F rom C onvergence to D ivergence   223

FIGURE 7.1  ​Empires of the Old World, c. 200 CE.

“barbarian” contingents. In both cases, territorial expansion slowed and

then ceased altogether. At the same time, rent-­seeking local elites in-
creasingly constrained central authority and state control (figure 7.1).5
The two empires even failed in a similar fashion. The third c­ entury
CE witnessed temporary splits into three subimperial states: however,
Rome experienced a more robust recovery (from the 270s to the 390s
CE) than Jin China (where unity was chiefly ­limited to a quarter ­century
­after 265 CE). Yet in the end, t­ hese differences in detail mattered l­ittle.
In both cases, the more exposed halves of each empire w ­ ere taken over
by outside (or rather preinfiltrated) conquest regimes: groups from the
steppe frontier region in northern China (in the fourth ­century CE) and
Germanic confederations in the western Roman empire (mostly in the
fifth c­ entury CE). Traditional rump states survived in the more shel-
tered southern half of China (from 317 to 589 CE) and in the eastern
Mediterranean (from 395 CE), which unlike southern China was less
well protected by geography but up to the early sixth ­century benefited
from the temporary weakness of Constantinople’s Ira­nian competitors.