The priority of Antique medicine reigned with the rule of the Roman Empire. The breakdown of the Roman Empire was followed by the early (5-10th centuries AD), then the developed (11-15th centuries) and, finally, the late Middle Ages (15-17th centuries) characterized by development and generation of a new social economic structure - feudalism. In different countries, this social and economic system was formed at different times but within the indicated era it culminated in bourgeois revolutions in Europe in the middle of the 17th century.
Byzantium was the successor of antiquity and, first of all, the Eastern Roman Empire, which lasted 1,000 years longer than the Western one destroyed by the raids of barbarians. Byzantium took its name from a small town in Asia Minor, Byzant, whereto Emperor Constantine the Great, who adopted Christianity as the religion of the Empire, transferred the capital from Rome. Later, this rapidly developing city occupying an advantageous geographical location on the shores of the Bosporus, became known as Constantinople, and still later, following the capture of Byzantium in 1453 by the Turks, the founders of the Ottoman Empire, was called Istanbul1. Byzantium, like Rome before, started constructing magnificent temples, of which the largest, still preserved, was the Santa Sophia Church (Hagia Sophia), which later became the main
mosque when Turks conquered Constantinople, the same as all other temples that still decorate Istanbul. Since Byzantium (Constantinople) did not have enough sources of drinking water, aqueducts were built in the city. For example, a two-story aqueduct 36 m high and 140 m long built under Emperor Justinian and underground freshwater storages, some of which are still in use.