The Vardariotai (, ), sometimes Anglicized as Vardariots, were an ethnic and territorial group (probably originally of Cuman and Pecheneg origin) in the later Byzantine Empire, which provided a palace guard regiment during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The Vardariotai (, ), sometimes Anglicized as Vardariots, were an ethnic and territorial group (probably originally of Cuman and Pecheneg origin) in the later Byzantine Empire, which provided a palace guard regiment during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
==History== The exact origin and nature of the is uncertain. The name first appears in the tenth century, when a bishopric of the " or " is mentioned as subject to the diocese of Thessalonica. The mid-fourteenth century writer Pseudo-Kodinos calls them "Persians" by race (a typical Byzantine anachronism for "Turks"), and recalls that they were settled in the Vardar river valley by an unnamed Byzantine emperor of old. In both cases, however, "Turks" probably implies the Cumans and Pechenegs, who were called "" by the Byzantines in the tenth–eleventh centuries. Hence it seems that the were Cumans and Pechenegs resettled in Macedonia in the tenth century, and that they had become Christians by the end of that century.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).