Medieval Nomads in Eastern Europe

Florilegium magistrorum historiae archaeologiaeque

Antiquitatis et Medii Aevi

Curatores seriei

VICTOR SPINEI et IONEL CÂNDEA

XVI

ROMANIAN ACADEMY

INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY OF IAŞI

ISTVÁN ZIMONYI

Medieval Nomads in Eastern Europe

Collected Studies

Edited by

Victor SPINEI

Bucureşti – Brăila

2014

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Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a României

ZIMONYI, István

Medieval Nomads in Eastern Europe

Edited by Victor Spinei

Bucureşti – Editura Academiei Române,

Brăila – Editura Istros a Muzeului Brăilei, 2014

ISBN 978-973-27-2482-8

ISBN 978-606-654-113-8

I. Spinei, Victor (ed.)

Editorial assistant: Anca Munteanu

Cover: Ionel Cândea

Cover illustration front: Hungarian sabre, 900-950, Eastern Europe (Hungary ?),

known as Attila’s or Charlemagne’s sabre, and its wooden scabbard, partly gilded

(Die Kaiserliche Schatzkammer / The Imperial Treasury, Hofburg Palace,

Vienna, Inv.Nr. XIII, 5) (Photo Victor Spinei, 2014).

CONTENTS ● INHALT ● ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ ●

TABLE DE MATIÈRES

István Zimonyi – a concise portrayal (András Róna-Tas) .................................11

I. Volga Bulghars

The First Mongol Raids against the Volga-Bulgars.

(Altaistic Studies. Papers at the 25th Meeting of the Permanent

International Altaistic Conference at Uppsala June 7-11 1982. Ed. G.

Jarring - S. Rosén. Konferens 12. Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och

Antikvitets Akademien. Almqvist and Wiksell International, Stockholm

1985, pp. 197-204) ............................................................................... 15

Volga Bulghars between Wind and Water

(Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 46 (1992/93), pp.

347-355) …………………………………………………………….. 25

Volga Bulghars and Islam

(Bamberger Zentralasienstudien. Hrsg. I. Baldauf, M. Friederich.

Konferenzakten ESCAS IV Bamberg 8.-12. Oktober 1991, Berlin 1994,

pp. 235-240) ..........................................................................................35

The Towns of the Volga Bulghars in the Sources (10-13th century)

(Средневековая Казань: возникновение и развитие. Материалы

Международной научной конференции Казань, 1-3 июна 1999

года. Казань 2000, pp. 134-140) ……………………………………41

Волжская Болгария и волжсий путь

(Великий Волжский путь. Материалы Круглого стола и

Международного научного семинара, Казань,

28-29 августа 2000 года. Отв. ред. Ф.Ш. Хузин. Казань 2001, pp.

123-129) ............................................................................................... 49

Значение волжкого пути в истории волжских болгар

(Великий Волжский путь: история формирования и развития.

Материалы Круглого стола «Великий Волжский путь и

Волская Булгария»: и Международной научно-практической

конференции «Великий Волжский путь» Казань – Астрахан -

Казань, 6 - 16 августа 2001 г. Часть II. Казань 2002, pp. 82-88)

................................................................................................................57

Зарубежная историография

(История татар с древнейших времен в семи томах. Том II.

Волжская Булгария и Великая Степь. Казань: Изд-во

«РухИЛ», 2006, pp. 20-24) ..............................................................65

Западноевропейские письменные источники о Булгарах

(История татар с древнейших времен в семи томах. Том II.

Волжская Булгария и Великая Степь. Казань: Изд-во

«РухИЛ», 2006,, pp. 31-33) ...............................................................79

II. Early Hungarians

Préhistoire hongroise: méthodes de recherche et vue d'ensemble

(Cahiers d'études hongroises 8/1996, pp. 20-33 = Préhistoire hongroise:

méthodes de recherche et vue d'ensemble: Les Hongrois et l'Europe

conquête et integration. Par S. Csernus et K. Korompay. Paris-Szeged

1999, pp. 29-43) ....................................................................................85

The Concept of Nomadic Polity in the Hungarian Chapter of Constantine

Porphyrogenitus' De administrando imperio

(Historical and linguistic interaction between Inner-Asia and Europe.

Proceedings of the 39th Permanent International Altaistic Conference

(PIAC) Szeged, Hungary: June 16-21, 1996. Ed. Á. Berta. Szeged 1997,

pp. 459-471) ..........................................................................................99

Why were the Hungarians Referred to as Turks in the Early Muslim Sources?

(Néptörténet - Nyelvtörténet A 70 éves Róna-Tas András köszöntése.

Szerk. Károly L. és Kincses Nagy É. Szeged 2001, pp. 201-212) ….109.

Венгры в Волго-Камском бассейне?

(Бюллетень (Newsletter) 9. Hungaro-Rossica. Институт

востоковедеия РАН, Москва 2002, pp. 130-186) ............................123

A New Muslim Source on the Hungarians in the Second Half of the 10th

Century

(Chronica 4 (2004), pp. 22-31) ……………………………………...165

Военные силы венгров при обретении родины: количество воинов

средневековых кочевых народов евразийских степей

(Бюллетень (Newsletter) 12. Hungaro-Rossica II. Институт

востоковедеия РАН, Москва 2005, pp. 32-51) ……………………175

Das eingregabene Land. Eine arabische Volksetymologie der ungarischen

Selbstbezeichnung

(Ural-Altaische Jahbücher 19 (2005), pp. 50-64) ..............................191

The Hungarian Passage of the Ğayhānī-tradition

(Chronica 5 (2005), pp. 161-170) ………………………………….205

The state of the research on the prehistory of the Hungarians. Historiography

(Oriental sources, history of the Steppe)

(Research on the prehistory of the Hungarians: A review. Papers

presented at the meetings of the Institute of Archaeology of the HAS,

2003-2004. Ed. B. G. Mende. Varia Archaeologica Hungarica XVIII.

Budapest 2005, pp. 87-102) …………………………………………215

Vom Ural ins Karpaten-Becken. Die Grundzüge der ungarischen

Frühgeschichte

(Chronica 7-8 (2007), pp. 261-270) ...................................................239

III. Nomads of Eastern Europe

Bulghars and Oghurs

(The Turks. Ed. H. Halaçoğlu. Ankara 2002, Vol. 1, pp. 569-578) ....251

The Nomadic factor in medieval European history

(Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 58 (2005), pp. 33-

40) …………………………………………………………………271

Islam and Medieval Eastern Europe

(Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the European Society for

Central Asian Studies. Ed. Tomasz Gacek, Jadwiga Pstrusińska

Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, pp. 420-427) …281

The Chapter of the Jayhānī-tradition on the Pechenegs

(The Steppe Lands and the World beyond Them. Studies in honor of

Victor Spinei on his 70th birthday. Ed. Florin Curta, Bogdan-Petru

Maleon. Iaşi 2013, pp. 99-113) ..........................................................287

IV. Mongols

Die Aussage eines mongolischen Kriegsgefangenen zur Zeit der Belagerung

von Kiev im Jahre 1240

(Chronica 1 (2001), pp. 52-66) ...........................................................305

Ibn Battuta on the First Wife of Özbek Khan

(Central Asiatic Journal 49 (2005), pp. 303-309) …………………..319

The Mongol Campaigns against Eastern Europe …………………………….325

V. Miscellanea

The Concept of Nation as Interpreted by Jenő Szűcs

(Forms of Identity. Ed. L. Löb, I. Petrovics, Gy. E. Szőnyi. Szeged

1994, pp. 1-8) ………………………………………………………..355

Bodun und El im Frühmittelalter

(Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 56 (2003), pp. 57-

79) .......................................................................................................363

Notes on the Differences between Bedouin and Inner Asiatic Nomadism

(Central Asia on Display. Proceedings of the VII. Conference of the

European Society for Central Asian Studies (ESCAS VII. Wien 2000.

September 27-30). Ed. Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek, Julia Katschnig.

Wiener Zentralasien Studien 2005, pp. 373-380) ..............................387

Abbreviations ………………………………………………………………...397

ISTVÁN ZIMONYI

– A CONCISE PORTRAYAL

István Zimonyi is professor of Medieval History and Oriental Studies at

the University of Szeged (Hungary). He graduated at the same university and

got his MA in Comparative Altaic Studies and English Language and Literature

in 1981. His interest first focused on the history of the Medieval Volga Bulgars,

an important political power in the Middle Volga Region from the 7th to the

13th century. He defended his university doctorate (Volga Bulghars in the early

13th century, 1983) and his PhD (The Origins of the Volga Bulghars, 1990) on

this important topic, using Arabic, Persian, Byzantine and Slavic sources and

the Volga Bulgar Inscriptions. He gave a new description of the birth and

history of this important political and economic entity. In the next years Zimonyi

extended his researches to the history of the steppe region and the prehistory of

the Hungarians. In 2003 he got his habilitation at the University of Szeged

presenting his monograph on the so called Jayhani tradition as source of the

early history of the Hungarians. He gave a detailed analysis on the Muslim

sources relevant to the Hungarians and the East European nomadic people. In

2014 he defended his dissertation for the title Doctor of Sciences of the

Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Key issues of the Early Hungarian History.

Theories in the light of recent literature) and in the same year he became full

professor at the University of Szeged.

Professor Zimonyi is an internationally well known scholar in Medieval

History. He is working with first-hand sources and uses philological and

linguistic methods in revealing new facts from Oriental, Byzantine and Western

sources. He has done much for editing the for long inaccessible manuscripts of

the famous Hungarian orientalist Mihály Kmoskó (1876-1931). The legacy of

Kmoskó included works on Muslim geographic and historical sources.

The Western part of the steppe includes territories from the Ural

mountain-range and the Ural / Yayik River to the Carpathian Basin, which

latter can be considered as the westernmost reaches of the Eurasian steppe. The

natural and economic settings of these parts of Europe are rich in great

pastures and grazing lands. These territories were later changed into fertile

agriculture, but up till the Medieval Ages they offered a welcome homeland to

nomadic people. While the nomadic people of Inner and East Asia are more or

less well studied, the history of the nomads of the Western part of the steppe,

was in certain periods much neglected. This was due to more factors, some of

them connected with political others with the languages of the relevant sources.

Zimonyi concentrated his studies on the Turkic period of the East European

steppe. Turks appeared there after the defeat of the Huns in the middle of the

5th century. Names like Avar, Onogur, Türk, Bulgar, Khazar, Pecheneg and

other are appearing in the sources denoting sometimes the same, sometimes

different peoples or political powers. The first task is therefore to identify that

what entity is denoted by a certain name in a given source. For instance the

general name of the Slavs in the Arabic sources Sakaliba denoted the non-

Slavonic Volga Bulgars in certain sources. Hungarians were called Turks,

Bashkirs, Maǰgars or Savartoi Asfaloi. Therefore even in case when the given

source is edited by bona fide scholars the historian has to use historical and

linguistic-philological methods to identify peoples in the original sources.

Zimonyi is following this path broken by such scholars as V. V. Barthold, V.

Minorsky, P. Golden and others.

Professor Zimonyi is not only interested in history of people and their

mutual contacts, but also in more general questions of Medieval history. The

role of the ’outer’ and ’inner’ powers of Europe, the role of the historical

regions of Europe, the ”Nomadic” factor in the history of Europe, got an

important focus in his works, following the fundamental theoretical essays of

Jenő Szűcs. Important are his deliberations on the concepts of ethnos, demos,

people, and nation, concepts much distorted by some authors in recent

historical literature. He highlighted the differences between the concepts of the

nomad and the beduin, pointing to their differences in political and economic

terms.

Professor Zimonyi has done much for our scholarship as editor of the

well-known series Magyar Őstörténeti Könyvtár [Studies in Early Hungarian

History], of which 27 volumes were hitherto published. In this series many

monographs came to light which are of interest not only for Early Hungarian

studies. Of wider interest may be the volumes on the Szekler Runiform Script

(Nos. 2, 4), on the sources of the history of the Avars (Nos 5, 8, 26), Huns,

Gepids, Longobards (No. 6), on nationalism and ethnic self-identity (Nos 1, 3),

on dilettant views on Hungarian Prehistory ( Nos 11, 18, 24), on the history of

Inner Asia (No. 7, 19), on religions and beliefs (17, 25) and others.

As the founder and the organizer of the International Conference on the

Mediaeval History of the Eurasian Steppe he opened a scholarly forum on these

studies which has met already four times (Szeged, Miskolc, Jászberény, Cairo).

The reader of the papers published in this volume will get an excellent

overview of the oeuvre of Professor Zimonyi.

András RÓNA-TAS

Professor emeritus,

Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences