From an evolutionary standpoint, Byzantium was a multi-ethnic empire that emerged as a Christian empire, soon comprised the Hellenised empire of the East, and ended its thousand-year history, in 1453, as a Greek Orthodox state: an empire that became a nation, almost by the modern meaning of the word. The presence of a distinctive and historically rich literary culture was also very important in the division between "Greek" East and "Latin" West and thus the formation of both. It was a multi-ethnic empire where the Hellenic element was predominant, especially in the later period.