The effect of the various changes of the seventh and eighth centuries, the rise of the Saracens, the settlement of the Slaves, the transfer of the Western Empire to the Franks, seem really to have had the effect of strengthening the Eastern Empire which they so terribly cut short. It began for the first time to put on something of a national character. ♦It takes a Greek character.♦ As the Western Empire was fast becoming German, so the Eastern Empire was fast becoming Greek. ♦Rivalry of the Eastern and Western or Greek and Latin Churches.♦ And a religious distinction was soon added to the distinction of language. As the schism between the Churches came on, the Greek-speaking lands attached themselves to the Eastern, and not to the Western, form of Christianity. The Eastern Empire, keeping on all its Roman titles and traditions, had thus become nearly identical with what may be called the artificial Greek nation. It continues the work of hellenization which was begun by the old Greek colonies and which went on under the Macedonian kings. ♦Fluctuations in the extent of the Empire.♦ No power gives more work for the geographer; through the alternate periods of decay and revival which make up nearly the whole of Byzantine history, provinces were always being lost and always being won back again. And it supplies also a geographical study of another kind, in the new divisions into which the Empire was now mapped out, divisions which, for the most part, have very little reference to the divisions of earlier times. ♦The _Themes_ as described by Constantine Porphyrogennêtos.♦