The reasons for this are complex. They have to do with the miraculous predominance of the West since Renaissance. We must remember that it is the victor who writes history - and Western historians by and large believe the Roman Empire fell in 476 A.D. They play down the fact that Constantine the Great moved the capital of the Empire to New Rome, Constantinople, in 330 A.D. How many of us realize, for example, that all seven Ecumenical Councils of undivided Christianity were held not in Greece or Rome, but in the East, in what is now Turkey?

What really happened in 476, was that the West was overrun by barbarians, and the Greco-Roman civilization that once extended throughout the Empire was shattered. To give some measure of how distant we grew over the centuries, consider the unusual names Western historians gave the Eastern Roman Empire when they "rediscovered" it in the sixteenth century - Byzantium - the pagan, pre-Roman and pre-Christian name of what was then Constantinople, and is now Istanbul.

This was perhaps a logical step for these historians. For centuries after Rome fell, barbarian Kings, whose claim to authority was based on force, grabbed at the glorious mantle of Rome to confer legitimacy upon themselves - so powerful did the idea of Rome remain in the popular imagination. The Renaissance was supposed to be a "rebirth" of classical civilization - and to some degree, it was. Western scholars created a different name for the New Rome that had not only survived, but flourished another millennium in the East - thus was born the term "Byzantine Empire".