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Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere

Chapter Two

Lev Gumilev

THE PROPERTIES OF AN ETHNOS

 

containing a list of the features of an ethnic phenomenon as such, compiled so as to make it possible to give a general explanation of ethnogenesis, the process in which ethnoi arise and disappear

 

Ethnos and Ethnonym

 

Names deceive. When one is studying the general patterns of ethnology one must remember above all that a real ethnos and an ethnonym, i.e. ethnic name, are not the same thing. We often encounter several different ethnoi bearing one and the same name; conversely, one ethnos may be called differently. The word 'Romans' (romani), for instance, originally meant a citizen of the polis Rome, but not at all the Italics and not even the Latins who inhabited other towns of Latium. In the epoch of the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries A.D. the number of Romans increased through the inclusion among them of all Italians-Etruscans, Samnites, Ligurians, Gauls, and many inhabitants of the provinces, by no means of Latin origin. After the edict of Caracalla in A.D. 212 all free inhabitants of municipalities on the territory of the Roman Empire were called 'Romans', i.e. Greeks, Cappadocians, Jews, Berbers, Gauls, Illyrians, Germans, etc. The concept 'Roman' lost its ethnic meaning, as it were, but that was not so; it simply changed it. The general element became unity not even of culture, but of historical fate, instead of unity of origin and language. The ethnos existed in that form for three centuries, a considerable period, and did not break up. On the contrary, it was transformed in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., through the adoption of Christianity as the state religion, which began to be the determinant principle after the fourth ecumenical council. Those who recognized these councils sanctioned by the state authority were Romans, and those who did not became enemies. A new ethnos was formed on that basis, that I conventionally call 'Byzantine', but they themselves called themselves 'Romaic', i.e. 'Romans', though they spoke Greek. A large number of Slavs, Armenians, and Syrians were gradually merged among the Romaic, but they retained the name 'Romans' until 1453, until the fall of Constantinople. The Romaic considered precisely themselves 'Romans', but not the population of Italy, where Langobards had become feudal lords, Syrian Semites (who had settled in Italy, then becoming deserted, in the first to third centuries A.D.) the townsmen, and the former colons from prisoners of war of all peoples at any time conquered by the Romans of the Empire became peasants. Florentines, Genoese, Venetians, and other inhabitants of Italy considered themselves 'Romans', and not the Greeks, and on those grounds claimed the priority of Rome where only ruins remained of the antique city.

A third branch of the ethnonym 'Romans' arose on the Danube, which had been a place of exile after the Roman conquest of Dacia. There Phrygians, Cappadocians, Thracians, Galatians, Syrians, Greeks, Illyrians, in short, all the eastern subjects of the Roman Empire, served sentences for rebellion against Roman rule. To understand one another they conversed in the generally known Latin tongue. When the Roman legions left Dacia, the descendants of the exiled settlers remained and formed an ethnos that took the name 'Romanian', i.e. 'Roman', in the nineteenth century.

If one can treat the continuity between 'Romans' of the age of the Republic and the 'Roman citizens' of the late Empire, even as a gradual extension of the concept functionally associated with the spread of culture, there is no such link even between the Byzantines and the Romans, from which it follows that the word changed meaning and content and cannot serve as an identifying attribute of the ethnos. It is obviously also necessary to take into consideration the context in which the word and so the epoch has a semantic content because the meaning of words changes in the course of time. That is even more indicative when we analyze the ethnonyms 'Turk', 'Tatar', and 'Mongol', an example that cannot be left aside.

 

Examples of camouflage. In the sixth century A.D. a small people living on the eastern slopes of the Altai and Khangai mountains were called Turks. Through several successful wars they managed to subordinate the whole steppe from Hingan to the Sea of Azov. The subjects of the Great Kaghanate, who preserved their own ethnonyms for internal use, also began to be called Turks, since they were subject to the Turkish Khan. When the Arabs conquered Sogdiana and clashed with the nomads, they began to call all of them Turks, including the Ugro-Magyars. In the eighteenth century European scholars called all nomads 'les Tartars', and in the nineteenth century, when linguistic classification became fashionable, the name 'Turk' was arrogated to a definite group of languages. Many peoples thus fell into the category 'Turk' who had not formed part of it in antiquity, for example the Yakuts, Chuvash and the hybrid people, the Ottoman Turks (about whose origin I have spoken above).

The modification of the ethnonym 'Tatar' is an example of direct camouflage. Up to the twelfth century this was the ethnic name of a group of 30 big clans inhabiting the banks of the Korulen. In the twelfth century this nationality increased in numbers, and Chinese geographers began to call all the Central Asian nomads (Turkish. speaking, Tungus-speaking, and Mongol-speaking), including the Mongols, Tatars. And even when, in 1206, Genghis-khan officially called all his subjects Mongols, neighbors continued for some time from habit to call them Tatars. In this form the word 'Tatar' reached Eastern Europe as a synonym of the word 'Mongol', and became acclimatized in the Volga Valley where the local population began, as a mark of loyalty to the Khan of the Golden Horde to call themselves Tatars. But the original bearers of this name (Kereites, Naimans, Oirats, and Tatars) began to call themselves Mongols. [+1] The names thus changed places. Since that time a scientific terminology arose in which the Tatar anthropological type began to be called 'Mongoloid', and the language of the Volga Kipchak-Turks Tatar. In other words we even employ an obviously camouflaged terminology in science.

But then it is not simply a matter of confusion, but of an ethnonymic phantasmagoria. Not all the nomad subjects of the Golden Horde were loyal to its government. The rebels who lived in the steppes west of the Urals began to call themselves Nogai, and those who lived on the eastern borders of the Jochi ulus, in Tarbagatai and on the banks of the Irtysh, and who were practically independent, because of their remoteness from the capital, became the ancestors of the Kazakhs. These ethnoi arose in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a consequence of rapid mixing of various ethnic components. The ancestors of the Nogai were the Polovtsy, steppe Alans, Central Asian Turks, who survived a defeat by Batu and were taken into the Mongol army, and inhabitants of the southern frontier of Rus, who adopted Islam, which became a symbol at that time of ethnic consolidation. The Tatars included Kama Bulgars, Khazars, and Burtasy, and also some of the Polovtsy and Ugric Mishari. The population of the White Horde was the mixture; three Kazakh jus were formed from it in the fifteenth century. But that is not yet all.

At the end of the fifteenth century Russian bands from the Upper Volga began to attack the Middle Volga Tatar towns, forced some of the population to quit their homeland and go off into Central Asia under the chieftainship of Sheibani-khan (1500-1510). There they were met as fierce enemies because the local Turks who at that time bore the name of 'Chagatai' (after Genghis-khan's second son Chagatei, the chief of the Central Asian ulus), where ruled by descendants of Timur, the enemy of the steppe and Volga Tatars, who ravaged the Volga Valley in 1398-1399.

The members of the horde who quit their homeland took on a new name 'Uzbeks' to honor the Khan Uzbeg (1312-1341), who had established Islam in the Golden Horde as the state religion. In the sixteenth century the 'Uzbeks' defeated Babur, the last of the Timurides, who led the remnants of his supporters into India and conquered a new kingdom for himself there. So the Turks who remained in Samarkand and Ferghana bear the name of their conquerors, the Uzbeks. The same Turks, who went to India, began to be called 'Moghuls' in memory of their having been, three hundred years earlier, subject to the Mongol Empire. But the genuine Mongols who settled in eastern Iran in the thirteenth century, and even retained their language, are called Khazareitsy from the Persian word khazar -a thousand (meaning a military unit, or division).

But where are the Mongols, by whose name the yoke that lay on Rus for 240 years is known? They were not an ethnos, because by Genghis-khan's will Jochi, Batu, Orda, and Sheibani each received 4 000 warriors, of whom only part came from the Far East. The latter were called 'Kins' and not 'Tatars', from the Chinese name of the Jurchen. This rare name occurred for the last time in the Zadonshchina, in which Mamai was called Kinnish. Consequently, the yoke was not Mongol at all, but was enforced by the ancestors of the nomad Uzbeks, who should not be confused with the settled Uzbeks, although they merged in the nineteenth century, and now constitute a single ethnos, who equally revere the Timurides and the Sheibanides, who were deadly enemies in the sixteenth century, because that enmity had already lost sense and meaning in the seventeenth century.

 

The helplessness of philology and history. The examples cited are sufficient to establish that the ethnic name or even the own name and the phenomenon of an ethnos as a stable collective of the species Homo sapiens, by no means cover each other. Therefore the philological method, which investigates words, is inapplicable in ethnology, and we have to turn to history, in order to check how far this discipline can help with the posing of my problem. But here, too, we come up against unexpected difficulties. The unit of investigation employed by historical science is the social institution which may be a state, a tribal union, a religious sect, a trading company, a political party, etc., in short, any institution in any age, and among any peoples. The institution of the state and the ethnos sometimes coincide, and then in some cases we observe nations of a modern type. But that is a case characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; in antiquity such coincidences were rare. It happens that a religious sect unites like-minded persons who, like the Sikhs, for example, in India, merge into an ethnos; then the origin of people incorporated by the community is not taken into account. But such communities are often unstable and break up into ethnoi as happened to the Muslim community founded by Muhammed in the seventh century A.D. While a process of the merging of Arab tribes, Syrians, and in part Persians, into a single ethnos took part under the first four Caliphs in the countries of Islam, that process had already ceased under the Ommiades (A.D. 651-750), and under the Abbasides, the descendants of the conquerors and the conquered merged into new ethnoi with a single interethnic culture conventionally called 'Muhammedan', with Arabic, and awareness of its unity by comparison with Christians and pagans, but with different historical fates and different stereotypes of behavior, which were expressed in the creation of diverse sects and ideological conceptions.

The emirates and sultanates that arose through the isolation of ethnoi would seem to have corresponded to the ethnic boundaries, but that was not so. Successful commanders subordinated territories to themselves for a short time with a population speaking different languages, but these later became the victims of neighbors, i.e. the political formations had a different fate than the ethnic entity. Community of historical fate of course encouraged the formation and maintenance of an ethnos, but historical fate [+2] can also be the same for two or three nationalities and different for two parts of a single one. The Anglo-Saxons and Celtic Welsh, for example, have been united state-wise since the thirteenth century, but they have not merged into one ethnos, which incidentally does not prevent them from living in peace; the eastern Armenians, already subject to Iran in the third century A.D., and the western, connected from that time with Byzantium; had different fates, but their ethnic unity was not disrupted. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the French Huguenots and Catholics were very different in their historical fates, and even in the character of their culture, both before the Edict of Nantes, and after its repeal. But the ethnic integrity of France remained unaltered in spite of bloody wars and dragonnades. The forming of an ethnos, i.e. ethnogenesis, consequently lies deeper than the apparent historical processes recorded by the sources. History can help ethnology but not replace it.

 

Mosaic Structure as a Property of an Ethnos

 

It is possible to manage without a gentile system. Many ethnoi are divided into tribes and clans. Can this division be considered an obligatory, essential quality of an ethnos? Or even the first stage in its formation? Or finally the form of a collective preceding the development of the ethnos itself? The reliable material at our disposal makes it possible to answer 'No!'.

First of all, far from all contemporary peoples have or had any kind of gentile or tribal division. There were not and are not such among the Spaniards, French, Italians, Romanians, English, Ottoman Turks, Great Russians, Ukrainians, Sikhs, Greeks (not Hellenes), and many other nations. But a clan or gentile system exists among Celts, Kazakhs, Mongols, Tungus, Arabs, Kurds, and a number of other peoples.

It is difficult to consider a gentile system an earlier stage, because the Byzantines or the Sassanid Persians were people formed a thousand years earlier than the Mongols and 1 200 years earlier than the Kazakhs, and they got along magnificently without clans and phratries. One can, of course, suppose that a system of clans was general in antiquity, but if so, such an assumption has no relation to the historical period when peoples (ethnoi) arose before the historian's eyes. It is more correct to recognize that the schema – clan, tribe, people, nation – applies to social development, i.e. lies on a different plane.

That the predominant forms of community life were different forms of family over the time of the existence of Homo sapiens, viz., group marriage, the punaluan family, pairing marriage, the monogamous family, [+3] is quite well substantiated and demonstrated, but it has no direct relation to my problem, since an ethnic entity does not coincide either with the family cell or with the level of production and culture. I must therefore look for other criteria and other identification signs in my study.

At the same time one must note that among peoples with a gentile-tribal system, the division into clans (among Celts), phratries (seok among Altaitsy), and tribal associations (jus among Kazakhs), etc., is constructive. These intraethnic units are needed in order to maintain the ethnic entity itself. The relations both of the separate individuals to the ethnos as a whole, and of gentile or family collectives among themselves are regulated through the division into groups. Exogamy preventing blood-related marriages is only maintained by this means. The members of a clan or family express the will of their fellow-tribesmen at folk gatherings and create stable alliances so as to wage external wars, both defensive and offensive. In Scotland, for example, the clan system withstood the raids of Vikings in the tenth century, the attacks of feudal lords in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, and war with the English bourgeoisie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and only capitalist relations were able to disrupt it. Where the clan system was less expressed, among the Elbe Slavs, for example, German and Danish knights made short work of it in two centuries (eleventh and twelfth), in spite of the undisputed bellicosity and enviable courage of the Bodrichi, Lutichi (Veleti), and the inhabitants of the island of RØgen. The division of an ethnos into tribes had the function of a skeleton on which muscles could grow, and so gather strength for struggle, against the environment.

Let me try to propose another system of reference suitable not for some but for the whole aggregate of observed collisions.

 

What the gentile system was replaced by. How was the absence of gentile-tribal groups made good among quite developed peoples who were at the stage of class society? The class stricture and class struggle in slaveowning, feudal, and capitalist formations are an established fact and do not need examinations. The division into classes cannot, consequently, be functionally analogous to division into tribes. And in fact we observe, parallel to the division of society into classes, a division of ethnoi into groups that by no means coincide with classes. They can be conventionally called 'corporations', but that word corresponds to the concept only as a first approximation, and will subsequently be replaced.

In feudal Europe, for example, the dominant class within an ethnos (the French, say) consisted of various corporations: (1) the barons or feudal lords in the direct sense, i.e. the holders of fiefs linked with crown by a vassal oath; (2) knights, united in orders; (3) notables, who constitutes the apparatus of royal power (noblesse des robes); (4) the higher clergy; (5) scholars (for example, the professors of the Sorbonne); (6) the urban patriciate, which was itself divided territorially, and so on. According to the accepted degree of approximation one can distinguish a greater or less number of groups, but one must necessarily, in that connection, still allow for membership of parties, for example, the Armagnac and Burgundian at the beginning of the fifteenth century. As for the popular masses, such a division is applicable to an even greater degree, since each feudal province then had a clearly expressed individual character. In the twelfth century, for example, people of Rouen displayed hostility to Philippe II Auguste, who had liberated them from the English, and the Provencals, learning of Louis IX's plan in Egypt, sang a Te Deum, hoping to be delivered from the Sires. [+4] We no longer see such corporations in bourgeois society, but the principle remains unchanged. For each individual within ethnoi there are, besides classes, people of 'his' circle and 'others'. But, as regards foreign expansion, all these groups acted as a single whole, as Frenchmen.

It is indisputable that 'corporations', as I have conditionally called them, are much less stable and viable than gentile-tribal groupings, but the latter, too, are not eternal. The difference between them and other groups is not, of course, one of principle. The similarity is that they have an identical functional purpose, maintaining unity of the ethnos through internal division.

The most important, and curious point is that 'corporations' differ from one another in their origin only by nuances of psychology, but the differences deepen and crystallize with time, passing into customs and rituals, i.e. into phenomena studied by ethnographers. The Old Slavonic kissing custom, for example, was transformed in Russia and Poland into kissing of the hands of married ladies and was retained among the landed nobility, but disappeared from the life of other strata of the population.

Maxim Gorky, who observed the life of the lower middle class and middle class intellectuals in the Volga towns, noted such deep differences that he suggested treating these recently formed groups of the population as 'different tribes'. To some extent that was true, and Gorky was right in recording the differences in everyday fife, morals, and notions, and his observances were fruitful. In our day these differences have been nearly wiped out. They were characteristic of a short period - around 80 years - but I have already said that the duration of a phenomenon does not affect the fundamental aspect of the matter.

 

The formation of ethnic subgroups. The concept of 'corporation' in the sense proposed is clear, but it is not sufficient for my analysis since it suggests that a given unit is not only formed from ethnographic features but is also demarcated from other 'corporations' by social barriers. Subethnic subdivisions often do not coincide with social ones, which indicates that the example adduced is a partial case of the general rule I am seeking.

Let us turn to the ethnogenesis of the French. In the sixteenth century the Reformation affected this people, and reshuffled all the former 'corporations' among them till they were unrecognizable. The feudal aristocracy, the petty nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry proved to be split into 'Papists' and 'Huguenots'. The social bases of both groups did not differ, but ethno-territorial subdivisions were distinctly visible. Calvinism was successful among the Celts of the lower Loire, where merchant La Rochelle became a stronghold of the reformers. The Gascon seigneurs and Kings of Navarre adopted Calvinism. The descendants of the Burgundians, the peasants of the Cevennes, and the heirs of the Albigenses, the bourgeois of Languedoc, joined the movement. But Paris, Lorraine, and Central France remained faithful to the Roman Church. All the former 'corporations' disappeared, since belonging to a 'community' or 'church' became an indicator, for two centuries, of membership of one ethnic sub-unit or another.

One cannot say that theology played a decisive role. Most Frenchmen were 'politicians', i.e. refused to be interested in the disputes of the Sorbonne and Geneva. The illiterate Gascon barons, the semi-savage Cevennes highlanders, the bold corsairs of La Rochelle, or the artisans of the suburbs of Paris and Angers by no means understood the fine points of the interpretation of Predestination or Pre-existence. If some gave their lives for the Mass or for the Bible, that meant that the one or the other was a symbol of their self-assertion and opposition to one another, and so an indicator of deep contradictions. These were not class contradictions, since nobles, peasants, and bourgeois fought on both sides. But Catholics and Huguenots really were divided by stereotypes of behavior, and that, as we agreed at the beginning, is the main principle of ethnic peculiarity, for which there are adequate grounds.

But what if the Huguenots had kept a patch of land for themselves and created an independent state like, say, the Swiss or the North Americans? They would probably have been regarded as a special ethnos arising through the zigzags of historical fate, because they would have had a special way of life, culture, mentality, and perhaps language, since they would hardly have conversed in Parisian, but would rather have chosen one of their local dialects. It would have been a process similar, to the separation of the Americans from the English.

The Scots are undoubtedly an ethnos, but they are composed of Highlanders (Celts) and Lowlanders (inhabitants of the valley of the Tweed). Their origin is different. The old population, the Caledonians (Picts) who painted themselves repulsed the onslaught of the Romans in the first and second centuries A.D. In the third century Scots migrating from Ireland were added to them. Both tribes made destructive raids on Romanized Britannia, and then on the northern fringes of England, and fought against the Norwegian Vikings who had established themselves in the east of the island. In A.D. 954 the Scots were fortunate: they conquered Lothian, the plain on the banks of the Tweed settled by descendants of Saxons and Norse Vikings. The Scottish kings acquired many rich subjects and, enjoying their aid and support, limited the independence of the chiefs of the Celtic clans. But they had to adopt many of the customs of their subjects, in particular feudal institutions and manners and customs. The rich, energetic inhabitants of Lothian compelled their Celtic sovereigns to turn Scotland into a small kingdom, because they had taken on defense of the borders with England. In the fourteenth century French adventurers, comrades-in-arms of John Baliol and Robert Bruce, poured into Scotland for the war with England. The French increased the number of border barons. The Reformation mainly embraced the Celts, but in the valleys Catholics held their ground with the Calvinists. In short, races and cultures, a clan system and feudalism were merged during the genesis of this people, but the complexity of its composition did not disrupt its monolithic ethnic character, which was manifested in clashes with the English, and later with Irish.

Russian Old Believers are another characteristic example of a different order. They were a small section of the Great Russians who did not adopt certain reforms of Church ritual proclaimed by the Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century. At that time the church service had the function not only of religion, but also of a synthetic art, i.e. filled an aesthetic vacuum. Therefore the requirements in performance of the rites and rituals were very high. But, as in our day, far from all immediately recognized and adopted the new style and trend in music or, for example, in painting, so the replacement of dark images in the seventeenth century by new rose and blue icons shocked a certain part of the worshippers. They simply could not concentrate in a situation that irritated them.

In reality, there was almost the same split of the ethnos as happened in Western Europe during the Reformation. Not all the Orthodox Christians plumped for the old ritual, but those who did clung firmly to it, fearing neither execution nor torture. When there was a chance they passed to the counter-attack, and dealt with the iconolaters as sharply as they with them. That happened during the Strelets uprising at the time of the regency of Czarevna Sophia. The heat of passions was identical on both sides. In the seventeenth century the dispute was only about Church ritual, but in other respects (in everyday life, the system of education, habits and customs) the Old Believers were indistinguishable from the general mass of Russians. In the second generation, under Peter the Great, they constituted a definite, isolated group of the population. At the end of the eighteenth century customs, rituals, and dress developed, and partly were retained, among them, that differed markedly from those generally accepted. Catherine II banned persecution of Old Believers, but that did not lead to their merging back into the main mass of the ethnos. Millionaire merchants, Cossacks, and the semi-destitute Transvolgan peasants formed part of the newly formed intraethnic entity. This entity, initially united by a community of fate, i.e. by attachment to principles so dear that they went to their death for them, became a group united by a community of way of life, headed by spiritual leaders (teachers) of various branches and trends. In the twentieth century it gradually began to break up, since the reason for its origin had long ceased to exist, and it only remained through inertia.

The examples I have cited are clear, but rare. The functions of intraethnic groups were more often assumed by naturally formed territorial associations of fellow-countrymen. The existence of such divisions, like the existence of phratries in the gentile system, does not undermine ethnic unity.

We can now draw conclusions. The social forms in which intraethnic entities are embodied are vague and do not always coincide with the subdivisions of an ethnos. Intraethnic splintering is a condition that maintains the unity of the ethnos and gives it stability. It is characteristic of any time and stage of development.

 

Variation of ethic contacts. So far I have examined separate groups within big ethnoi but the problem is by no means exhausted by that. Pure forms of ethnoi are not observed in the real historical process, but rather various variants of ethnic contacts arising in territories inhabited by different ethnoi, united politically in a polyethnic state. Four variants can be when we study their relations: (a) coexistence, in which the ethnoi do not merge and do not imitate each other, borrowing only technical innovations; (b) assimilation, i.e. the swallowing-up of one ethnos by another with complete forgetting of origin and old traditions; (c) cross-breeding, in which traditions of the preceding ethnoi and a memory of the ancestors are retained and combined (these variants are usually unstable, and exist through replenishment by new metises); (d) merging, in which the traditions of the original components are forgotten and a third, new ethnos arises alongside the two precursors, or in place of them. That is essentially the main variant of ethnogenesis. For some reason it is observed less frequently than all the others.

Let me illustrate this four-part schema by clear examples. Variant a is the most common.

All things and phenomena are recognized by their interactions. Soda and citric acid poured together give a reaction of neutralization with a vigorous fizzing only when water is poured on them. In history reactions go on all the time, as in an aqueous solution, and there is no hope of that being finished.

Even the simple coexistence of different ethnoi with rapprochement and growing intimacy is not neutral. Sometimes it is simply necessary. In the upper reaches of the Congo, for instance, Bantu and pygmies live in a symbiosis. The Negroes cannot move in the forest, except by paths, without the help of the pygmies, while the paths are rapidly overgrown unless cleared. The Bantu can get lost in the forest, like a European, and die within twenty meters of his own home. But the pygmies need knives, vessels, and other articles of daily use. For these two ethnoi dissimilarity is the guarantee of well-being, and their friendship is founded on that.

A variant of lengthy coexistence with constant enmity was wen described by Leo Tolstoy, who observed the skirmishes of Greben Cossacks and Chechens. But he faithfully noted the mutual respect of the two neighboring ethnoi and the wariness of the Cossacks toward the soldiers who were the pioneers on the Terek of assimilation of the Cossacks by the Great Russians, which was completed by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Variant b, assimilation, usually occurs through methods not so much bloody as shameful. The object of assimilation is presented with an alternative: abandon either conscience or life. It can avoid death by repudiating everything dear and accustomed for the sake of being converted into a second-class person among the victors. The latter also gain little since they acquire hypocritical and, as a rule, inferior fellow-countrymen, because only the outward manifestation of the behavior of the conquered ethnos can be controlled, and not its mood. The Irish persuaded the English of that in the nineteenth century, Simon Bolivar's partisans the Spaniards, and the Dungans the Chinese. There are too many examples but the matter is clear.

Variant c – cross-breeding – is observed very often, but the progeny of exogamous marriages either die out in the third or fourth generation, or break up into paternal and maternal lines. For example, in the sixteenth century the Turks considered it sufficient to pronounce the formula of professing Islam and submitting to the Sultan to become a true Turk. In other words they regarded ethnic affiliation a 'state' that could be changed at will. Turks therefore willingly took any adventurers into service if they were specialists in some craft or in the art of war. The consequences of that made themselves felt within a hundred years.

The decline of the Sublime Porte in the seventeenth century attracted the attention in its time of contemporaneous Turkish writers. In their view ajen-oglani, i.e. the children of renegades, were the reason for the decline. The influx of the foreign-born spoiled the stereotype of behavior, which told in the venality of viziers, the purchasability of judges, the fall in the fighting capacity of troops, and the collapse of the economy. By the beginning of the nineteenth century Turkey had become the 'sick