The Church in particular exhibited in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a worse degree, all the corruption and backwardness of that of the West in the pre-Reformation period. Greek monasteries, despite attempts at reform by single emperors, had long been in large measure places of comfortable retreat for members of the upper classes; and under Turkish rule they became still more so, acting however as centres of political intrigue in addition. The result was that, with every facility for such study as the Benedictines carried on in the West, the Greek monks as a rule left learning alone, and were active chiefly as Turkish political agents, in the manner of the Western Jesuits. The secular clergy at the same time became so depressed economically that they were commonly obliged to work with their hands for a living; and though those of the country districts were as a rule morally much superior to those of the towns, all alike were necessarily very ignorant. In the towns, where many of the aristocracy had become Moslems at the conquest, both clergy and monks frequently apostatized to Islam, three cases being recorded in the year 1675; and about that time there is a curious record of the Turks putting a Christian renegade to death for cursing his own religion in the divan. Moslems seem always to have retained a reverence for the Gospel Jesus, considered as apart from his Church. It is needless to say that Greek Christianity never had the slightest countervailing success in converting Moslems. In addition to the spectacle of Christian degradation constantly under their eyes, the Turks were in a position to say that no trust could ever be put in the good faith of a Christian State which made a treaty with them. Thus even when the usual diseases of despotism and dogmatism corroded the Turkish polity, the Christians counted for nothing as an element either of regeneration or of criticism; and no Turk ever looked to their creed as a possible force of reform, though in the period of energy the ablest Turkish statesman always saw the wisdom of ruling them tolerantly, in the Turkish interest, and sought to win them to Islam. Outside of Greece proper, accordingly, the Greek Church never regained any ground in the Turkish empire; and in the age of the conquest, when the expulsion of Jews from Spain drove many of that race to Turkey, they were everywhere preferred to Christians, whom they ousted, further, from many industrial and commercial positions in the towns, becoming the chief bankers, physicians, and merchants, and so helping to depress the Christians.