For over a millennium, 1,123 years to be precise, the Byzantine Empire was the centre of the most brilliant civilisation known to the Middle Ages, and possibly even the only real civilisation which prevailed in Europe between the close of the fifth century and the beginning of the eleventh. Hellenism, Christianity, and the East met in forming Byzantine civilisation; and by the characteristic forms it assumed, by its superiority, as well as by the long and profound influence it exercised in both the Eastern and Western world, this civilisation played a prominent part in the history of thought, and the history of mankind.