Only in the reign of Justinian did the law begin expressly to encourage manumission, to recognize freedmen as full citizens, and to raise the slave status; and several circumstances are to be noted as giving a lead to such a course. Justinian had pursued a policy of great outlays where his immediate predecessors had been frugal, and to sustain it he had to impose much fresh taxation on the land. For fiscal purposes, it had long been recognized, the government did well to limit the power of proprietors to dispose of their slaves; and it is probable that the humane law of Constantine really had this end in view. By raising slaves to the status of half-free peasants, the State increased the number of its taxpayers. "The labourer of the soil then became an object of great interest to the treasury, and obtained almost as important a position in the eyes of the fisc as the landed proprietor himself." In the process the small freeman was put in a worse position than before; but the slave was at the same time bettered--the hereditary slave, that is, for captives were enslaved or bought throughout the history of the Byzantine empire. The legal change was thus made from economic motives; but one moral gain did indirectly accrue from the existence of the Church as such. Under Justinian the empire was re-expanded after having been for a time curtailed; and this would under paganism have meant a large addition to the number of slaves. The recovered lands, however, were peopled by Christians; and all bishops were bound in their own interest to resist the enslavement and deportation of their flocks; so that Christianity at this point was favourable to freedom exactly as was Islam, which forbade Moslems to enslave Moslems. And the indirect benefit did not end there. The Church, like the fisc, had a good deal to gain pecuniarily from the freeing of slaves; and, especially in the West, though it supported slave-laws, it encouraged masters to manumit for the sake of their souls' welfare in the next world. That the motive here again was political and not doctrinal is clear from the two facts--(1) that even when making serfs priests for its own service the Church often did not legally free them, thus keeping them more fully subject to discipline; and (2) that while urging laymen to free the slaves or serfs on their lands Churchmen were the last to free those on their own, on the score that no individuals in orders had the right to alienate the property of the order as such. Other economic causes, of course, effectually concurred to further the freeing of slaves and serfs, else the institution would not have decayed as it did in the Middle Ages. It is noteworthy, too, that while the Jews were the great slave dealers for Europe in the Dark Ages, thus dangerously deepening their own unpopularity and moving the Church to thwart the traffic on Christian grounds, Christians everywhere were long eager to buy and sell barbarians such as the Slavs (from whose