After the conquest of the island by Jaime I nearly all of the great nobles who had accompanied the king returned to the peninsula, granting their lands to _caballeros_ of their following, or renting them to plebeian cultivators, and Jaime I did much the same. Thus the _caballeros_, or nobility of the second grade, were virtually the only representatives of the feudal aristocracy in Majorca, and laws were passed limiting the amount of land which they might hold, so as to avoid the evil of vast estates. The _caballeros_ were reinforced by a Catalan middle class element which constituted a majority of the Christians in the island in the early years following the conquest. From these two elements there emerged a new aristocracy, based on wealth, growing out of Majorcan commerce, an aristocracy open to all, given to pomp and luxury, and dwelling mostly in Palma. Some of the wealthy lived in the country, where there was also a large number of free tillers of the soil. A few of these became wealthy, but there was always a tendency for the rich to migrate to Palma. The position of the rural classes was not satisfactory at any time, but two causes appeared in the fourteenth century to make it worse. One was the increase in taxation after the reincorporation into the crown of Aragon, and the other a change in the form of wealth with the decline of Majorcan commerce in the latter fourteenth century, when the aristocracy of Palma began to buy lands and rights to collect taxes. Thus the rural districts became economically dependent on the absentee landlords at the capital, who were more zealous over the collection of their rents and taxes than in cultivating the land. Society divided itself largely on the lines of the country and the city, with the inhabitants of the former bitterly hostile to the aristocracy of the latter. [Sidenote: Conversion of the Mudéjares and Jews.]