Download PDF | The Islamic Byzantine Border In History From The Rise Of Islam To The End Of The Crusades
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NOTES: ON CONTRIBUTORS
Alexander D. Beihammer is Heiden Family College Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, specialising in Byzantine History. His books include Byzantium and the Emergence of Muslim—Turkish Anatolia, ca. 10401130 (2019); with Maria Parani and Christoph Schabel, Diplomatics in the Eastern Mediterranean 1000-1500: Aspects of Cross-cultural Communication (2008); and Quellenkritische Untersuchungen Zu Den Agyptischen Kapitulationsvertragen Der Jahre 640-646 (2000).
Carole Hillenbrand was educated at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. She was Professor of Islamic History, Edinburgh University, 2000-8, and is now Professor Emerita of Islamic History, Edinburgh since 2008. She was Professorial Fellow (Islamic History), St Andrews University, 2013-21 and is now Honorary Professor there. She has been Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA, Groningen University, The Netherlands and St Louis University, USA. She was awarded the King Faisal International Prize in Islamic Studies in 2005 (the first non-Muslim and the first woman to receive this prize) and the British Academy/Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Transcultural Understanding in 2016. She has published eight single-authored books, four edited books, two translated books, and over seventy articles on Islamic history and thought. She was given the award of Commander of the British Empire (for Encouraging Inter-Faith Relations) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2018, and she received a DLitt (Honorary Doctorate of Letters) at the University of St Andrews in 2022.
Robert Hillenbrand is currently Honorary Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Educated at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford (DPhil 1974), he was a chaired Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh until his retirement in 2007. Hillenbrand has written numerous books, including Lslamic Art and Architecture, Studies in Medieval Islamic Art and Architecture (2021, 2 vols) and the prize-winning /slamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning (Edinburgh University Press, 2000, translated into Persian). He hasalso edited, among many volumes, The Art of the Saljuqs in Iran and Anatolia (2022), Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars (2001) and Image and Meaning in Islamic Art (2005). Hillenbrand has also served on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including Art History, Persica, Assaph, Bulletin of the Asia Institute and Oxford Studies in Islamic Art. He has also served on the Councils of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, British Research in the Levant, and the British Institute of Persian Studies (Vice-President). He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Robert G. Hoyland is Professor of the late antique and early Islamic history of the Middle East at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He is the author of a number of publications on the culture, both material and intellectual, of this pivotal region in world history, including Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997), Arabia and the Arabs (2001) and In Gods Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (2014). He has also conducted fieldwork in many countries of the Middle East, and is currently involved in the excavation of a Christian and Muslim settlement in the modern United Arab Emirates that played a long-term role in Indian
Ocean trade.
Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. His research explores the history, culture and literature of the east Roman empire — aka ‘Byzantium’ — from antiquity to the fifteenth century. His research has focused on the reception of ancient Greek and Roman ideas, and he has also translated many Byzantine texts into English. He has just finished a comprehensive history of east Rome from Constantine the Great to Mehmed Fatih, which embeds social, economic, religious and demographic developments
within a lively narrative framework.
Hugh Kennedy is Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of London. From 1997 to 2007, he was Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. His numerous books include The Early Abbasid Caliphate: A Political History (2015), The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphs (2015), Muslim Spain and Portugal (2016), The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State (2001) and. The Court of the Caliphs (2005).
Ralph-Johannes Lilie was Professor for Byzantinology at the Free University Berlin and at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich. Between 1992 and 2013 he also worked at the Academy of Sciences, Berlin, where he directed the research project Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (641-1025) which was published 2013 in print and online. His publications on Byzantine political, economical and cultural history, as well as on Byzantine historiography, include numerous articles and several books including Die byzantinische Reaktion auf die Ausbreitung der Araber (1976), Byzantium and the Crusader States (1994), Byzanz. Das zweite Rom (2003) and Einfiihrung in die byzantinische Geschichte (2007).
Sophie Métivier is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. She works on the social and political history of the Byzantine empire and on the history of holiness during meso-byzantine times. Published works include two monographs, La Cappadoce (IV-Vle siécle): Une histoire provinciale de lempire d’Orient (2005) and Aristocratie et sainteté a Byzance (VIIIe-XTe siecle) (2019).
A. C. S. Peacock is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at the University of St Andrews and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Recent publications include Islam, Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia (2019) and The Great Seljuk Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). His research interests include the impact of nomadic peoples upon the Islamic world and Islamic manuscripts.
Christian C. Sahner (PhD, Princeton University, 2015) is an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Cross College. His recent publications include Christian Martyrs under Islam (2018) and Conversion to Islam in the Pre-Modern Age (2020, co-editor). He is currently working on the history of religious and political movements in the mountains of the medieval Islamic world, as well as the history of early medieval Zoroastrianism and its relationship with Islam.
D. G. Tor is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, specialising in the history of the pre-thirteenth century medieval Middle East and Central Asia. Tor’s publications include the books Violent Order: Religious Warfare, Chivalry, and the ‘Ayyar Phenomenon in the Medieval Islamic World (2007); The ‘Abbasid and Carolingian Empires: Studies in Civilizational Formation (2017); together with A. C. S. Peacock, Medieval Central Asia and the Persianate World: Iranian Tradition and Islamic Civilisation (2015) and, with Minoru Inaba, The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia: From the PreIslamic to the Islamic Period (2022). Tor has won numerous major research grants and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies; the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies; and Harvard University. Tor is also the Medieval History editor of the journal Jranian Studies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The germ of this volume was a conference held at the University of Notre Dame in April 2019. The authors are grateful to the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts; The Medieval Institute and its director, Thomas Burman; and The Program in Byzantine Studies, for their generous funding of that gathering.
Additionally, the lion’s share of the work on this book was undertaken while D. G. Tor was on research leave as a year-long Fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, whose essential support is gratefully acknowledged.
INTRODUCTION
D. G. Tor and Alexander D. Beihammer
he academic study of borders and borderlands, especially the historical study of the subject, has been a well-tilled field in recent decades, resulting in a plethora of conferences and studies. To a certain degree, of course, anyone studying an empire with the history and geopolitical situation of Byzantium, or one with the expansionist drive and history of the Islamic oecumene, has always of necessity to some degree treated the relevant empire's borders and their historical significance and influence. But the historical study of borderlands in recent years — and certainly collaborative efforts in volumes such as the one you are now reading — has tended to take one of two forms: either the overly atomised, divorced from a larger historical context and the tradition in which it was embedded, or the overly generalised and amorphous.
The study of borderlands today has also seen its task as something different from that of traditional frontier history; this intellectual trend is given voice in the following passage, written in the context of American history:
If frontiers were the places where we once told our master . . . narratives, then borderlands are the places where those narratives come unraveled. They are ambiguous and often-unstable realms where boundaries are also crossroads,
peripheries are also central places, homelands are also passing-through places, and the end points of empire are also forks in the road. If frontiers are spaces of narrative closure, then borderlands are places where stories take unpredict- able turns and rarely end as expected.'
One might say that whereas the study of borderlands in the past often involved seeing only the forest at the expense of the trees, today’s practice of borderland history runs the danger of committing the opposite error: of failing to see any forest at all, and of focusing only on isolated trees and groves. Obviously, a careful historian should, ideally, not only examine minutely the individual grove within the forest, but also not lose sight of the greater context of the forest, and even the larger region in which the grove finds itself.
Alongside this modern-day tendency to study a borderland in isolation from the civilisation of which it formed a part, an opposite tendency has also manifested itself in attempts to arrive at overarching theoretical constructs deemed to be valid in all places and times, in all borderlands — what one might call a Newtonian Law of borderlands. Such attempts are invariably predicated, though, upon certain modern Western ideological suppositions, especially the norm of the modern, centralised nation state.” The irrelevance of such assumptions should be patently clear to the historian of pre-modern times, when not only were there no nation states, but there was no ‘state’ at all in the centralised, highly bureaucratised, modern sense of the term, and the values, priorities, outlooks, and assumptions of the people living in those times and places differed so markedly from those of the present day.
Among the plethora of conferences and studies devoted to the subject of borderlands, moreover, there have been surprisingly few attempts among scholars of the medieval world to employ standard historical methodology by focusing on one specific border over time, and studying the significance of
that border in depth, within the historical context and cultural tradition to which it belonged; and the editors of the present volume can recall no previous such attempt at all with regard to the Islamic—Byzantine border in the pre-Ottoman period, on anything greater than the scale of an individual article. Yet this particular border, and the confrontation and interaction between two world civilisations which took place upon it, was, quite simply, one of the most formative areas and periods in both Mediterranean history and in the history of Muslim—Christian relations.
This book, in short, undertakes something never before essayed: a collaborative volume, including contributions from both Byzantinist and Islamicist scholars, dedicated solely to the examination of the Islamic—Byzantine border and borderlands, and covering the large span of time stretching from the rise of Islam in the seventh century until the fall of the last Crusader principality in the Levant shortly before the year ap 1300, with the aim of elucidating some of the most significant ramifications the history of this specific border had upon the course of both internal and trans-civilisational religious and cultural development.
This volume should therefore be viewed as a pioneering effort, rather than the final word on the subject; while it ranges far and wide in time, space, and theme, there remain of course innumerable areas for further exploration and explication, not least because our primary concern was answering the research question of how the existence of the Islamic— Byzantine border influenced above all the internal developments of each of the two respective civilisations or cultural worlds which shared it.
The first two chapters, D. G. Tor’s “The Historical Significance of the Islamic—Byzantine Border: From the Seventh Century to 1291’ and Alexander Beihammer’s “The Byzantine—Muslim Frontier from the Arab Conquests to the Arrival of the Seljuk Turks’, provide civilisationally specific overviews of the history of the Islamic—Byzantine border and the major relevant historiography. Tor’s article then delivers an overview of the cultural importance and influence of that border within Islamic civilisation over the centuries treated in this volume, while Beihammer’s contains a critical discussion of the historiographical discourse and future directions for research.
Hugh Kennedy's chapter on “The Formation of al-‘Awdsim’ examines one of the two terms that appear constantly in early Islamic sources regarding the Islamic—Byzantine border and its special organisation and status within the early caliphate: the border hinterlands known as “al-‘Awasim’, an administrative concept created under Harin al-Rashid, the caliph most famously preoccupied with jihad on the Islamic—Byzantine border, as recorded in ninth- and tenth-century sources.
The chapter elucidates clearly, for the first time, the actual meaning of the term, demonstrating that it refers to reserved or protected property, and showing that the ‘Awdasim of Syria had, not a military role, but rather a fiscal and administrative one: the Barmakids set aside the revenues of the ‘Awdsim in order to fund and finance the strengthening (through e.g. the building and repair of fortifications) of the actual border areas, the thughir. The later works which constitute our earliest sources on this institution, which claim that the term ‘Awdédsim refers to a defensive hinterland which served as a refuge and defensive retreat for Muslim armies at the border, had clearly forgotten the original meaning of the term, and seem to have provided what seemed to them a likely explanation, thereby inventing the unhistorical trope of ‘Awdsim as a military area, rather than understanding them as what they were: administrative tax zones whose revenues financed the fortifications and military needs of the actual border zones, the thughur.
Robert Hoyland’s chapter, “Caucasian Elites between Byzantium and the Caliphate in the Early Islamic Period’, deals with the Caucasian borderland situated between the Byzantine and Islamic empires in the East Caucasus, referred to by modern scholars as Caucasian Albania and called Arran in the Arabic sources. It first supplies an overview of the history of the area prior to the rise of Islam, and then focuses on the struggle for the Caucasus between Byzantium and Islam. After giving an exposition of the history of the region in Umayyad times, the chapter traces the growing Muslim incorporation of the Caucasus within the Islamic empire beginning in the mid-eighth century; the settlement of Arabs in the area; the lordship of Caucasian Albania in the ninth century; and the complex history of the area and its political fragmentation from the mid-tenth through mid-eleventh centuries. Throughout, it traces the continuing role of Christian elites, even under Muslim rulers.
The article demonstrates that the loss of status of the late Roman elites of Syria in the early Islamic period is not true of the Caucasus, where the deeds and dicta of their princes, lords, and nobles fill the pages of our historical texts concerning this region. In part, this is because of its distance from the imperial centres in Syria and Iraq and its mountainous topography, and in part because of its proximity to the empires of the Byzantines and Khazars, whom the local chiefs could call upon for support, or play divide and rule between them and the agents of the Caliphate. On the downside, this meant that imperial actors would meddle in the affairs of Caucasian leaders or force them to support the imperial actors against their enemies, which frequently placed these local potentates in a difficult position between the dominant powers.
Anthony Kaldellis’s chapter, ‘Byzantine Borders were State Artefacts, not “Fluid Zones of Interaction”’, addresses a historiographical trend of recent decades, in which certain claims have been advanced about the Roman and early Byzantine imperial borders: namely, that the empire had no clear or fixed borders — or even no concept of a border to begin with; that there was no expectation that the borders could or should be defended, and no actual ability to do so; that there was no concept of territorial integrity; that the border was always permeable, porous, and fluid; that there was no imperial strategy for the defence of the empire; and that features of the natural terrain were not used or even imagined as borders or as marking the border. Not all of these theses have been advanced in the same publications, but as a coherent constellation they have given rise to a revolutionary understanding of the imperial borders that is often encapsulated in the catchphrase ‘fluid zones of interaction’.
This chapter shows, on the contrary, from primary source evidence, that borders were not zones of fluid contact: they were zones of state-regulated contact, which could be more open or more closed depending on policy. There was, of course, a great deal of movement of peoples, goods, and ideas across them; but this by itself does not refute the existence of borders or make them fluid. Borders exist if and only if a state authority has the ability to intervene and regulate or restrict that movement. That is what a border is, and there is every indication that the Roman-Byzantine state had the infrastructural capability to turn that spigot one way or the other.
Christian Sahner’s chapter, ‘A Christian Insurgency in Islamic Syria: The Jarajima (Mardaites) between Byzantium and the Caliphate’, examines the group of mountain Christians, known as Jarajima in Arabic and as Mardaites in Greek, composed largely of bandits and mercenaries, who helped the Byzantines reestablish control over the coastal highlands between Antioch and Jerusalem at the end of the seventh century. Although their success was short-lived, the Jarajima managed to create a Christian guerilla zone on the doorstep of the Umayyads’ most important province. In the process, they terrified caliphs, gave hope to emperors, and left a deep impression on the historical record of the period.
This chapter, first, establishes a clear chronology for the Jarajima from the time they first appear in the historical record during the Arab conquest of the 630s, to their last gasp as a militarised movement during the littlestudied revolt of Theodore in 759-60. Second, it explores the afterlife of the Jarajima until the tenth century, when for all intents and purposes they disappear from the historical radar. Third, the chapter answers some of the outstanding questions about the Jarajima, showing that they were probably Chalcedonian, Aramaic-speaking locals from Syria’s coastal mountains, without a strong ideological programme. Fourth, the chapter places the Jarajima within their wider historical context beyond Syria and the Byzantine frontier, examining, for instance, the rarity of post-Conquest Byzantine revivalism with the ubiquity of Sasanian revivalism; nativist unrest throughout the young Islamic Empire during this period; and the reasons underlying the rarity of Christian insurgencies versus those of other denominations. Finally, the chapter shows how, and the manner in which, the border location of the Jarajima played a critical role in their success.
Robert Hillenbrand’s “The Character of Umayyad Art: The Mediterranean Tradition’, is an attempt to explain what happened when Umayyad art came to grips with the pictorial heritage of Byzantium and, further back, of the Graeco-Roman classical world. The period when this encounter took place is short — aD 661—750 — but the pace of change was extraordinarily rapid and intense. During this period, Greater Syria was transformed by glamorous religious buildings such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Damascus, and by massive investment in the countryside in the form of hydraulic installations, villas, hunting lodges and luxurious ‘desert palaces’. In all of this work the classical heritage, embodied by Byzantium itself as the principal remaining rival of the Umayyad state, forms the most important constituent element.
The bulk of this chapter is an attempt to identify the underlying processes which shaped Umayyad art. Three stages emerge with some clarity: imitation, adaptation, and transformation. Each stage is explored in some detail, and illustrated with examples taken from a remarkable variety of media: architecture, with its sister arts of painting, sculpture and mosaic; but also textiles, coins, manuscripts, and metalwork. Iconography also plays a major role.
The art of this century takes the Graeco-Roman, early Christian and Byzantine heritage down many unexpected paths, with its time-honoured conventions variously copied, adapted and thoroughly reworked in accordance with a constantly evolving aesthetic. That aesthetic used not only Graeco-Roman art but also the various subsets of Byzantine art — Italian, Balkan, Syrian and Egyptian among them — in unprecedented ways. The chapter concludes by showing how Umayyad art, while rooted in the Mediterranean world, and thus using visual idioms instinctively familiar to a Western observer, nevertheless found its own distinctive voice by 750, creating a foundation on which all later Islamic art rests.
Sophie Métivier’s contribution, “Byzantine Heroes and Saints of the Arab—Byzantine Border (Ninth—Tenth Centuries)’, shows that much of the modern scholarly conception of the Islamic—Byzantine borderland as a bilingual, even bicultural, frontier society, a separate cultural space of its own between two civilisations, is actually predicated upon the heroic romance of the border warrior Digenis Akritas and similar compositions and their respective heroes, especially in their chronologically later forms, many of which were produced in Constantinople. Many previous scholars have therefore concluded that the heroic border epic was merely a Constantinopolitan production, a vehicle used to legitimise and justify the ascension of aristocratic families in the capital city who were descendants of the commanders glorified in these border epics.
This chapter analyses the development of the heroic border epic tradition in the ninth and tenth centuries, especially those connected with hagiographic lives of militant saints, such as Antony the Younger, in order to show that this consensus is certainly wrong, at least regarding the border epics of this period, which are demonstrably not Constantinopolitan fabrications, confected to honour an aristocratic progenitor. Rather, the development of these heroes takes place within the context of the territorial expansion of the Byzantine empire; the heroes portrayed in these stories are heroes of the conquests/reconquests, not resistance fighters.
Carole Hillenbrand’s chapter, ‘A Cosmopolitan Frontier State: The Marwanids of Diyar Bakr, 990-1085, and the Performance of Power’, constitutes a detailed examination of the Marwanid Dynasty of Diyar Bakr, one of a number of small dynasties that appeared in northern Syria, Diyar Bakr and Armenia, territories which lay near or on the eastern borders of the Byzantine empire or the fringes of the Fatimid empire, in the wake of the dissolution and fragmentation of Abbasid power in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
The Marwanid polity, like the other small states which appeared in these border areas, was ethnically diverse; its peoples spoke Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish, Persian or Turkish. The Marwanid Dynasty which forms the subject of this chapter, is intriguing to the historian: first, because it relied on Kurdish nomadic groups for its power; and, furthermore, because it is uniquely well-chronicled in the neglected history 7a’ikh Mayydfarigin wa-Amid of Ibn al-Azraq al-Fariqi (d. after 1176-7), which focuses especially upon the statecraft of the ruler Nasir al-Dawla (r. 1079-85), and how he was able to cultivate a small oasis of prosperity amidst the larger imperial geopolitics of the time.
The next chapter, Ralph-Johannes Lilie’s “Byzantine Population Policy in the Eastern Borderland between Byzantium and the Caliphate from the Seventh through the Twelfth Centuries’, focuses on the problem the Byzantines had controlling their border with the Islamic world, and the measures they took to remedy the problem. The chapter identifies four strategies that the Byzantines employed in their border with the Islamic world, and the drawbacks each entailed: (1) Garrisoning the border with additional troops, strengthening existing fortifications and building new ones. This strategy of course did not offer a plan for what to do when the enemy broke through the fortified line and began ravaging the hinterland. (2) Devastating the border region, transforming it into a kind of no-man’s-land that would make it more difficult for the enemy to cross the area.
The drawback of this method is that this region would be lost for any military or economic utilisation, and its erstwhile population would be dislocated. (3) Strengthening the region’s economics, infrastructure and population by creating or supporting small buffer states or semi-independent local forces on both sides of the border. Obviously, this would create a problem of its own, as the Byzantine authorities might find it difficult to control independently-minded minor local powers, especially in times of need. (4) The final, extreme option was to abandon the whole region and to retreat into the interior provinces. This option of retreat did not really solve the problem of border defence, since the former hinterland would become the new border region, with the same problems as before.
Over the centuries the Byzantines tried each of these options, either individually or in tandem. This chapter analyses the methods and effects of each particular policy at the Islamic—Byzantine border, from the rise of Islam through the thirteenth century, showing that policy towards populations at the border was in constant flux, and depended more upon conditions in Constantinople than on events at the border.
Finally, A. C. S. Peacock’s chapter, “The Islamic—Byzantine Frontier in Seljuq Anatolia’, addresses the nature of the Islamic—Byzantine frontier in the thirteenth century — the post-Abbasid period before the Ottomans — with the aim, not of describing the frontier, but rather of considering how it was perceived from the Seljuq point of view, particularly regarding the role the Byzantine frontier played in the mental worlds of the educated populations of places such as Konya, the Seljuq capital.
Muslim Anatolia in the thirteenth century makes an important case study, not only because it was a period of relative stability on the frontier between Byzantium and the Muslims, but also because it is the earliest period to be adequately attested in the Arabic and Persian sources from Anatolia, which barely exist for the first century of Turkish domination. The thirteenth century also represents the zenith of the territorial extent of the Seljuq state in Anatolia, although after their defeat at K6ésedag in 1243, the sultanate survived only as a vassal of the Mongols, until its final disappearance in 1307.
The chapter examines the concept of the frontier, as well as accounts of frontier warfare, in Seljuq literary texts, concluding that, on the whole, the evidence presented suggests that, contrary to expectations, at least from the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Islamic—Byzantine frontier was of relatively limited importance to the Islamic side. The relative lack of military activity on the Seljuq—Byzantine frontier is indicative of the fact that the Seljuqs stood to gain little from battling Byzantium over the Anatolian countryside: they were already a well-established principality, and had no need to establish their legitimacy anymore; rather, they saw themselves as a major Islamic power, whose prestige was to be enhanced by asserting suzerainty over the Muslim-ruled lands of the Jazira and even Syria.
It was not until the rise of Ottoman power in the fourteenth century that the Islamic frontier with Byzantium would again assume major political and ideological importance. As can be seen from the above summary, this book explores a very broad range of the manifold facets of the Islamic—Byzantine border during the historically important period that began with the Early Islamic Conquests and drew to a close with the end of the Crusading era, and endeavours to elucidate the border’s significance, shifting and fluctuating over the course of time, within the religious, cultural, military, political, and economic life of both the Byzantine and Islamic worlds.
There remain, of course, a virtually unlimited number of areas and issues awaiting elucidation; it is our hope that this volume will provide not only a useful shedding of light upon this particular border, and its importance during these centuries, but also an impetus for further research and discussion.
D. G. Tor
Alexander Beihammer
The University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana
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