The Byzantine Empire was one of the most significant and powerful states in the Middle Ages. It emerged from the eastern part of the Roman Empire, which was split into two in AD 395. The modern name "Byzantine Empire" is derived from the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. The Byzantines, however, considered themselves Roman. Constantinople, now Istanbul, was the capital of their empire. Its namesake, the Roman emperor Constantine the Great (306-337), refounded the city on the site of Byzantium.

When Parisians stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789, the face of Europe was changed forever. At this time, France was ruled by Louis XVI, king by divine right. He reigned in the tradition of the Sun King Louis XIV and exercised almost absolute power. The country was in turmoil. Large swaths of the population were impoverished while the nobility enjoyed a life of excess. It was on that fateful day that tensions erupted.

The feeling of living in a world full of interchangeable personal narratives and uniform biographies is a commonplace in modernism. Not only is almost every region on earth characterised by identical consumer possibilities and choices; the general principles, aspirations, desires and dreams of humans across the globe have, moreover, long since been standardised by the pervasiveness of media communication.

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The European sovereign debt crisis was characterised by the fact that some euro area countries, owing to their high levels of debt – caused in part by efforts to counter the consequences of the global financial crisis – experienced difficulties refinancing their debt and, in some cases, lost access to capital market funding. In order to protect monetary policy transmission and safeguard sufficient liquidity provision for the financial system, the ECB Governing Council adopted various non-standard measures during the course of the crisis that went beyond the scope of the usual operational framework at that time.

Prior to the global financial crisis starting in 2007, the Eurosystem’s operational framework for implementing monetary policy used to be a corridor system. This involved the ECB Governing Council setting three interest rates, which usually had the same distance from each other. The rates of the deposit facility and the marginal lending facility formed the lower and upper bounds of the corridor, respectively. The relevant key interest rate on the main refinancing operations was the middle of the interest rate corridor. This system aimed to steer short-term money market rates close to the main refinancing operations rate.