but this, again, meant no new intellectual life. To the last there was a sufficiency of static Greek scholarship to preserve much of the ancient heritage for the time when the Turks should scatter it through the West; but no Byzantine name belongs to the roll of light-givers in the age of the Renaissance. If we search for the bearing of religion on the popular life during the thousand years of the eastern empire, the conclusion will remain very much the same as that reached by a study of the conditions of the first centuries of established Christianity. Boundless credulity, boundless superstition, and zealous idolatry are the standing features from the seventh century onwards. Conduct was substantially what it had been in pagan times; and whatever might be the legal status of those born in slavery, the myriads of captives enslaved in every successful war can have had no better lot than those of the ancient world. Doubtless the lot of the Byzantine people in the mass was better than that of the westerns of the Dark Ages insofar as they were artisans living under a regular government; but in the rural districts and outlying regions they can have fared no better, either in peace or war. When the Saracens wrested Crete and Sicily from Byzantium early in the ninth century, the majority of the inhabitants seem to have been little loth to turn Moslems. "In almost every case in which the Saracens conquered Christian nations," says the Christian historian already quoted, "history unfortunately reveals that they owed their success chiefly to the favour with which their progress was regarded by the mass of the people. To the disgrace of most Christian governments, it will be found that their administration was more oppressive than that of the Arabian conquerors." We have already seen that both the Arabs and the Mongols, as apart from the Turks, were by far the more tolerant. When the Byzantine empire recovered Crete in the tenth century, its rulers planned to exterminate the Saracen population; and though the purpose was not carried out, the Saracens who remained were reduced to virtual serfdom. Of the moral and intellectual unprogressiveness of Byzantium we may say, finally, that the Christian State, like those of the Saracens and the Turks, was in large measure kept stationary precisely by the relation of constant strife set up by the existence of the enemy. Each was the curse of its antagonist. And Christianity did no more to raise men above that deadlock of enmity than did Islam; nay, the further factor of Byzantine isolation represented by the rupture between the Greek and Latin Churches was a special product of the Christian system. PART IV MODERN CHRISTIANITY CHAPTER I THE REFORMATION § 1. Moral and Intellectual Forces