To the Byzantines they were just one of an endless succession of peoples beating a path to the great city; their homeland was beyond the Black Sea and stretched as far as China. They were pagan steppe dwellers of the rolling grasslands of Central Asia, from whose epicenter shock waves of nomadic raiders poured out at periodic intervals to ravage the settled peoples beyond. They have left us their word ordu – “horde” – as a memory of this process, like a faint hoofprint in the sand.
