SINIC AND HELLENIC UNIVERSAL STATES 665
laeti who had been planted in Anatolia to till fields left fallow there by
the extermination of these Slavs' Gothic predecessors in A.D. 40O.1

The preservation of this citadel of Hellenism in Anatolia during the
social interregnum that followed the dissolution of the Hellenic Society
elsewhere was a feat of the same kind as the preservation of a citadel
of the Sinic culture in Southern China during the interregnum that
followed the dissolution of the Sinic Society in the Yellow River Basin;
and this common achievement on the politico-geographical plane is, as
we have seen, one of two distinctive common assets which account,
between them, for the remarkable robustness of both the T'ang Empire
and the East Roman Empire by comparison with such anaemic ghosts
as the Holy Roman Empire and the Ch6u Empire. The two excep-
tionally stalwart revenants' other special common achievement was, as
we have also already noticed, the revival of a professional ky civil
service. We may now go on to observe that, of the two achievements,
this institutional feat was by far the more efficacious in assisting the
wraith of a dead oecumenical empire to clothe itself in flesh and blood.
The truth is that the part played in the two miracles of reincarnation
by an inviolate South Chinese fortress in the one case and by an inviolate
Anatolian fortress in the other case was only a passive one. The mere
survival of a cultural asylum would have been of no avail in itself if
it had not served to give sanctuary to an imperial corporation by whose
action a suspended imperial administration's paralysed, but never fatally
dislocated, heart could be conjured into beating again; and, when we
compare the relative success of the Han regime's and the Roman
regime's residuary legatees in weathering this ordeal of hibernation, we
shall find that the Han imperial civil service far surpassed its Roman
counterpart in both the extent and the success of its performance.

During a post-Roman interregnum the anarchy into which the central
and eastern provinces followed the western provinces after the murder
of the Emperor Maurice in A.D. 602 put out of action, here too, an
imperial administrative machine that in the western provinces had
already ceased to function some two hundred years earlier; and, even
when an eventual break of political continuity in the central provinces,
which had lasted, when it had come, for not less than four generations,
had been followed at length by Leo Syrus's evocation of an East Roman
ghost of the Roman Empire in Anatolia in A.D. 717, another 147 years
had still to pass before this local simulacrum of the Roman Empire was
to be endowed with a local simulacrum of the Roman civil service2

1 The largest settlements of Slav laeti in Anatolia of -which a record survives took
place during the first reign of the Heraclian Emperor Justinian II (imperabat A.D. 685—95
ft 704-11) (see Vasiliev, A. A.: Histoire de FEmpire Byzantin (Paris 1932, Picard, a vols.),
vol. i, pp. 288-9). Thomas the Slav, who -was the leader of the great Anatolian insurrec-
tion of A.D. 821-3, was the offspring of a Slav family settled at Gaziura (Toqat) in the
Armeniac army-corps district, and the Anatolian Slavs were one of the dissident elements
in Anatolia that joined his standard. The insurrection was not, however, confined to the
Slav element in the population of Anatolia, and Thomas was aiming at a more ambitious
objective than the establishment of an Anatolian Slav successor-state of the East Roman
Empire. His aim was to make himself master of the East Roman Empire itself, and this
was why he wasted his strength on a fruitless siege of Constantinople.

a The conspicuous absence of an administrative renaissance of the Diocletianic
Roman Imperial regime in the administrative organization of Leo Syrus's East Roman
Empire has been noticed in VI. vii. 357, n. 4.