First Post
The New World of the White Huns
I highly recommend first reading The Rise of the White Huns first, before reading this thread. This is the sequel thread, which picks up roughly in the year 1104, when the adventurer Bjorn Solva discovers the continent which will ultimately come to bear his name.
For those who are unaware what the White Huns story is, it's essentially the story of an alternate timeline wherein the Near East is wrecked by successive waves of nomadic invaders and India emerges more or less untouched and the Gupta Golden Age, from a certain perspective, never ends. Ultimately commercial interests gain substantial power and the era of universal Indian Empires comes to a crashing halt with the collapse of the fictional Maukhani dynasty. Europe remains in the shadow of Roman glory, with a Frankish dynasty descended from the Merovingians claiming the title of Augustus Imperator. China is divided between warring states in the south and a decadent "barbarian" dynasty in the north, called the Kitai Yaol. East Africa is a melting pot of Near East cultures, a series of trade cities clinging to the coast.
This is the continuation, where we follow the [Columbian] exchange and the Commercial Revolution to their (in some sense) inevitable conclusions.
As I said the first time, here goes nothing.
This sequel features heavy contributions from @Hobelhouse and @LostInNewDelhi. Consider these to be posts by co-authors, and equally canonical.
Prelude to the Flowering
When Roland of Rennes laid eyes upon the sprawling city of Colhuancan in 1213, he witnessed the climax of a mortally wounded civilization, gripped by the heady rush of collapse. When he returned in 1217, the antique city of pyramids and gardens was no more, overthrown by a tribe of the Nahua who called themselves the Mexica.
Vast and apocalyptic migrations of peoples, most notably the Nahua and Chichimecas, had begun several decades before, mixed with plagues which would seemingly strike and level whole nations. Scattered bands of European adventurers brought with them warfare and disease. In the south, the armies of Mansa Nfansou (Fanceau to his European rivals and federates) were carving out a nation from the backs of their swift horses, gathering allies and enemies in equal measure and turning the valley peoples to war.
Meanwhile, the people of Colhuacan and their settled counterparts, who were in the eyes of Nahua and European alike the “civilized ones” or “artisans” were building every greater works of art and culture, ever more intricate pieces of golden finery which were every bit as ephemeral as their civilization and painted art that would not long survive the plunder of migrating peoples. The past century had been one of environmental shifts that in another world might have simply been devastating. However, combined with Old World plagues and the arrival of adventuring conquerors, there was simply no chance.
Like Tula, a city which had once held a hundred thousand souls and was now little more than overthrown ruin, Colhuacan in time would succumb as well. A year later, the Emperor Nfansou and his Fula cavalrymen would ride into the Valley of Mexico triumphant. They would record their victories on stele in the varied tongues of the region and founded the city of Kafibaka on the backs of their supposed native allies. The Mexica would prostrate themselves in rows before the triumphant Mansa, who demanded the traditional submission of his Fula culture from the conquered tribes.
Later, Europeans and their Nahua subjects would pick through the stony rubbish of these cities and more. They would marvel for what was lost, but they would not understand. The Nahua kept records, but these were shrouded in myth. They spoke of the people who came before them as Tolteca, but little truth could be discerned from their reports – to them time was cyclical, governed by patterns that only the wise could see. The fall of the Tolteca was every bit as inevitable as the fall of the Franks and Fula.
In time, the Mexica claimed, a new round of disease and famine would purge the haughty nations across the sea.
They had no idea how right they were.
The New World and the Old
The Frankish Empire needed an outlet, and the New World was the perfect answer. Agriculturally, the Old World European populations were overburdened. They suffered from a surfeit of nobles in a world where Eastern conquests were becoming increasingly unpalatable. The 1128 conversion of the Polish King to Christianity marked the end of the Votive era in Europe, and the beginning of the end of German migration. Stealing land from coreligionists was hard to justify and far less palatable to the average migrant.
By and large, the Franks had come to terms with the state of affairs in the East. Xasar country was an armed camp, whose great fortresses had marked the end of more than one ambitious Marcher Lord with fanatic zeal and too few forces to make a difference. For the Germans, Slavic country was increasingly off limits, and quite simply there was nowhere to go.
Was it any wonder that so many chose to flee the swollen cities of Europe or forfeit their royal stipends to seek adventure in the new world? For the nobility, the cloistered misery of the monastic life was nothing compared to the opportunity to take up Votive arms for Christ in a new land. For the peasantry, the new world represented unprecedented social advancement in a land where supposedly even the meanest tenant could have slaves of his own. It meant a land of gold and adventure where anything was possible.
The New World was not what Europe wanted or needed in 1104.
The merchants of Italy and Ispana were far more concerned with the Near East than the Utter West. Preachers on their payroll still clamored for Votive War and the destruction of Iran.
They were not wrong to think in this way: the wealth of Asia far outpaced that of Solvia, and the luxury goods they wanted were all found in the Orient. Whatever bounty could be found overseas was difficult to extract and bring back. The overwhelming majority of those who set sail for the Utter West stayed there, never to return. Those who returned were more often than not recruiters, and were shunned by landholders who wanted to keep their farms staffed and merchants who thought this was all a vast distraction from the real war, the oldest war, between the deadly fanatics of Boddo and the warriors of Christ.
For groups such as the Mauri and Ispanians, however, one major boon did present itself. Sailing around Africa meant an alternative to Khardi tolls and the wartorn chaos of the Near East. It also meant opportunities to bring back vast cargos of salt in exchange for what the Ispanians considered a pittance. So while the Germans and Franks eagerly dreamed of Votive crusade and glory, the merchants of the south plotted how best to circumnavigate the vast continent to their south. It could be done – wise men all believed that much was obvious. Royal mathematicians in Ispanic courts bickered and disputed the distances involved, but by 1146, the first Italian-funded Ispanian voyage had reached Cape Watya.
In time the trickle of adventurers would become a flood.
First Steps
The first contacts between the Old and New Worlds were a series of utter disasters. Would-be conquerors were time and again scattered to the winds or overrun by their own ignorance.
Navigation and nautical technology as a whole was still in its infancy. Whole fleets and voyages were swallowed up in the passage.
If iron and steel would give the invaders an advantage, as many later scholars have postulated, it was not readily apparent in the early post-contact days. The early decades post-contact passed without major incidents, and after 1104, a series of pitched battles between natives and newcomers would primarily end with the newcomers buried by sheer weight of numbers, slaughtered despite technological advantages they presumed would keep them safe.
Few accounts of these early battles survive, and what stories we do have tell of huddled, starving Franks surrounded and picked off one by one. However, these tales of atrocity are not necessarily representative of the majority of these early post-contact massacres. Later archeology indicates that pitched battles were more common than previously believed – that the usual pattern of contact was one of brutal open warfare. The attritional patterns of later conflicts only began after the natives were decimated by disease and forced back into the hinterlands. In general these early battles were disastrous for the lightly-equipped seafarers who almost universally underestimated their native foes time and again. Open hospitality gave way to distrust, and soon the Caribbean was inflamed against the voyagers from the west.
However these disasters did not mark the end, but rather the beginning. The Europeans learned from their mistakes, and benefitted from the collapse of native populations in their absence. Future conquests swept islands already depopulated by plague and incipient social collapse. Conquering lords set up cities under “the authority of the king” and built wooden castles and churches so as to proclaim themselves victors. The use of “theatrical violence” brought many cautious or outright hostile tribes to heel, and combined with the taking of (overwhelmingly female) hostages as “wives” these early colonies were able to survive.
One Hundred Ships
There is no more vivid image of the conquest of Tolteca in the popular imagination than that of Mansa Nfansou and his hundred ships setting sail from Fula country. Occurring a mere century after the initial contact, Mansa Nfansou and his adventures quickly took on the aspect of legend or myth, and few accurate chronicles of his voyage have survived. There is a gulf in the historical record – between the legendary hundred ships and scattered accounts from the petty “Duke” of Tahiti, who records no more than five ships limping into his harbor. The famed Mansa in his account is a proud and arrogant man, a warlord who refuses to acknowledge the disastrous storms that have ruined his fleet and left him “as a beggar in the Carib Sea” – a king reduced to eating his valuable warhorses.
From there, Nfansou’s next steps become difficult to trace, not for a want of accounts, but for the confusion of those royal historians and Norse chroniclers who travelled with him. He either landed near the city of “Cuetsala” or “Cuetseleuca” on the Gulf of Tolteca, the location of which is lost to history. Shortly thereafter he began involving himself in the affairs of native kings, and rode to the city of “Ohsakag” – where in a ceremony which rapidly became confused by issues of translation, he demanded the submission of the Ohsakagi King and his entourage.
The ensuing war was brutal chaos, but another wave of disease would fortuitously strike a year after his landfall, and Ohsakagi would be destroyed by a rival city state that has been identified to a large degree of certainty as Coyolapan. Shortly thereafter, a war with the Sabotegi would throw him back on the defensive, and Nfansou’s chaotic and tumultuous rise to the top would continue.
The Norse and Fula chroniclers who charted Nfansou’s ascension to power are broadly responsible for the legendary quality of his conquests and the pervasive misconceptions which endure to this day about his victories. The Norse in particular emphasized the individual heroism of a small band of conquering heroes holding back endless waves of chaotic barbarians. To them, Nfansou’s foes dressed in carnival motley. Each battle was a legion of unrestrained cannibal demons throwing themselves on the long-armed and stern warriors of the Fula, who kept disciplined ranks and repulsed their foes time and again. The native allies of the Fula feature not at all in their accounts. The savage chaos of warriors armed with stone clubs assailing the finely armored horsemen of the Fula made for a beautiful and romantic picture, but an inaccurate one. Equally fraudulent was the Fula depictions, which emphasized the pseudodivine glory of Nfansou, the heroics of the cavalry charge, and their enormous, incomprehensibly vast fleet and army which won submission after submission with a minimum of effort.
The truth, as ever, is a grimy thing. First, the Fula fleet was in no small part composed of Canary Norse, a people who had rapidly outbred the carrying capacity of their small island. Second, what sparse native accounts and oral histories remain do not focus on the cavalry at all, and given the Duke’s account of the Mansa forced to eat many of his horses, it is likely that the cavalry contingent was small to say the least. Third, the Fula would have been annihilated if it was not for the apocalyptic chaos gripping the whole of the region. Mass migrations, societal breakdown, and a rapid series of plagues all allowed Nfansou to carve out a state where otherwise he might have simply been killed along with the starving men who staggered ashore in 1208.
Still, Nfansou’s conquests were uncertain and ephemeral at best. Many of the native kings whose “submission” he attained saw him as little better than a particularly high quality mercenary. There were various Frankish and Norse mercenaries already in the New World by the time of Nfansou, and he would certainly not be the last Old World leader to cross the sea and engage in mercenary activity. The famed womanizer and mercenary Niccolo Cosca, who had passed away some four decades previously, was hailed as a hero by the Xicallanca of Cholula and his travelogues, widely disseminated in Italian vernacular, had proved wildly popular with the common people of his home country.
Nfansou, in the eyes of many historians and contemporaries, was acting in the same tradition as the Cosca family, who were in the 1220’s represented in the new world by Stefano Cosca, a cousin of the famed adventurer, and his little brother who was called the Lesser Niccolo. But the story of the New World is not the story of great men or grand adventures.
The story of the New World is of vast impersonal forces. From the first meetings of sailors and Carib islanders, diseases leapt from mouth to mouth, from flea to flesh. From early beginnings and perilous voyages, the groundwork for a truly global economy was laid. The engine of global trade was even now being primed in the far East – when it reached the shores of the Americas, nothing would ever be the same.
The story of the New World is the story of an exchange of ideas. From the first contact, representations of Christ and the native gods of the Taino were painted on cliff-faces and pieces of stone and bark. Cultures long separated by the yawning gulf of the Atlantic Ocean struggled to understand and make sense of new worlds beyond their reckoning.
The story of the New World is one born in blood and fire. From the first meetings between Haitians and Franks, it is the story of unspeakable atrocities and the lowest depths of human degradation, of starving sailors butchering unprepared natives and being butchered in turn by vengeful war-parties. It is the story of arrogant conquering Princes who sought everlasting glory at sword point. It is the story of the New Votive Wars and the bloody religious revolution which would follow.
[These posts are meant to be more "teasers" than anything. Fear not, I'll be going into more detail shortly. However, there may be a bit more chronological jumping about in this part of the story, especially when it comes to discussing cultural themes and the various revolutionary changes taking place in Asia.
N.B. All guest posts set before 1104 should still be posted in the original White Huns thread. If I have any additional posts that discuss pre-1104 topics they will go there as well. ]
I highly recommend first reading The Rise of the White Huns first, before reading this thread. This is the sequel thread, which picks up roughly in the year 1104, when the adventurer Bjorn Solva discovers the continent which will ultimately come to bear his name.
For those who are unaware what the White Huns story is, it's essentially the story of an alternate timeline wherein the Near East is wrecked by successive waves of nomadic invaders and India emerges more or less untouched and the Gupta Golden Age, from a certain perspective, never ends. Ultimately commercial interests gain substantial power and the era of universal Indian Empires comes to a crashing halt with the collapse of the fictional Maukhani dynasty. Europe remains in the shadow of Roman glory, with a Frankish dynasty descended from the Merovingians claiming the title of Augustus Imperator. China is divided between warring states in the south and a decadent "barbarian" dynasty in the north, called the Kitai Yaol. East Africa is a melting pot of Near East cultures, a series of trade cities clinging to the coast.
This is the continuation, where we follow the [Columbian] exchange and the Commercial Revolution to their (in some sense) inevitable conclusions.
As I said the first time, here goes nothing.
This sequel features heavy contributions from @Hobelhouse and @LostInNewDelhi. Consider these to be posts by co-authors, and equally canonical.
Prelude to the Flowering
When Roland of Rennes laid eyes upon the sprawling city of Colhuancan in 1213, he witnessed the climax of a mortally wounded civilization, gripped by the heady rush of collapse. When he returned in 1217, the antique city of pyramids and gardens was no more, overthrown by a tribe of the Nahua who called themselves the Mexica.
Vast and apocalyptic migrations of peoples, most notably the Nahua and Chichimecas, had begun several decades before, mixed with plagues which would seemingly strike and level whole nations. Scattered bands of European adventurers brought with them warfare and disease. In the south, the armies of Mansa Nfansou (Fanceau to his European rivals and federates) were carving out a nation from the backs of their swift horses, gathering allies and enemies in equal measure and turning the valley peoples to war.
Meanwhile, the people of Colhuacan and their settled counterparts, who were in the eyes of Nahua and European alike the “civilized ones” or “artisans” were building every greater works of art and culture, ever more intricate pieces of golden finery which were every bit as ephemeral as their civilization and painted art that would not long survive the plunder of migrating peoples. The past century had been one of environmental shifts that in another world might have simply been devastating. However, combined with Old World plagues and the arrival of adventuring conquerors, there was simply no chance.
Like Tula, a city which had once held a hundred thousand souls and was now little more than overthrown ruin, Colhuacan in time would succumb as well. A year later, the Emperor Nfansou and his Fula cavalrymen would ride into the Valley of Mexico triumphant. They would record their victories on stele in the varied tongues of the region and founded the city of Kafibaka on the backs of their supposed native allies. The Mexica would prostrate themselves in rows before the triumphant Mansa, who demanded the traditional submission of his Fula culture from the conquered tribes.
Later, Europeans and their Nahua subjects would pick through the stony rubbish of these cities and more. They would marvel for what was lost, but they would not understand. The Nahua kept records, but these were shrouded in myth. They spoke of the people who came before them as Tolteca, but little truth could be discerned from their reports – to them time was cyclical, governed by patterns that only the wise could see. The fall of the Tolteca was every bit as inevitable as the fall of the Franks and Fula.
In time, the Mexica claimed, a new round of disease and famine would purge the haughty nations across the sea.
They had no idea how right they were.
The New World and the Old
The Frankish Empire needed an outlet, and the New World was the perfect answer. Agriculturally, the Old World European populations were overburdened. They suffered from a surfeit of nobles in a world where Eastern conquests were becoming increasingly unpalatable. The 1128 conversion of the Polish King to Christianity marked the end of the Votive era in Europe, and the beginning of the end of German migration. Stealing land from coreligionists was hard to justify and far less palatable to the average migrant.
By and large, the Franks had come to terms with the state of affairs in the East. Xasar country was an armed camp, whose great fortresses had marked the end of more than one ambitious Marcher Lord with fanatic zeal and too few forces to make a difference. For the Germans, Slavic country was increasingly off limits, and quite simply there was nowhere to go.
Was it any wonder that so many chose to flee the swollen cities of Europe or forfeit their royal stipends to seek adventure in the new world? For the nobility, the cloistered misery of the monastic life was nothing compared to the opportunity to take up Votive arms for Christ in a new land. For the peasantry, the new world represented unprecedented social advancement in a land where supposedly even the meanest tenant could have slaves of his own. It meant a land of gold and adventure where anything was possible.
The New World was not what Europe wanted or needed in 1104.
The merchants of Italy and Ispana were far more concerned with the Near East than the Utter West. Preachers on their payroll still clamored for Votive War and the destruction of Iran.
They were not wrong to think in this way: the wealth of Asia far outpaced that of Solvia, and the luxury goods they wanted were all found in the Orient. Whatever bounty could be found overseas was difficult to extract and bring back. The overwhelming majority of those who set sail for the Utter West stayed there, never to return. Those who returned were more often than not recruiters, and were shunned by landholders who wanted to keep their farms staffed and merchants who thought this was all a vast distraction from the real war, the oldest war, between the deadly fanatics of Boddo and the warriors of Christ.
For groups such as the Mauri and Ispanians, however, one major boon did present itself. Sailing around Africa meant an alternative to Khardi tolls and the wartorn chaos of the Near East. It also meant opportunities to bring back vast cargos of salt in exchange for what the Ispanians considered a pittance. So while the Germans and Franks eagerly dreamed of Votive crusade and glory, the merchants of the south plotted how best to circumnavigate the vast continent to their south. It could be done – wise men all believed that much was obvious. Royal mathematicians in Ispanic courts bickered and disputed the distances involved, but by 1146, the first Italian-funded Ispanian voyage had reached Cape Watya.
In time the trickle of adventurers would become a flood.
First Steps
The first contacts between the Old and New Worlds were a series of utter disasters. Would-be conquerors were time and again scattered to the winds or overrun by their own ignorance.
Navigation and nautical technology as a whole was still in its infancy. Whole fleets and voyages were swallowed up in the passage.
If iron and steel would give the invaders an advantage, as many later scholars have postulated, it was not readily apparent in the early post-contact days. The early decades post-contact passed without major incidents, and after 1104, a series of pitched battles between natives and newcomers would primarily end with the newcomers buried by sheer weight of numbers, slaughtered despite technological advantages they presumed would keep them safe.
Few accounts of these early battles survive, and what stories we do have tell of huddled, starving Franks surrounded and picked off one by one. However, these tales of atrocity are not necessarily representative of the majority of these early post-contact massacres. Later archeology indicates that pitched battles were more common than previously believed – that the usual pattern of contact was one of brutal open warfare. The attritional patterns of later conflicts only began after the natives were decimated by disease and forced back into the hinterlands. In general these early battles were disastrous for the lightly-equipped seafarers who almost universally underestimated their native foes time and again. Open hospitality gave way to distrust, and soon the Caribbean was inflamed against the voyagers from the west.
However these disasters did not mark the end, but rather the beginning. The Europeans learned from their mistakes, and benefitted from the collapse of native populations in their absence. Future conquests swept islands already depopulated by plague and incipient social collapse. Conquering lords set up cities under “the authority of the king” and built wooden castles and churches so as to proclaim themselves victors. The use of “theatrical violence” brought many cautious or outright hostile tribes to heel, and combined with the taking of (overwhelmingly female) hostages as “wives” these early colonies were able to survive.
One Hundred Ships
There is no more vivid image of the conquest of Tolteca in the popular imagination than that of Mansa Nfansou and his hundred ships setting sail from Fula country. Occurring a mere century after the initial contact, Mansa Nfansou and his adventures quickly took on the aspect of legend or myth, and few accurate chronicles of his voyage have survived. There is a gulf in the historical record – between the legendary hundred ships and scattered accounts from the petty “Duke” of Tahiti, who records no more than five ships limping into his harbor. The famed Mansa in his account is a proud and arrogant man, a warlord who refuses to acknowledge the disastrous storms that have ruined his fleet and left him “as a beggar in the Carib Sea” – a king reduced to eating his valuable warhorses.
From there, Nfansou’s next steps become difficult to trace, not for a want of accounts, but for the confusion of those royal historians and Norse chroniclers who travelled with him. He either landed near the city of “Cuetsala” or “Cuetseleuca” on the Gulf of Tolteca, the location of which is lost to history. Shortly thereafter he began involving himself in the affairs of native kings, and rode to the city of “Ohsakag” – where in a ceremony which rapidly became confused by issues of translation, he demanded the submission of the Ohsakagi King and his entourage.
The ensuing war was brutal chaos, but another wave of disease would fortuitously strike a year after his landfall, and Ohsakagi would be destroyed by a rival city state that has been identified to a large degree of certainty as Coyolapan. Shortly thereafter, a war with the Sabotegi would throw him back on the defensive, and Nfansou’s chaotic and tumultuous rise to the top would continue.
The Norse and Fula chroniclers who charted Nfansou’s ascension to power are broadly responsible for the legendary quality of his conquests and the pervasive misconceptions which endure to this day about his victories. The Norse in particular emphasized the individual heroism of a small band of conquering heroes holding back endless waves of chaotic barbarians. To them, Nfansou’s foes dressed in carnival motley. Each battle was a legion of unrestrained cannibal demons throwing themselves on the long-armed and stern warriors of the Fula, who kept disciplined ranks and repulsed their foes time and again. The native allies of the Fula feature not at all in their accounts. The savage chaos of warriors armed with stone clubs assailing the finely armored horsemen of the Fula made for a beautiful and romantic picture, but an inaccurate one. Equally fraudulent was the Fula depictions, which emphasized the pseudodivine glory of Nfansou, the heroics of the cavalry charge, and their enormous, incomprehensibly vast fleet and army which won submission after submission with a minimum of effort.
The truth, as ever, is a grimy thing. First, the Fula fleet was in no small part composed of Canary Norse, a people who had rapidly outbred the carrying capacity of their small island. Second, what sparse native accounts and oral histories remain do not focus on the cavalry at all, and given the Duke’s account of the Mansa forced to eat many of his horses, it is likely that the cavalry contingent was small to say the least. Third, the Fula would have been annihilated if it was not for the apocalyptic chaos gripping the whole of the region. Mass migrations, societal breakdown, and a rapid series of plagues all allowed Nfansou to carve out a state where otherwise he might have simply been killed along with the starving men who staggered ashore in 1208.
Still, Nfansou’s conquests were uncertain and ephemeral at best. Many of the native kings whose “submission” he attained saw him as little better than a particularly high quality mercenary. There were various Frankish and Norse mercenaries already in the New World by the time of Nfansou, and he would certainly not be the last Old World leader to cross the sea and engage in mercenary activity. The famed womanizer and mercenary Niccolo Cosca, who had passed away some four decades previously, was hailed as a hero by the Xicallanca of Cholula and his travelogues, widely disseminated in Italian vernacular, had proved wildly popular with the common people of his home country.
Nfansou, in the eyes of many historians and contemporaries, was acting in the same tradition as the Cosca family, who were in the 1220’s represented in the new world by Stefano Cosca, a cousin of the famed adventurer, and his little brother who was called the Lesser Niccolo. But the story of the New World is not the story of great men or grand adventures.
The story of the New World is of vast impersonal forces. From the first meetings of sailors and Carib islanders, diseases leapt from mouth to mouth, from flea to flesh. From early beginnings and perilous voyages, the groundwork for a truly global economy was laid. The engine of global trade was even now being primed in the far East – when it reached the shores of the Americas, nothing would ever be the same.
The story of the New World is the story of an exchange of ideas. From the first contact, representations of Christ and the native gods of the Taino were painted on cliff-faces and pieces of stone and bark. Cultures long separated by the yawning gulf of the Atlantic Ocean struggled to understand and make sense of new worlds beyond their reckoning.
The story of the New World is one born in blood and fire. From the first meetings between Haitians and Franks, it is the story of unspeakable atrocities and the lowest depths of human degradation, of starving sailors butchering unprepared natives and being butchered in turn by vengeful war-parties. It is the story of arrogant conquering Princes who sought everlasting glory at sword point. It is the story of the New Votive Wars and the bloody religious revolution which would follow.
[These posts are meant to be more "teasers" than anything. Fear not, I'll be going into more detail shortly. However, there may be a bit more chronological jumping about in this part of the story, especially when it comes to discussing cultural themes and the various revolutionary changes taking place in Asia.
N.B. All guest posts set before 1104 should still be posted in the original White Huns thread. If I have any additional posts that discuss pre-1104 topics they will go there as well. ]
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