For over a millennium, 1,123 years to be precise, the Byzantine Empire was the center of the most brilliant civilization known to the Middle Ages, and possibly even the only real civilizations 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 civlization; 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 civilization played a prominent part in the history of thought, and the history of mankind.