The Church does not impose a certain political or economic system. However, she demands that in every form of human society there must be applied biblical principles and the evangelical values.
This is what the Byzantine world knew of the Orthodox Church. The Byzantine Empire was the most cultivated the strongest military force and the richest state of Europe. Its civilization was an amalgam of three elements: Christian religion, Greek culture and Roman tradition. During the three centuries, while the Western Europe was a land of partly tamed barbarians, the Byzantine Empire was a highly civilized state where the most felicitous merger of Christianity and Hellenism produced a fascinating culture. The last four centuries of the empire's existence, from 1057 to 1453, was a period of gradual decrease in power.
Few states played such an important part in history, as did the Byzantine Empire. In it was developed the eastern civilization that still exists in Balkans, Greece and Russia. Bit by bit, directly or indirectly, the knowledge build up by the people of the ancient world and preserved in the Byzantine empire found its way to the people of the West as they grew mature enough to receive it.
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