[730] Rubruquis (thirteenth century): "We came to the Etil, a very large and deep river four times wider than the Seine, flowing from 'Great Bulgaria,' which lies to the north." Farther on he adds: "It is from this Great Bulgaria that issued those Bulgarians who are beyond the Danube, on the Constantinople side" (quoted by V. de Saint-Martin).
[731] Evidently much nearer to the Ural Mountains, for Jean du Plan Carpin says this "Great Hungary was the land of Bascart," that is, Bashkir, a large Finno-Turki people, who still occupy a considerable territory in the Orenburg Government about the southern slopes of the Urals.
[732] With them were associated many of the surviving fugitive On-Uigurs (Gibbon's "Ogors or Varchonites"), whence the report that they were not true Avars. But the Turki genealogies would appear to admit their claim to the name, and in any case the Uigurs and Avars of those times cannot now be ethnically distinguished. Kandish, one of their envoys to Justinian, is clearly a Turki name, and Varchonites seems to point to the Warkhon (Orkhon), seat in successive ages of the eastern Turks, the Uigurs, and the true Mongols.
[733] Ethnology, p. 309.
[734] Vambéry, perhaps the best authority on this point, holds that in its structure Magyar leans more to the Finno-Ugric, and in its vocabulary to the Turki branch of the Ural-Altaic linguistic family. He attributes the effacement of the physical type partly to the effects of the environment, partly to the continuous interminglings of the Ugric, Turki, Slav, and Germanic peoples in Pannonia ("Ueber den Ursprung der Magyaren," in Mitt. d. K. K. Geograph. Ges., Vienna, 1897, XL. Nos. 3 and 4).
[735] T. Peisker, "The Asiatic Background," Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. I. 1911, p. 356.
[736] "Das Volk steht und fällt mit der Sprache" (Urbewohner Brasiliens, 1897, p. 14).