Byzantium thus possessed an effective military organization, based upon an efficient and, above all, highly centralized fiscal system. An intelligent, effective and flexible diplomatic and political strategy, combined with a powerful sense of its own identity and the values it represented, enabled it to survive, even flourish, in a highly disadvantageous strategic situation for some six centuries. Its political and military demise followed inevitably from the combination of a series of factors during the twelfth century and after: first, a long-term change in the international political situation, which saw the appearance to the north and west of a number of rival, and often hostile, political formations of equivalent technological, organizational and, above all, economic potential, a situation that had not arisen before this time; second, the loss of the Taurus- Anti-Taurus ranges as a natural political barrier in the southeast, as it was outflanked by the Turkish occupation of Asia Minor from the east in the later eleventh century; third, and perhaps most importantly, major changes in the distribution of political and economic power within the empire, as the growth of a self-aware political, economic and cultural elite challenged the government’s absolute authority over the distribution and consumption of provincial resources. Together, these factors weakened the military organization of the state in the short term, reduced the government’s ability to respond to external threats by an appropriate manipulation of resources in both the short and long term, and created a competition for central power within the elite— with consequent consumption of precious resources in internecine conflicts— which fatally weakened the government’s ability to maintain a consistent foreign policy and defensive strategy. Most of the results of these developments become apparent only during the thirteenth century, but the last fifteen or so years of the twelfth century, culminating in the Fourth Crusade and the partition of the empire, point the way of things to come.
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