The disasters of the seventh century were accompanied by wholesale displacements of population. In Europe the old Latin-speaking population of Illyricum, Moesia, and Thrace had almost disappeared. Only a few scattered fragments, the ancestors of the modern Roumanians and Dalmatians, still survived, scattered among the Slavs of the Balkans. In Asia the old provincial population had been grievously thinned by Saracen wars, but, on the other hand, it had been recruited by great bands of refugees from all the lands that the Saracen had overrun. [Sidenote: Changes in population.] Many thousands of Armenians and Persians had chosen to become subjects of the Emperor rather than the Caliph, and in particular the Mardaïtes or Christians of the Syrian mountains had emigrated wholesale into Asia Minor, after maintaining for many years a struggle in the Lebanon against the power of the Saracens. The European themes were now Greco-Slav, not Greco-Roman, in their population: the Asiatic ones were far more Oriental and far less Greek than in the sixth century. By the time of Leo this change was complete: the empire was now Roman in nothing but name and administrative organisation. On the other hand, it had not yet become Greek, as it was to do in a later age. Its most important element in this and the next two centuries was the Asiatic. Isauria and Armenia and the other mountain lands of Asia Minor supplied most of the rulers of the empire. They were not Orientals of the more effeminate and feeble type—like the Syrians or Egyptians, whose only show of energy for many years had been in the hatching of new heresies and the practice of irrational asceticism—but were a bold vigorous race, hardened by many generations of Persian and Saracen wars, the men who, ever since the fifth century, had been supplying the core of the East-Roman armies.