650 RENAISSANCES

dates. Leo Syrus established his East Roman Empire in Anatolia after
foiling the Arabs' second attempt to capture Constantinople (iterum
obsidebatur A.D. 717-18); the Carolingians established their Holy Roman
Empire under the lee of the Roman Empire's former frontier along the
Rhine in the course of the sixty-eight years that elapsed between Charles
MarteFs repulse of the Arabs at Tours in A.D. 732 and Charlemagne's
coronation at Rome in A.D. 800. The Roman Empire was thus resus-
citated as a split personality; and, even so, the aggregate area of the
actual domains of the two rival soi-disants Roman Empires that made
their successive appearances on the political map in the eighth century
of the Christian Era did not cover, between them, anything like the
entire area of the Roman Empire imperante Hadriano (A.D. 117-38) or
even imperante Diocletiano (A.D. 284-305). The Arabs' conquest of the
Visigothic successor-state of the Roman Empire in the Iberian Peninsula
in A.D. 711-13 had completed the liberation of all provinces of the
Syriac World that had ever been annexed to the Hellenic World by
force of Macedonian and Roman arms; and the military reverses which
the Arabs suffered thereafter in A.D. 717 and in A.D. 733 merely pre-
vented them from engulfing a Hellenized Hittite World in Anatolia and
the adjoining Greek and Italian homelands of the defunct Hellenic
Civilization, without resulting in the re-establishrnent of even a simu-
lacrum of Roman rule over the former Roman provinces south of the
Taurus and of the Pyrenees.

Moreover, the two rival eighth-century avatars of the Roman Empire
were insulated from one another overland by the effects of successive
eruptions of Eurasian Nomadism out of the Great Western Bay of the
Eurasian Steppe into the Balkan Peninsula; and, though the Avars on
the Alfold were extirpated by Charlemagne in A.D. 791, this Austrasian
'Roman Emperor's' success in thus disposing of one intrusive Nomad
horde was purchased at the price of enlarging the domain of another.
Charlemagne found himself constrained to divide the territorial spoils
of the Avars with the Bulgars, and the elimination of the Avars thus
left the Bulgars astride the Middle as well as the Lower Danube, while
it did not relieve the Balkan Peninsula of the presence of pagan Slav
sedentary barbarians whom the Avars had parked there as their 'human
cattle' when they were restocking a ranch that had been depopulated
by the ravages of the Avars' Nomad forerunners, the Huns, and by the
simultaneous drafts drawn on Illyrian military man-power by the Roman
Emperor Justinian in pursuance of an anti-barbarian revanche that had
defeated its own ultimate purposes.

This partition of two salvaged fragments of former Roman imperial
territory between two rival ghosts of the defunct Hellenic universal
state is a tale of comparative failure which gives the measure of the
success achieved by the Sui and the T'ang in reuniting the whole
former territory of a defunct Sinic universal state under the undivided
rule of a single reincarnation of the Han Empire; and the historical
consequences of this difference between the outcomes of these evoca-
tions of ghosts of a Sinic and an Hellenic universal state were truly
momentous. The Sui and T'ang empire-builders' success in establishing