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itt we will discuss the historical anomaly of significantly stronger vassals to manipulative foreign powers. Vassals controlled by corruption networks and coercion rather than brute force.

I'm having trouble thinking of any at the moment. Maybe Janissaries? What Ottomans did to those Balkan lads in the devshirme seems more to be less predicated on guile and more on trying to uplift them to a kind of new elite through their religious interpretation of life. Rather than complete and utter servitude of outsiders by a coercive elite, or assigning to those outsiders a subhuman cattle status like pic rel.

So any strong but poorly organized group in service to a much smaller, weaker and even dependant one would be great if you can think of any.