CUMANS or COMANS, one of the most important of the old Turkish races. Their origin is uncertain; they were prob ably closely akin to the Seljuk Turks, and perhaps identical with the Qun of Arabic chroniclers; in which case they were the western neighbours of the Seljuks, and preceded their westward march by a few years. They must have arrived on the confines of Europe about A.D. 1030. About 1050 they attacked the Ghuz, who were then living in the old lands of the Petchenegs (q.v.) between the Ural and the Volga. These they subdued and made their vassals. After 1120 they further combined with the Kipchak State which had now come under a Mongolian dynasty. The new federation was known henceforth to Arabic and Chinese sources as Kipchak; to the Russians as Polovtsi; to the Greeks as Cumani, and to the Germans as Walwen, or Falven, these being attempts to reproduce the Slavonic name, which means "dwellers in the plains"; for the Cumans were not of pure Turkish race. The Cuman federation destroyed the last remains of the Khasar State and took their lands. After the defeat of the Petchenegs by Jaroslav of Kiev, they extended their empire yet further westward, reaching the Dnieper in 1055. Soon their frontiers reached from the Volga to the Danube. For the next century, the history of Kiev is practically one of continual Cuman wars. Sometimes treaties, and even marriage alliances were con cluded; but the Cumans seem to have taken these treaties lightly, and bands of them constantly harassed the Slavonic peasants. At this time the Cumans were partly Mohammedan, but still largely pagan. "We worship one God, who is in the sky," they told the first missionaries to them, "and beyond that we know nothing ; for the rest, we have abominable habits." As to these, the "Chronicle of Nestor" states : "Our Polovtsi too have their own habits ; they love to shed blood, and boast that they eat carrion and the flesh of unclean beasts, such as the civet and the hamster; they marry their mothers-in-law and daughters-in law, and imitate in all things the example of their fathers." These Cumans wore short kaftans, and shaved their heads, except for two long plaits. They seem to have been purely hunters and warriors, leaving the cultivation of the soil to their subject tribes of Slays. Cumania, as south Russia was called, possessed thriving towns, and traded in slaves, furs and other products; but the trade was probably in the hands of Greeks and Genoese; the funeral monuments attributed to the Cumans (pyramids or pillars, each surmounted by a male figure bearing in his hand a drinking cup) were probably not their work. The early westward raids of the Cumans, as when they invaded Hungary in 1071-7 2 and Byzantine territory in io86 and 1094, allied with the Petchenegs, were not made in force, and were defeated. After the break-up of Kiev they grew stronger; at the opening of the 12th century they were the allies of the terrible Bulgarian Tsar Kalojan, whose wife was a Cuman. With him they were engaged in annual wars against Byzantium and against the Crusaders, although the alliance had to be renewed annually, for at the approach of sum mer the Cumans always retired to their own steppes to enjoy their booty. The growing power of Hungary was already a danger to them; the King of Hungary made several campaigns into Mol davia and Wallachia from 1223 on, coupling these wars with the more pacific methods of Catholic propaganda. By 1228 he already had enough converts to found a bishopric in Moldavia.
Break-up of the Cuman Empire.—The conquerors of the Cumans were to come, however, from the East. In 1228 the Mongols attacked them on the Volga, destroying many and driving others into Georgia, where they were attacked and wiped out. In 1238 they were crushingly defeated near Astrakhan. Many of them were slain, many more absorbed in the conquerors' hordes. Some, who were sold as slaves to the Sultan Malek-el-Saleb, be came the founders of the Boharib dynasty of Mameluke sultans in Egypt, and subsequently avenged their earlier defeat, and in flicted on the Mongols their first check. Large numbers of Cumans crossed the Danube in leather boats, and took refuge in Bulgaria. Their army is still heard of as a separate force here in 1256, and the Cumans played a very large, if not a preponderating part in Bulgarian history up to the Turkish conquest. The two chief Bul garian dynasties of this period, the Terterovske and the Sisma novske, were Cuman, and much of the population of north Bul garia must also have been Cuman. Jirecek believes the so-called "Gagauz" of north-east Bulgaria, the Dobruja and Bessarabia (Turkish-speaking orthodox Christians) to be descendants of the Cumans. The Gagauz are being rapidly Bulgarized to-day.
Another group of Cumans, consisting of 40,00o warriors with their families, or at least 200,000 souls in all, under their Khan Kuthen, took refuge in Hungary in 1239, promising to adopt Christianity in return for protection. This protection was the occasion of the declaration of war on Hungary by the Mongols who claimed the Cumans as their vassals. They were received with honour by King Bela of Hungary, and a commission was appointed to settle with them. There was, however, much friction between the Cumans and the Magyars. The former, who were still nomad tent-dwellers, felt cramped in their new life; the latter complained of depredations against their fields and their women. The Cuman women, on the other hand, were too ugly to attract the Magyars. The Cumans were eventually settled in the most fruitful parts of the Alf old, between the Danube and the Theiss, in the districts henceforward known as Greater and Lesser Cumania. When the Mongols invaded Hungary, they drove before them many Cuman prisoners as their vanguard. This caused the belief that the Cumans of Hungary had turned against their hosts, and a mob of infuriated Magyars broke into the royal palace and murdered Kuthen. His followers, who were assembling loyally enough to fight the Mongols, thereupon turned on the Magyars, and a party of them after devastating much of south Hungary and Styria, retired with their booty to the Balkans. Some of his followers settled in the district of south Serbia where a village still bears the name of Cumanovo; others rejoined their com patriots in Bulgaria.
King Bela married his son to a Cuman woman, and King Ladislaus of Hungary (12 7 2-9o) was known as the Cumanian. He favoured the Kunok (as the Cumans were known in Hungary) to such a extent that there appeared a danger that the land might relapse into heathendom, and a crusade was preached against them; but after his death their importance diminished. Many of them were created nobles, the rest remained free peasants, enjoying special privileges and immunities. Until 1715 they did military service in lieu of all taxation, and had the right of migrating at will. They retained their individuality until late in the i8th century, when they were completely Magyarized. The last speaker of Cuman as a living language died in 17 7o. Many Cumans doubtless left Hungary with the Turks.
The Cumans were notoriously prolific, and it certainly cannot be doubted that they form a much larger element of the popula tion of Hungary and Bulgaria, perhaps also Rumania, than is generally recognized. They were a talented race. They produced a dynasty in Egypt and two in Bulgaria, and intermarried with the kings and princes of Kiev, Serbia and Hungary. Matthias Corvinus himself is said by some authorities to have been of Cuman origin.
Their language has been preserved in the so-called Codex Cumanicus, which was once in the possession of Petrarch, and is now in the library of St. Mark in Venice. This interesting i4th century document contains an imperfect Cuman lexicon, a num ber of hymns, and a collection of riddles in Cuman. The lan guage is clearly an east Turkish dialect.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—Codex Cumanicus, ed. Count Geza Kuun (BudaBibliography.—Codex Cumanicus, ed. Count Geza Kuun (Buda- pest, 188o) ; K. Jirecek, "Bemerkungen Taber die Kumanen and Pet schenegen," in the Berichte of the k. bohmischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (1880 ; J. Marquart Ueber das Volkstum der Ku manen, in Ost-tiirkische Dialektstudien (1914) ; A. Bruce Boswell, "The Kipchak Turks" in The Slavonic Review June, 1q27; other studies by Bang, Marquart and Pelliot have appeared in the minutes of learned societies in Liege, Gottingen, Paris and elsewhere.
(C. A. M.)