History
The Byzantine Empire was the end result of centuries of Roman rule and bureaucratic growth. During this era, a combination of growth of the aristocratic class, the difficulties of administering an increasingly expanding Roman republic led to a complex and opaque system of government that no one who had not grown up inside it had much hope of understanding.
It was so complex that Byzantine complexity has come to refer to any overly complex system.
Read more about this topic: Byzantine Complexity
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)