REMARKS ON THE SOURCES

The greatest difficulty in investigating the Cumans and Tatars, like that encountering anyone who investigates the Eurasian nomadic peoples, lies in the almost total lack of indigenous sources. (The Secret History of the Mongols is a rare and happy exception.) Chinese, Islamic, Byzantine and medieval western historiographies are severely biased against the nomadic foes, and reflect only certain aspects of nomadic life. So, willy-nilly, we must be content with a Cuman and Tatar history written mainly through the prism of the ‘civilised’ enemy. The most we can do is to apply an equally ‘severe’ criticism of the sources, thereby making an attempt to find an equilibrium between the tendentiousness of the sources and the historical reality they reflect. The basic written sources of the time-span treated in this book are undoubtedly the Byzantine narrative works. Their testimony can be corroborated and supplemented by some Latin and Slavic sources, especially in the age of the Third and Fourth Crusades (Ansbert, Robert de Clari and Geoffroi Villehardouin) and the Tatar invasion of the Balkans (Albericus Trium Fontium, Thomas of Spalato, etc.). These sources will always be referred to in the appropriate place, but the basic Byzantine sources, to which reference is made on practically every page, need a separate short treatment here, so that readers may become familiar with them. There follows a short sketch of the five basic Byzantine narrative sources relating to the period 1185–1365.