SINIC AND HELLENIC UNIVERSAL STATES 653
porary East Roman reincarnation of the Roman Empire in Anatolia and
Constantinople with Charlemagne's reincarnation of the Roman Empire
in Gaul and Italy. But, to make our imaginary correspondence of post-
Roman history with post-Han history complete, we must also endow
the eighth-century East Roman Empire, which we are imagining
Charlemagne's hypothetical Gallo-Roman supplanter to have annexed,
with a vastly wider dominion than the modest combination of an
Anatolian citadel with a Constantinopolitan bridgehead that had actually
been inherited by Charlemagne's contemporaries Constantine VI and
his mother Irene from their predecessor Leo Syrus. We must imagine
the East Roman Empire of Charlemagne's day to have been coextensive
with the Roman Empire within the frontiers that had been recovered
for it by Justinian, and we must imagine Justinian to have succeeded
completely in attaining his objective of reconquering the Roman Em-
pire's Visigothic, as well as its Ostrogothic and Vandal, successor-state.
This series of imaginary successes would have to be substituted for so
many historical failures in the political history of a post-Hellenic inter-
regnum in order to credit Charlemagne's hypothetical supplanter with
an imaginary achievement of the same order of magnitude as the actual
performance of the Chinese empire-builder Sui W€n-ti; and, even then,
we should find that we had not succeeded in bringing Charlemagne's
imaginary Gallo-Roman heir completely into line with his mighty Far
Eastern counterpart; for the combination of actually unachieved suc-
cesses which we have placed to the credit of Charlemagne's imaginary
heir still leaves the English successor-states of the Roman Empire in
Britain beyond our preposterously exaggerated imaginary limits of the
Holy Roman Empire, whereas the whole former domain of the Han
Empire was duly reassembled in the realm that Sui Wen-til actually
brought into being.
The residual discrepancy resulting from the recalcitrant independence
of Mercia and the other barbarian successor-states of the Roman Empire
in Britain might perhaps be glozed over, but we must not flatter our-
selves by supposing that, if we were to ignore this minor point, we
should find ourselves at the end of our imaginary rewriting of post-
Roman history if we were seriously intent on bringing it into line with
the post-Han history of the Far East; for an avatar of the Han Empire
that had been integrally reconstructed by Sui Wen-ti was preserved all
but intact for the next 553 years (a.d. 589-1142) under successive Sui,
T'ang, and Sung regimes,1 whereas Charlemagne's diadochi and epigoni
actually proved incompetent to hold together even the fraction of the
Roman Empire's former domain that Charlemajgne had managed to
reassemble. To bring the course of Far Eastern history into conformity
with the course of Western history, we must imagine the year a.d. 589
1 A stricter count would limit the duration of the Far Eastern avatar of a Sinic uni-
versal state to a span of some three hundred years, since the main body of the Far
Eastern World went through a spell of political disruption between the onset of the
T'ang Dynasty's death-agonies in the last quarter of the ninth century of the Christian
Era (see IV. iv. 86 and 87-88) and the establishment of the Sung Dynasty in a.d. 960
(see V. vL 306); and during this bout of anarchy sixteen border districts were ceded,
between the years a.d. 927 and 937, to the Khitan transfrontier barbarians (see II. ii.
lai; IV. iv. 86; V. v. 308; and V. vi. 3°7).