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THE
ORIGIN OF ISLAM |
LECT. |
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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 |
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VI |
CHRISTIANS
AT ARAB CONQUEST |
175 |
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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 |
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