Although leaders like Ahmed Bey Agayeff clearly visualized the entire Turanian world from Finland to Manchuria as a potential whole, and were thus full-fledged "Pan-Turanians," their practical efforts were at first confined to the closely related Turko-Tartar segment; that is, to the Ottomans of Turkey, the Tartars of Russia, and the Turkomans of central Asia and Persia. Since all these peoples were also Mohammedans, it follows that this propaganda had a religious as well as a racial complexion, trending in many respects toward Pan-Islamism. Indeed, even disregarding the religious factor, we may say that, though Pan-Turanian in theory, the movement was at that time in practice little more than "Pan-Turkism." It was the Balkan wars of 1912-13 which really precipitated full-fledged Pan-Turanism. Those wars not merely expelled the Turks from the Balkans and turned their eyes increasingly toward Asia, but also roused such hatred of the victorious Serbs in the breasts of Hungarians and Bulgarians that both these peoples proclaimed their "Turanian" origins and toyed with ideas of "Pan-Turanian" solidarity against the menace of Serbo-Russian "Pan-Slavism."[163] The Pan-Turanian thinkers were assuredly evolving a body of doctrine grandiose enough to satisfy the most ambitious hopes. Emphasizing the great virility and nerve-force everywhere patent in the Turanian stocks, these thinkers saw in Turan the dominant race of the morrow. Zealous students of Western evolutionism and ethnology, they were evolving their own special theory of race grandeur and decadence. According to Pan-Turanian teaching, the historic peoples of southern Asia--Arabs, Persians, and Hindus--are hopelessly degenerate. As for the Europeans, they have recently passed their apogee, and, exhausted by the consuming fires of modern industrialism, are already entering upon their decline. It is the Turanians, with their inherent virility and steady nerves unspoiled by the wear and tear of Western civilization, who must be the great dynamic of the future. Indeed, some Pan-Turanian thinkers go so far as to proclaim that it is the sacred mission of their race to revitalize a whole senescent, worn-out world by the saving infusion of regenerative Turanian blood.[164] Of course the Pan-Turanians recognized that anything like a realization of their ambitious dreams was dependent upon the virtual destruction of the Russian Empire. In fact, Russia, with its Tartars, Turkomans, Kirghiz, Finns, and numerous kindred tribes, was in Pan-Turanian eyes merely a Slav alluvium laid with varying thickness over a Turanian subsoil. This turning of Russia into a vast "Turania irredenta" was certainly an ambitious order. Nevertheless, the Pan-Turanians counted on powerful Western backing. They realized that Germany and Austria-Hungary were fast drifting toward war with Russia, and they felt that such a cataclysm, however perilous, would also offer most glorious possibilities.