Short History of the Pechenegs

Thonuzoba, the ancestor of the Tomaji family, was a Pecheneg chieftain.

According to one theory, the Pechenegs originated from the Wusun people of Central Asia, recorded in Chinese chronicles in the early centuries of the modern era. Whatever the truth of this, the Pechenegs emerge in the historical records only in the 8th and 9th centuries, inhabiting the region between the lower Volga, the Don, and the Ural Mountains. By the 9th-10th centuries AD they controlled much of the steppes of southwestern Eurasia and the Crimean Peninsula. Although an important factor in the region at the time, like most nomadic tribes their concept of statecraft failed to go beyond random attacks on neighbours and spells as mercenaries for other powers.

According to Constantine Porphyrogenitus writing in c.950, Patzinakia - that is the Pecheneg realm - streched west as far as the Siret river and was four days distant from "Tourkias" (i.e. Hungary). In the 9th century, the Byzantines became allied with the Pechenegs, using them to fend off other, more dangerous tribes such as the Varangians and the Magyars. This was an old Roman ploy (divide and rule) continued by their Byzantines successors - playing off one enemy tribe against another.

The Uzes, another Turkic steppe people, eventually expelled the Pechenegs from their homeland; in the process, they also seized most of their livestock and other goods. An alliance of the Oghuz, Kimeks and Karluks were also pressing the Pechenegs, but another group, the Samanids, defeated that alliance. Driven further west by the Khazars and Cumans by 889, the Pechenegs in turn drove the Magyars west of the Dnieper River by 892.

In 894, the Bulgars went to war against Byzantium. Early in 895, Emperor Leo Grammaticus invoked the help of the Magyars, who sent an army under a commander named Levente into Bulgaria. Levente conducted a brilliant campaign and invaded deep into Bulgaria, while the Byzantine army entered Bulgaria from the south. Caught in a vice of Magyar and Byzantine forces, Tsar Simeon I realised he could not fight a war on two fronts, and quickly concluded an armistice with the Byzantine Empire.

Tsar Simeon also employed the Pechenegs to help fend off the Magyars. The Pechenegs were so successful that they drove the Magyars remaining in Etelköz and the Pontic steppes, forcing them westward up the lower Danube, Transdanubia and towards the Pannonian plain, where they later founded the Hungarian state.

From the 9th century AD, the Pechenegs started an uneasy relationship with Kievan Rus. For more than two centuries they launched random raids into Rus lands, which sometimes escalated into full-scale wars (like the 920 war on the Pechenegs by Igor of Kiev reported in Nestor's Chronicle). In 968, the Pechenegs attacked and then besieged the city of Kiev. Part of them joined the Prince of Kiev Sviatoslav I (Europe/Rurik) in his Byzantine campaign of 970-971, though eventually the Pechenegs ambushed and killed the Kievan prince in 972, and according to the Chronicle of Bygone Years, the Pecheneg Khan made a chalice from his skull - a traditional steppe nomad custom. The fortunes of the Rus-versus-Pecheneg confrontation swung during the reign of Vladimir I (Europe/Rurik) of Kiev (990-995), but were followed by the defeat of the Pechenegs after the reign of Yaroslav I the Wise (Europe/Rurik) (1037). Shortly afterwards, the Pechenegs were replaced in the territories surrounding Kievan Rus by another Steppe people - the Cumans or Polovtsy ("Kun" in Hungarian).

After centuries of fighting involving all their neighbours - the Byzantine Empire, the Bulgars, Kievan Rus, Khazaria and the Magyars, the Pechenegs were finally routed at Levounion by a combined Byzantine and Cuman army in 1061. Attacked again in 1064 by the Cumans, many Pechenegs were slain or absorbed. After the siege of Constantinople in 1091, the Pechenegs were virtually annihilated by Emperor Alexius I (Europe/Komnene). For some time, significant communities of Pechenegs still remained in Hungary, but finally the Pechenegs ceased to be a distinct people and were assimilated into neighboring peoples such as the Bulgars, Magyars and Gagauz.