Turkic peoples in the Medieval layer of Hungarian legendary tradition

This chapter discusses Turkic-speaking peoples who became integrated into the Hungarian population – Pechenegs, Uzes (Oghuz), Cumans and Tatars – as they appear in medieval Hungarian written sources and in folklore, particularly folk legends. The Székelys are treated only indirectly, and the survey ends in the mid-14th century, leaving aside the legends connected with the Ottoman Turks. The sources include the Chronicon Pictum, Anonymus' Gesta Hungarorum, the Vita and Admonitions of Saint Stephen, the anonymous Minorite chronicler, later folk legends and the Saint Ladislaus wall paintings. The chapter presents the reading of the chronicle's eagle episode as a symbolic memory of a Pecheneg attack, Anonymus' report of Cuman settlers in the light of archaeogenetic results, the legend of the Pecheneg Tanuzaba buried alive for refusing baptism, and the contrasting story of the sixty Pechenegs whose robbers King Stephen punished. It shows how the victories of Ladislaus I over the Uzes and Cumans made him a leading hero of Hungarian legend, how the image of the enemy was transferred to Tatars and Ottoman Turks, and how the wall paintings of the Cuman abductor, whose dress and weapons are largely realistic, follow an Eastern heroic-song motif sequence also attested among the Abakan Tatars, Sur Tatars and Kara-Kyrgyz. It closes with the legend of Saint Ladislaus in the 1345 Moldavian campaign, preserved among the Csángós into the 21st century. The chapter concludes that some traces of early Hungarian–Turkic relations survive mainly in folklore and may partly preserve the memory of historical events.