!8 RENAISSANCES been, not central, but peripheral. The geographical situation of Charlc- other three emph „ ., . . ,-.«„•- in the Wei Basin, which had been the western murehhmd of uw. Shang culture and which was to continue to play the same role in the successive histories of the Sinic and the Far Eastern Civilissation.1 The Khatti Empire's metropolitan territory lay in the former western mure)riant! of a Sumeric universal state on the eastern fringe of the Anatolian Plateau, The Toltec Empire's capital city, Tula, lay in the former north-wcntem hinterland of 'the First Empire' of the Mayas on the smith-eastern fringe of the Mexican Plateau. The four empires that we are comparing bear a further and more in- timate resemblance to one another in being, all alike, feudal in their organization. All four were loose and unstable; asHoemtiona of divers peoples constituting so many separate principalities or kingdoms* that were held together precariously under the never quite unchallenged overlordship of one of their number,2 This ramshackle constitution wtw a birth-mark that was also a death-warrant; and the slow agony of the Holy Roman Empire's decline and fall, in the course of the 1,005 yt'un* and seven and a half months intervening between Chariemagne'n coro- nation at Rome on Christmas Day A,I>, 800 and Francis 11 *H abdication at Vienna on the 6th August, 1806, has a striking parallel in Sinic history in the eight or nine hundred years3 long dtyringvtttde of u Chou Empire which received its Napoleonic coup dt> grfiee in 240, iut» ut the brutal hands of the revolutionary militarist principality of Ta*in. The ninth- century collapse of the Carolingiana, the eleventh-century humiliation of the Carolingians* Franconian successors by Pope, Gregory VII, and the thirteenth-century overthrow of the HohenHtauten by Pope Innocent IV, are milestones on a leisurely yet unswerving road to ruin that hitvc their counterparts in the history of the Chou in the Aucectimvc catas- trophes of 841 and 77I-Q B.a* The four-hundred-years-loug history of the Khatti Kmptrc wan chequered by a corresponding series of collapses and recoveries ending in the final cataclysm in the iirst decade of the twelfth century ».c» Though the progress of Modern Western archaeological discovery in South-West Asia during the second quarter of the twentieth century of the Christian Era had brought to light evidence indicating that a tup- posed blank interval of 150 or 200 years between the full of the First Empire of Khatti and the rise of the Second Empire5 was the figment of * See VI. vii. ara, n, 4. * For the structure of the Toltec Empire, toe Garm, np, ctt,, pp. 35-36 arul 44, Tht sumlftnty m point of structure between the Chriu Empire and the Csr«iinui«ii Kmtiir* leaps to the eye when the map on p* 13 in A, Herrmann** flittwteal ttnttttemttmrittl Atlas of China (Cambridge, Mats, 1935, Harvard Univermlty I'fcun) i* nlwml *iU* hy Bide with Mapi No, so and No, 30 in K. von Spruner'i and Th, Mwnktt'i ItttttMttat fiir &* Gescfaehte des Mittelalters und d*r Nmwtn Zrtt (Gotha 1880, I**rthtri), 3 Our estimate of the Ch6u Empxre't duration wilt differ according t» whtthtr w« follow the Sinic official tradition b accepting i xaa a.c. aa the date of the Chdu Dynetty't overthrow of the Shang, or whether we adopt the ahorter chronology which