Mykola Melnyk. Byzantium and the Pechenegs: the historiography of the problem (2022)

Mykola Melnyk. Byzantium and the Pechenegs: the historiography of the problem. Translated by Yaroslav Prykhodko; Series: East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450, v. 79. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2022, 398 p. ISBN 9789004280465

This book traces 150 years’ worth of scholarly interpretations of relations between Byzantium and various North Pontic nomads, with particular attention to how colonialist or national aspirations often triggered, hampered, biased, or otherwise influenced these interpretations. Original in its interdisciplinary approach, Mykola Melnyk’s book highlights an overlooked topic: the history of non-historic peoples. Going beyond the well-studied written sources for nomadic history, the author incorporates insights provided by archaeology, linguistics, and the natural sciences, bringing forth promising avenues of research into the subject of nomadic cultures in the medieval world.

Mykola Melnyk, Ph.D. (2007), the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, served as an associate professor at that university, and is currently an independent scholar. He has published many articles on historiography and the history of scholarship, and co-authored The History of Byzantium: Introduction to Byzantinology (Lviv, 2011).

Contents

Acknowledgements … vii
Abbreviations … viii

Introduction … 1

1. Byzantium and the Pechenegs Vasilievskiĭ to Moravcsik … 7
1. Byzantium, the Pechenegs, and the Black Sea Straits … 7
2. Byzantium and the Nomads of the North Pontic Steppes in European Historiography, Mid-19th to Mid-20th Centuries … 20
2.1. Historical Writing in the Russian Empire before 1917 … 21
2.2. European Oriental Studies and the History and Languages of the Medieval Nomads of the Western Eurasian Steppes. Hungarian and Turkish Historiography … 28
2.3. “The Battle for History”: Romanian Historiography, Bulgarian Historiography, and the Lower Danube in the 10th to 12th
Centuries … 41
2.4. Russian and Ukrainian Historiography in the 1920s–1940s … 53
2.5. 10th- to 11th-Century Relations between Byzantium and Trans-Danubian Nomads in International Byzantine Studies … 62

2. “Poised Perception” Trans-Danubian Turks in the Historiography of the Balkan-Danubian Countries … 73
1. Preconditions … 73
2. The Pechenegs and Cumans and Their Relations with Byzantium in Hungarian Historiography, Mid-20th to Early 21st Centuries … 76
2.1. Hungarian Oriental Studies … 76
2.2. Medieval Studies … 83
2.3. Archaeology … 88
3. Romanian Historiography … 96
4. Bulgarian Historiography … 136
4.1. Archaeology … 138
4.2. Medieval and Byzantine Studies … 159
5. Historiography of Other Countries in the Region … 176

3. Eastern European Historiography since 1945 … 190
1. Soviet and Post-Soviet Archaeology … 190
1.1. Interpreting the Archaeological Record of the Late Nomads of the North Pontic Steppe … 191
1.2. 11th- to 12th-Century Nomadic Archaeological Remains in the Prut-Dniester Region … 207
1.3. The Pechenegs and the North Crimean Canal: Exploring Nomadic Archaeological Remains in Crimea … 222
2. Soviet and Post-Soviet Medieval Studies … 236
3. Oriental Studies … 252

4. International Byzantine and Oriental Studies … 265
1. Congresses of Byzantine Studies … 265
2. Publication of Major Sources … 276
3. Visions … 287
4. Selected Problems in the History of Byzantium’s Relations with Steppe Dwellers and Attempts to Solve Them … 298
5. Oriental Studies … 310

Conclusions … 323
1. Periodization … 323
2. Source Base and Methodology … 325
3. Byzantium, Nomads, and National Historiographies … 326
4. Byzantine-Nomadic Relations and International Byzantine and Oriental Studies … 327

Selected Bibliography … 329
Index of Geographic and Ethnic Names … 380
Index of Persons … 389
Index of Modern Authors … 392