The Magyars' early homes had been on the upper waters of the Volga and Kama rivers; unrecorded causes had driven them, at an uncertain date, southward into the steppes, where they have adopted the life of peripatetic herders.

Their base in the late ninth century is the lower Don, ranging over the steppes to the west of that river.

They now comprise a federation of hordes, or tribes, each under a hereditary chieftain and each composed of a varying number of clans, the members of which share a real or imagined blood kinship.

All clan members are free, but the community includes slaves taken in battle or in raids.

There are seven Magyar hordes, but other elements are part of the federation, including three hordes of Turkic Khazars (the Kavars).

Either because of this fact or perhaps because of a memory of earlier conditions, this federation is known to its neighbors as the On-Ogur (literally, “Ten Arrows”), from the Slavic pronunciation of which the name “Hungarian” is derived.

In the late ninth century, the Magyars breach Khazar control of the steppe, but in 889, attacks by a newly arrived Turkic people, the Pechenegs, whose migration the declining Khazar state can no longer impede, drive the Magyars and their confederates from their home in the northern Caucasus to the western extremities of the steppes, the strong presence of the Varangian Rus’ in Kiev blocking the Magyars’ northward advance.