Cuman

Member of a powerful alliance of Turkic-speaking peoples of the Middle Ages, which dominated the steppes in the 11th and 12th centuries and built an empire reaching from the River Volga to the Danube.

For a generation the Cumans held up the Mongol advance on the Volga, but in 1238 a Cuman and Russian army was defeated near Astrakhan, and 200,000 Cumans took refuge in Hungary, where they settled and where their language died out only about 1775. The Mameluke dynasty of Egypt was founded by Cuman ex-slaves. Most of the so-called Tatars of southern Russia were of Cuman origin.