I acquired the last book about the Balkans solely because of my interest in Hungary.[1] I have been richly rewarded from the early pages. Stephenson introduces De administrando imperio as a book of fifty-two chapters compiled in the middle of the Tenth Century on the instruction of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII for advice to his son and heir, Romanus II.[2] As Stephenson points out, it was a work of greatest secrecy, meant only for the eyes of emperors and their closest advisors.[3] It details the imperial policy concerning the neighboring peoples, as well. Thus we learn that Byzantium secured Serbian assistance for the assault on Bulgaria in the early Tenth Century, and that the ruler of the Serbs, Peter son of Goinikos, took with him the Tourkoi, who can only have been the Magyars.[4] An entire section is dedicated to these people, a confederation of nomadic clans who arrived at the Danube from across the south Russian steppe, who were known in the contemporary Byzantine sources almost invariably as Tourkoi.[5] Lands settled by them north of the Danube were also known as Tourkia.[6] To my surprise, though, Stephenson fails to make any suggestion of the link between the Magyars and the early Turks in this otherwise superb section.[7]

Footnote

1. Stephenson, Paul, Byzantium’s Balkan Frontier: A Political Study of the Northern Balkans, 900-1204, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

2. Op. cit., p. 25.

3. Op. cit., p. 33.

4. Op. cit., p. 26.

5. Op. cit., p. 38.

6. Op. cit., p. 41.

7. Op. cit., pp. 38-45.