 Historians and anthropologists such as John S. Koliopoulos and Paul Sant Cassia have criticised the social bandit theory, emphasising the frequent use of bandits as armatoloi by Ottoman authorities in suppressing the peasantry in defence of the central state.Sant Cassia observed of Mediterranean bandits that they "are often romanticized afterward through nationalistic rhetoric and texts which circulate and have a life of their own, giving them a permanence and potency which transcends their localized domain and transitory nature".In Hobsbawm's case, the romanticisation was political rather than nationalistic, yet the fluid, ambiguous figure of the bandit remains.