The Roman and later Eastern Roman (Byzantine) state encompassed the entirety of the eastern Mediterranean for six centuries, but following the advent of Islam in Arabia in the 7th century, and the subsequent Islamic conquest of what is now Syria, Egypt, and Libya in the 7th-8th centuries AD, the Byzantine state shrank to consist only of what is now modern Turkey and the Balkans in the Middle Ages. In the early Renaissance (15th century) the Byzantine state finally fell to muslim Turkic conquerors, who had begun migrating into what is now Turkey from Central Asia during the 12th-14th centuries. Thus, during the Middle Ages the Arabs called the native inhabitants of what is now Turkey, the Balkans, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine "Rûm" (Romans), and called what is now Turkey and the Balkans "the land of the Rûm," while referring to the Mediterranean as "the Sea of the Rûm".