SINIC AND HELLENIC UNIVERSAL STATES 651
and maintaining a single oecumenical empire embracing the whole
former domain of the extinct universal state of which this new empire
was intended to be an avatar was a political achievement which ensured
that the Sinic Civilization should be succeeded by a single undivided
Far Eastern Society.1 Conversely the Syrian and Carolingian dynasties'
common failure to reincarnate a single unchallenged avatar of the
Roman Empire was a political reverse which ensured that the Hellenic
Civilization should be succeeded by one Christian Hellenistic Society
in Anatolia and by another in the West.2

In the light of these portentous failures to re-establish either the
political unity of the Roman Empire or the cultural unity of the Hellenic
Society hi the former geographical domain of the Hellenic World, the
culturally fruitful political achievement of the Sui and T'ang Power
stands out impressively; and this impression will be enhanced when we
make a closer inspection of this great event's historical antecedents;
since these will be found to forbid the assumption that, because this
act of political reunification was successfully accomplished, it must
therefore have been either a foregone conclusion or even an easy task.

By the time when the North and the South of a nascent Far Eastern
World were united politically by the Sui Power in A.D. 589, the political
separation between them had lasted, without a break, for no less than
272 years,3 and the previous political unity that had dissolved in AJX 317
had been both ephemeral and unsubstantial. Even in name the oecu-
menical empire of 'the United Tsin* had existed for no more than
thirty-seven years (AJD. 280-317); and the facade of political unity that
had been erected by Sse-ma Yen (alias Wu-ti) in A.D. 280 and had been
maintained by his successors during the 'United TsuV Dynasty's brief
regime had been purchased by them at the fatal price of losing hold,
de facto, of the dynasty's own original patrimony in the North which
had been their base of operations for this anachronistic reunification
of the Sinic World a hundred years after the fall of the Posterior Han.
This concentration of the military energies of one of the Han Empire's
three indigenous successor-states on the fratricidal objective of sup-
pressing the other two came as a godsend to Eurasian Nomad laeti who
had been establishing themselves inside the Great Wall, by a process
of more or less peaceful infiltration, ever since the first beginnings of
the Han Power's decline; for this internecine Sinic civil war gave these
barbarian interlopers their patiently awaited opportunity to shake off

1 The eventual supplementation of the main body of this Far Eastern Society in China
by a branch in Korea and Japan was the result of a subsequent process which -was one,
not of division, but of multiplication.

2 Even after the differentiation between an Orthodox Christian and a Western Chris-
tian Hellenistic Civilization had declared itself in the generation, of Leo Syrus and had
accentuated itself in the generation of Charlemagne and had exacerbated itself in the
generation of Photius (see I. i. 66-67), History's decree rtisi need not, even then, neces-
sarily have been made absolute—as it was made in fact in the generation of Michael
Cerularius—to judge by the different denouement of another historical drama after it
had arrived at the same dramatic situation. The differentiation between an Arab Muslim
and an Iranic Muslim successor of a defunct Syriac Civilisation -was at least arrested,
even if it was not permanently overcome, through the political union of five-sixths of the
Arabic World with one-third of the Iranic World as a result of Ottoman conquests of
Arabic territories in the sixteenth century of the Christian Era (see I. i. 388-400).

a See V. v. 356, n. 6.