652 RENAISSANCES

the control of the sedentary Power on whose domain they were tres-
passers.1 When we have discounted an attempt to re-establish the Han
Empire at the turn of the third and fourth centuries of the Christian
Era which had such unfortunate consequences, we shall realize that, in
effect, the political separation between North and South that was
brought to an end by Sui Wen-ti in A.D. 589 had prevailed, by that
date, not merely for 272 years, but for no less than four hundred years
if we ignore the interlude of the United Tsin and carry our reckoning
back to the date of the Posterior Han Dynasty's death agonies, which
had set in before the close of the second century of the Christian Era.
The feat performed by Yang Kien (alias Sui We"n-ti) in thus overcoming
a political disunity, which, by his day, was entrenched in the accu-
mulated inertia of four centuries of use and wont, was only surpassed
by the succeeding T'ang Dynasty's feat of consolidating the unity of
the long severed northern and southern halves of the Far Eastern World
which the Sui had so dexterously joined together.2

Both the Sui and the T'ang were heirs of the Eurasian Nomad bar-
barian successor-states of the Han Empire3 which had overtly asserted
their independence in the hinterland of the Great Wall at the beginning
of the fourth century of the Christian Era after the fiasco of the osten-
sible political reunification of the Sinic World under the United Tsin;
and, if we bear in mind this barbarian heritage of the dynasties respon-
sible for the renaissance of the Sinic universal state in the history of
the subsequent Far Eastern Civilization in its original political shape
of a single oecumenical empire embracing the entire domain of the
former Sinic Society, we shall be able to discern what the corresponding
course of events would have been in the aftermath of the histories of
the Hellenic Civilization and of a Roman Empire that had played the
part of an Hellenic universal state.

To reconstruct a corresponding denouement here, we should not
only have to imagine Charlemagne emulating, as he did, the achieve-
ment of the Sui's predecessors the Pe Ch6u, who had provided the Sui
with their base of operations for uniting the South of the Far Eastern
World with the North in A.D. 589 by having already reunited a pre-
viously partitioned North in A.D. 577; we should have to imagine
Charlemagne, after his reunion of the Roman Empire's Lombard
successor-state with its Frankish successor-state in A.D. 772-4, being
supplanted by a usurper of native Gallo-Roman descent who then went
on—by conquest or marriage or diplomacy—to reunite the contem-

^ See V. v. 272-3. In thus purchasing a transitory political reunification of the South
•with the North of the Sinic World at the cost of opening the door for barbarian usurpers
to make themselves masters of an archaistically ambitious Imperial Power's home terri-
tories, the United Tsin were making the same mistake that Justinian was to make when
he purchased for the Roman Empire a transitory reconquest of Italy at the cost of losing
the Balkan Peninsula to the Avars and their droves of Slavs (see V. vi. 286), and that
Michael Palaiologhos was to make when he purchased for the East Roman Empire's
Nicaean Greek Orthodox Christian successor-state a burdensome re-occupation of
Constantinople at the cost of losing Western Anatolia to Turkish Muslim war-bands set
in motion by the dissolution of the Saljuq Sultanate of Qonlyeh.

z Matt. six. 6.

s These barbarian antecedents of theirs are underlined by Franke, O.: Geschichte des
Chinesischen Reiches, vol. ii (Berlin and Leipzig 1936, de Gruyter), p. 250. On this point,,
see also the present Study, V. v. 273, 356, n. 6, and 477-8.