The Pechenegs seize the Pontic steppe

Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, writing about 950 in his treatise On the Governance of the Empire, relates that the Pechenegs had once lived on the Atil (Volga) and the Geïch (Ural), bordering on the Khazars and the people called Uzes (the Oghuz). Fifty years before, he says, the Uzes made common cause with the Khazars, defeated the Pechenegs and drove them from their country; some stayed behind and joined the Uzes. The rest wandered west until they reached the land they now held, found the “Turks”, as Byzantine writers called the Magyars, living there, defeated them and drove them out, and had been its masters for fifty-five years; the two figures do not agree.

Other sources point to the end of the 880s and the 890s. Regino of Prüm, writing in the early 10th century, records under the year 889 that the Hungarians were driven from their homes by their neighbours, the Pechenegs. Constantine also tells how Simeon I of Bulgaria, defeated in 894–895 by the Magyars as allies of Byzantium, made peace with the emperor and then, together with the Pechenegs, fell on the Magyar camps between the Dnieper and the lower Danube while the Magyar warriors were away on campaign; the survivors left for the Carpathian Basin. The interval 889–896 combines Regino’s year with Constantine’s reckoning; some historians also reconstruct an earlier stage, when the Pechenegs had already moved from the Volga to the steppes of the Donets and the Kuban, and date it variously, from about 830 to the 850s or later.

By the middle of the 10th century, Constantine writes, Patzinakia was divided into eight provinces under great princes, four on each side of the Dnieper: the western ones bordered on Bulgaria, Hungary and Rus’, the eastern ones on the lands of the Uzes, Khazaria, Alania and Cherson. Byzantium paid the Pechenegs to keep the peace and used them to restrain the Rus’, the Magyars and the Bulgarians, and Rus’ convoys bound for Constantinople had to pass the Dnieper rapids under the threat of their attacks. Archaeologists connect the arrival of the new nomads with the decline of the Saltovo-Mayaki culture of the Khazar steppe. Under 915 the Primary Chronicle records that the Pechenegs came to the Rus’ land for the first time.