e Christians who did apostatize--and we may believe that
they were chiefly slaves--at once took up a position of legal, though
not social, equality with the other Moslems. It is no wonder that the
slaves became Mohammedans, for, apart from their hatred for their
masters, and the obvious temporal advantage of embracing Islam, the
majority of them knew nothing at all about Christianity.[3] The ranks of
the converts were recruited from time to time by those who went over to
Islam to avoid paying the poll-tax, or even to escape the payment of
some penalty inflicted by the Christian courts.[4] One thing is
noticeable. In the early years of the conquest there was none of that
bitterness displayed between the adherents of the rival creeds, to which
we are so accustomed in later times. Isidore of Beja, the only
contemporary Christian authority, though he rhapsodizes about the
devastations committed by the conquerors, and complains of enormous
tributes exacted, yet speaks more fairly about the Moslems[5] than any
other Spanish writer before the fourteenth century. "If he hates the
conquerors," says Dozy,[6] "he hates them rather as men of another race
than of another creed;" and the marriage of Abdulaziz and Egilona
awakens in his mind no sentiment of horror.

[1] This was not so when the fierce Almoravides and fiercer
Almohades overran Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
See Freeman's "Saracens," p. 168.

[2] As happened in Egypt under Amru. See Cardonne, i. p. 168,
and Gibbon, vi. p. 370.

[3] Dozy, ii. 45, quotes a passage from Pedraca, "Histor.
Eccles. of Granada" (1638), in which the author points out that
even in his day the "old Christians" of Central Spain were so
wholly ignorant of all Christian doctrines that they might be
expected to renounce Christianity with the utmost ease if again
subjected to the Moors.

[4] Samson, "Apolog.," ii. cc. 3, 5.

[5] Speaking of Omar, the second Khalif of that name, Isidore,
sec. 46, says, "Tanta ei sanctimonia ascribitur quanta nulli
unquam ex Arabum gente."

[6] Dozy, ii. p. 42.

On the whole the condition of the mass of the people, Christian or
renegade, was certainly preferable to their state before the
conquest.[1] Those serfs who remained Christian, if they worked on State
lands, payed one-third of the produce to the State; if on private lands,
four-fifths to their Arab owners.[2] The free Christia