Kumyk

The Kumyks are the largest Turkic people of the North Caucasus, settled on the Caspian coastal plain and the banks of the Terek in a land called Kumykia. Their identity grew from the Turkic-speaking population of the Khazar era, reinforced by Kipchak and Cuman migrants, and their ethnogenesis ran from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. Their chief polity was the Shamkhalate of Tarki.

Wedged between Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Persia, they balanced all three. Russian armies first stormed Tarki in 1560, but a Kumyk victory at Karaman in 1605 halted the Russian advance for more than a century.

Peter the Great's Persian campaign of 1722 to 1723 broke the balance: in 1725 Russian troops burned Tarki and over six thousand households. Through these wars Kumyk, written in the Arabic script, served as the lingua franca of the North Caucasus.