Kipchaks

In their original home their raiding expeditions were aimed at their neighbors to the north, the shamanistic Kipchaks; the Oghuz were recently converted Muslims (though sometimes pre-Islamic customs remain embedded in the narrative).

Triumph of a Heretic Knox, Bernard 1978

His successors entered Russia in 1237, conquered the Kipchaks about the Caspian Sea and pursued their fugitives into Central Europe, defeated the Poles, ravaged

The Church and the Empire, Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 1907

But the sixteenth-century version retains only occasional reminiscences of the Kipchaks and the geography of the Samarkand area; in it the Oghuz beys now live, hunt, and plunder in western Anatolia, a thousand miles to the west; their infidel enemies "worship a god made from wood" and have churches with monks in them ” one of their strongholds is Trebizond, which remained in Byzantine hands until 1461.

Triumph of a Heretic Knox, Bernard 1978