance with the warlike Pechenegs. The Byzantines reportedly sailed up the Dnieper and Danube Rivers for negotiations with the Pechenegs.
The Pechenegs were known to attack the Rus of the Kievan Rus principality as they sailed downriver for trade with the Byzantines. In 968-969 the Pechenegs besieged Kiev, the Kievan Rus capital in present-day ukraine. For a time afterward, they were allied with the Kievan Rus and attempted another invasion of Byzantium. In 972, led by Kuryea, they killed svyatoslav who had failed to pay the agreed amount for their help. (It is said that Kurya, the most dominant khan of the Pechenegs of the time, drank from a goblet made from Svyatoslav’s skull.)
C. E.
Early 10th century Pechenegs settle between Volga and Don Rivers. 968 Pechenegs attack Constantinople.
1036 Rus defeat Pechenegs.
1064 Cu mans defeat Pechenegs.
The Rus under Yaroslav defeated the Pechenegs in 1036. At that time they were centered along the Lower Danube in present-day Romania, from which they continued to be a threat to Byzantium.
In 1064 the Pechenegs were defeated by the Cumans, another Turkic people, who absorbed many survivors. In 1090-91 the Pechenegs advanced into Thrace and threatened Constantinople (modern Istanbul). The Eastern Roman emperor Alexius I, with the help of the Cumans, defeated and dispersed them. Some survivors found work as soldiers for the Byzantines.
In the course of their wanderings some Pechenegs settled in present-day Bulgaria,
Pechenegs time line
Serbia, and Hungary. Others who had remained in Russia joined the Torks in a confederacy called Chenrye Klobuki (Black Hoods) and were settled at the limits of Rus territory northeast of Kiev as a buffer against the Cumans.
CULTURE (see also Turkics) Economy
For the ancestors of the Pechenegs as for other nomadic steppe peoples the harshness of the steppe climate prevented anything but a simple nomadic socioeconomy, whose main imperative was to find pasturage for the herds, a need constantly threatened by the extremes, severe winters and drought, that periodically ruined pasturelands. In general the various deserts in central Eurasia, among them the Garagum, the Qyzylqum, and the Gobi, have slowly been expanding since prehistoric times, each encroachment caused by a period of drought and also overgrazing, which periodically pressures groups along their borders, pressures that ripple out in waves of disturbance in all directions across the steppe.
Raiding and Trading An important part of the economy of the Pechenegs involved raiding on trade routes. The Pechenegs attacked traders of the Rus traveling down rivers through their territory on expeditions to Constantinople. The Dnieper River had nine sets of rapids to be negotiated, and the laborious portages around them furnished the Pechenegs opportunities for attack.
The Pechenegs also engaged in trade with the Rus and other neighboring peoples, as documented in Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus’s De administrando imperio. The Rus bought cattle, horses, and sheep from them. From a neighboring people called the Chersonites they received pieces of purple cloth, ribbons, woven cloths, gold brocade, pepper, and scarlet or “Parthian” leather.
After Pecheneg groups had settled in present-day Hungary as allies of the Magyars who had seized this territory, they took up a sedentary existence and built prosperous towns.
Government and Society Steppe Tribalism The name Pecheneg may have derived from Badjanakia, a name given in an early Arabic account to peoples living from the Volga River to the Ural Mountains. The name may have been related to the Turkish badjanak, which means “brother-in-law,” possibly indicating the political structure of peoples here as being primarily tribal, with tribes made up of familial clans whose members were genuinely related to one another. When a number of clans formed a tribe, all tribal members may have adopted one another as honorary broth-ers-in-law.
The social organization of steppe peoples through prehistory and history was profoundly influenced by the conjunction of harshness of the Eurasian steppe lands in the interior with the circumstance that it lay between growing civilizations to the east and west, a wilderness at the heart of Eurasia crossed by the silk Road along which the civilizations reached out to one another. The impoverished inhabitants of the wilderness, observing the products of cultures of unimagined sophistication and luxury, fell upon the silk Road caravans and wrested the goods for themselves, thereby profoundly changing their own societies. They developed societies in which status depended on success in war, in this way warfare became ever more important in steppe societies: used by different groups of nomads to compete for pasturelands and later for dominance in controlling access to trade routes.
By the time of the rise of the Huns in the middle of the first millennium C. E. attempts by Byzantine armies to destroy Hunnic power caused former loose coalitions of tribes to join in a tighter, more disciplined organizations. A vast territory, including many Turkic areas, was more or less united into a Hunnic empire. Turkic involvement in Attila’s empire in the fifth century caused the spread of Turkic languages and influence. The Pechenegs, however, who had emerged (or were first written about) some 400 years later, seem to have preserved the much more loose tribal organization of the pre-Hunnic past.
Foreign Relations and Internal Organization
The Byzantines made it a conscious policy to remain on peaceful terms as much as possible with the Pechenegs. They concluded conventions and treaties of friendship with them and every year sent to them a diplomatic agent bearing gifts. According to Porphyrogenitus the agent received from them hostages and a Pecheneg diplomatic agent. Also according to Porphyrogenitus the Rus did what they could to pacify the Pechenegs, both because they had valuable livestock to offer in trade and because their hostility hampered Rus activities in trade and war. At times the Pechenegs allied with the Rus in war.
Porphyrogenitus described the political organization of Patzinacia, the name of the original Pecheneg territory homeland. It was divided into eight provinces, each with a great prince. As in many tribal societies (including those of the Germanics before they were under Roman influence), traditional laws ensured that no one family could gather the reins of power in their own hands. Princes were succeeded by cousins, rather than sons or brothers to vary the lineage. It is probable that “cousins” could include men with only a distant or even no actual family relationship, because it was common for tribes to consider all their members as being in some sense related through their common ancestry from a usually mythical founding hero. Thus Pecheneg society is likely to have been relatively egalitarian, at least compared to the highly stratified Byzantine Empire, with anyone of the warrior class able to rise to power if he were successful at war. The eight provinces were divided into 40 districts, each with a minor princeling ruling it. The names of the tribes were based on horse colors (for example, Qara-Bay, the tribe of Bay with grayish horses).
The Pechenegs were famous for their skill and ferocity in warfare and reportedly did not even wear armor or build protective palisades or ditches around their camps. The mention of lack of armor is probably based on rumor and hearsay, inflating the prowess of the fierce Pechenegs to mythic dimensions, and says more about the psychological effect they had on their victims than actual fact. It is more likely that they were armed and fought very much as other steppe races such as the Huns did, with felt or leather lamellar armor, shooting the bow from horseback. A helmet found in Hungary, though apparently of Byzantine manufacture, had decoration thought to be of Pecheneg origin, indicating that Pechenegs readily adopted arms from other peoples. On the other hand a type of cavalry saber made by Byzantines in the 10th century may have derived from a Pecheneg sword.
The Pechenegs decorated their arms and other metalwork with designs used by steppe peoples everywhere, which were strongly influenced by the art of the Scythians.
The Pechenegs probably practiced a form of animism and shamanism observed for millennia by peoples all over the steppes. Shamanism among steppe peoples usually involved the shaman’s entering a trance state, often attained by ingesting cannabis, to communicate with the spiritual realm and gain wisdom. Later other religious impulses moved through the steppe lands—from Persian Zoroastrianism and Hinduism to Buddhism especially the Tantric sect.
By the end of the 14th century most Pechenegs in Hungary had been forcibly converted to Christianity.
The Pechenegs were among those Turkic steppe people who had a major impact on European history.
Further Reading
Andras Paloczi Horvath. Pechenegs, Cumans, lasians: Steppe Peoples in Medieval Hungary (Budapest: Corvina, 1989).
World History
