the Christians within the Persian Empire had no great cause for strenuous loyalty. They had suffered terrible persecutions, and though in late times they had enjoyed more or less quiet, they lived always pretty much on sufferance.

It may be questioned, too, whether these conquered populations were really placed in a very much worse position by passing under Arab rule. Some temporary loss by pillage and plunder they undoubtedly suffered. That would affect chiefly the rural populations. The inhabitants of towns, surrendering, as we have seen, chiefly by capitulation, generally managed to secure immunity for their houses and goods as well as for their lives and those of their children. But the population at any rate of Mesopotamia and even of Iraq and Syria had in the frequent and long-continued wars between the rival empires grown in a manner accustomed to such vicissitudes of war.

It would require investigations of a detailed kind, which lie apart from my main purpose, to discover how the annual payments imposed by the Moslems compared in amount with the contributions made by various districts and towns to the Roman or Persian Empire. That is a subject for which materials for investigation seem to exist, but which so far has not been very thoroughly worked out. Suffice it to say here that probably they were not much if any heavier in amount. In the hurry of such rapid conquest the Moslems cannot have narrowly considered what each district could contribute, and must have been very largely dependent upon the

information supplied by those who capitulated to them. The offers made by the capitulating population would, one might expect, be based upon the taxes they were already paying. Evidently the Moslems when they had leisure thought they were too low, and they were sometimes increased. The financial organisation of their extensive conquests also required time. Probably they simply took over the organisation which had previously existed. In any case the finances were conducted for many years after the conquest by Greek (Christian), Jewish, and Persian officials, and in the Greek and Persian languages respectively. It was not until the reign of Abd al-Malik and the governorship of the dreaded Hajjaj in Iraq that the change to Arabic was made.

I have said that the exactions from the provinces were in some cases afterwards increased. That, of course, was not possible where capitulation had been made on the basis of a stated annual payment. Theoretically, at any rate, that was unalterable, though the rapacity of provincial governors probably led to uncovenanted exactions even there. Such things happened even in the Roman Empire. But theoretically the capitulation treaties remained inviolable. We have already seen in the case of the Church of St. John at Damascus both how encroachments tended to be made, and how by appealing to the treaty the Christians could hope for redress. But for the most part these capitulation treaties only applied to the towns. The Arab armies raided the country, the inhabitants