iS4 RENAISSANCES

other three evocations all happened to prove expensively abortive.1 In
contrast to the social effect of a universal state in its original epiphany in
the flesh, when it secures a postponement, though not a permanent
remission, of the execution of a self-imposed sentence for a society that
has already inflicted mortal wounds on itself, the social effect of the
evocation of a dead and buried universal state's ghost is to force the
growth of the evoking society to a hot-house pace at which it is con-
demning itself in advance to pay for a spell of artificially induced pre-
cocity by a premature breakdown in which Atlas involuntarily betrays
and stultifies his mission by doing Samson's suicidully vindictive deed.
In the history of Western Christendom up to the date of writing
mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian lira, the same
penalty had been paid already three times over for the sin of resusci-
tating the pre-Augustan Hellenic political institution of the deified
parochial state; and in this parochial three-act play of Western political

to be a sufficient mobilization of Western strength to prevent the 'Onmnnlia from making
further continental conquests at Western expense; and the rest of the Wt'Htern World
therefore left it to the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy to perform this public service for
the Western common weal, without acknowledging its obligation _to the Monarchy by
submitting to the hegemony of a Cacsarea Maicsttis whose suxerainty, even within the
limits of the Holy Roman Empire, had never been more than nominal, outside the
frontiers of the hereditary dominions of the imperial house of the Uuy, since 'the Great
Interregnum' (vacabat A.D, 1254-73).

The role of unprofitable servants, who had done that which it was their duty to do,
without having earned thereby any claim to recognition or reward (Luke xvii, 7-10).
was naturally resented by the Hapsburgs of the Danubian line when it was imposed
upon them by their Western beneficiaries, and they expressed this resentment by making
their weight felt in the interior of the Western World whenever any slackening of the
pressure from their Ottoman adversaries gave them an opportunity to neglect their task
of serving as wardens of the West's anti-Ottomftn marchcH, Such opportunities for
occasional intervention in the domestic politics of the Western World were expended by
the Danubian Hapsburg Power, with remarkable consistency, on Atlcmtcnn dfortu to
uphold lost causes. The ninety-years-long eclipse of the Ottoman Power from the death
of Sultan Suleyman I in A.D. 1566 to the appointment of Mehmcd Kttprultt to In* Grand
Vezir in A.D. 1656—an eclipse that was only momentarily relieved! by the meteoric
career of Sultan Murad IV (imperabat A.D. 1623-40)—wa» spent by « Viennese Gacsarta
Maiestas in Counter-Reformational activities culminating in the Thirty Yearn* War
(gerebatur A.D. 16x8-48). The temporary exhaustion of the Ottoman Power after the
Great War of A.D. 1682-09 was taken by the Danubian IJapHburg Power as an oppor-
tunity for joining forces with the Netherlands and Great Britain in order to repress
King Louis XIV of France for the benefit of British intercuts, The relief from Ottoman
pressure after the collapse of the Ottoman Power in the HuHSo-Ttirkinh War of A,D,
1768-74 tempted the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy into committing itself to the forlorn
hope of repressing the hydra-headed 'Ideas of Seventeen Kighty»Nme', which had no
sooner been crushed in their first avatar in the form of a Napoleonic imperialism than
they reasserted themselves in the form of a nineteenth-century Romantic Nationalism
which the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy was so far from being able to repress that it
was first encircled and finally disrupted by it.

It is true that these Atlantean reactions to the raising of & ghost of a Roman Catsarea
Maiestas at Vienna were not entirely unaccompanied by Antaetm symptoms. The moat
lively of these was the role which Vienna cam* to play an a melting-pot for transforming
Orthodox Christians or ex-Orthodox Christian Uniatea into Westerner*. An eloquent

Monarchy from

_ r ___ .,„_,_„.,_ ___„.,.,„,„.» switch does not

perceptibly relax the rigidity of the Monarchy's Atlantean itince""""""

1 Charlemagne's abortive empire-building cost a naucent Western Society the re-
crudescence of a post-Hellenic social interregnum (see IV. iv, 400) ( TimQr'a cost a
nascent Iranic Muslim Society the loss of its opportunity to make *t»elf the heir of the
Eurasian Nomad World (see IV, iv. 496-500); the pseudo-T'ans regime that had been
installed 4e toutes pieces in Yamato cost a nascent Japanese Society the harih experience
of subjection to the ascendancy of the unexotically crude marchmen who opened up the
Kwanto (see II. U. 158-9).