Byzantium was the name of Istanbul before it became Constantinople. The Roman Empire was multi-ethnic, but after the split in 395 AD the Eastern part became more closely associated with the Greek elements. Besides the rule of the Empire, Religion also bound the people even after the fall of the West. The Byzantium Empire continued for an additional thousand years until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The ties of Christianity broke in 1054 with the Great Schism which separated Roman Catholicism from the Eastern Orthodox Church. Both still believing themselves universal, but having different interpretations of what that meant. The modern state of Greece only emerged from Ottoman dominion in 1830 in the post French Revolution wave of nationalism that led Greeks to seek an identity separate from the wider Orthodox world through a war of independence.
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