During the four hundred years between the Battle of Manzikert (1071) and the fall of Constantinople (1453), the decline of Byzantine Hellenism and the Islamization of Asia Minor followed a convergent course for the last time. This long period of Time covers a vast geographical area and the history of many different peoples who related, clashed, influenced each other and eventually cohabited in the melting pot of the Eastern Mediterranean —a history that still awaits its researchers. The disappearance of institutions that supported the Empire, the corruption of the aristocracy, the centralization of State and church, and the division of the leadership into unionists and anti-unionists were the most important causes that opened the backdoor to the victors. The work of Spyros Vryonis soberly describes the process of Islamization and at the same time shows how the Byzantine multi-ethnic culture managed in turn to influence the Turkish, so that a new one was born: the popular culture of Asia Minor.