Now Hellenism owes nothing to Byzantium, and Byzantinism, imbued with Christianity, is but remotely and indirectly connected with the magnificent pagan bloom of Hellenism. Byzantium, as has been shown, was not only the continuation of Rome in its decay: it had also a character of its own. Neither was Byzantinism a mere continuation of Hellenism. It was rather the propagator of Orthodoxy, so that when the Greeks claimed Byzantium, they could not do so on behalf of Hellenism, but merely on behalf of Christianity. There is a confusion here that many people have sought to perpetuate because it serves numerous interests, those of the Greeks, and also those of the Slavs, who owe their culture to Byzantium. But whereas Byzantium chiefly taught barbarous Russia a religion together with the rudiments of knowledge, and opened for her a door to the Old World, she imparted to Arabian civilisation knowledge of the works and traditions of antiquity. Russia, who only borrowed the rites of the Byzantine Church and exaggerated them, did not derive much profit from that initiation; the Turks and Arabs, on the contrary, thanks to their own culture, were able to imbibe the old knowledge bequeathed and handed down to them by Byzantium—leaving aside the religious bequest. Thus they were enabled to exercise a wholesome influence, driving out of Constantinople both Orthodoxy and the Slavs who aimed at the possession of that town. As to the so-called Hellenism of Asia Minor, it is true that the civilisation of ancient Greece spread over several districts on the coast; but it should be borne in mind that, long before the Greeks, the Egyptians and various Semitic peoples had settled on the coast of Lydia—which up to the seventh century B.C. bore the name of Meonia—and fought there for a long time; and that the Lydians, a hybrid race akin to the Thracians and Pelasgi commingled with ethnic elements coming from Syria and Cappadocia, kept up an intercourse between the Greeks of the coast and Asia[24] till the Cimmerian invasion convulsed Asia Minor in the eighth century. Lastly, the Medes, against whom the Greeks waged three wars, are considered by Oppert,[25] owing to the etymology of the name, to be of Turanian descent. In fact, the relations between the Turks and the Greeks and the Byzantians are really most involved. We know to-day that some Turkish elements, who were converted to the Greek Church long before the Ottoman Turks embraced Islam, and whose origin is anterior by far to the establishment of the Seljukian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, faithfully served the Byzantine Empire from the fifth century onwards, and were utilised by Justinian for the defence of the Asiatic boundaries of the Empire—which were also the boundaries of Christianity—against the attacks of Eastern nations.