Arabians at Constantinople

I believe the MAIn reason for the vurtual fall of the Byzantine Greek east is the sack of constantinople by the crusaders. The city was pillaged and it was a pitiful example of Christian vs Christian. I wonder how the West trys to clear that one up with the Eastern Church, no wonder the divisions are so deep.

By acknowledging and apologizing for their mistake, the only thing they can do.

The Thematic scheme collapsed when the small farmers that were the backbone of the army, began to collapse economically. As a result they started selling their land to big landowners (Dynatoi = strong ones) and became serfs to them (some sort of feudalism. There were some attempts by a few emperors to reverse this trend but without success. If you search for "dynatoi" you'll find a lot of information on this interesting matter.

Nice - but looking back, what could have been done to prevent this decline?
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Well basically Byzantium needed to continue with its anti-aristocratic legislation, if possible. Limiting the amount of land legally held by one household would be a wise move, while imposing heavier and heavier quotas on the troops to be supplied by a given area of land as a household's amount of land increased would be another. Of course this was a hard system to think up, implement and enforce. Even Basil II cannot be said to have been 100% successful seeing how fast the aristocracy re-emerged after his death, and Basil was not one to be half-assed in doing anything. The sad fact of the matter is that Byzantium faced an unusually large number of threats. Reading Gibbon you see alot of reference to immorality being the cause of their decline. I remember when I was 14 and first became interested in Byzantium simply because of the sound of its name, since then I made it my primary area of study and have found it the most fascinating area of all the histories i have delved into. I think it is simply the case that Byzantium was surrounded by a number of distinctly different nations, some militant and semi-barbaric on the one hand (eg the Pechenegs), while others highly developed and organised (like the Arabs and Persians).  All nations were too distinct to really find much common cause with Byzantium and so any time Byzantium experienced even a short period of weakness (e.g. 602-610) the damage that waiting enemies could cause could undo decades of hard work. Basically that is why I believe Byzantium collapsed, it was a beleaguered state with a sheer mass of distinct external enemies always ready to pounce. How could Byzantium have prevented the collapse of its small holder farming class in the face of the Dynatoi? Basically only through stringent legislation and a good Emperor. I suppose Basil II did have one big failing, he failed to provide a capable heir to the Macedonian dynasty, and with the throne vacant the Dynatoi came to fill the vacuum and in doing so were all too pleased to further erode the state legislation which protected the small holder peasants.