AS we have seen in a previous chapter, the lot of the Spanish Jews under Mohammedan rule was supremely enviable. Their condition in the Christian parts of the Iberian Peninsula was less uniformly prosperous. We there find two forces at work, one favourable to the children of Israel and the other the exact opposite. The people and the Church were ill-disposed towards them; the princes and the nobles protected them. Their history is therefore marked by the vicissitudes of the conflict between those two forces, and their ultimate fate was to be determined by the result of that conflict. That they should be mulcted by the Christian princes was only what might have been expected. In Spain they were subjected, among other burdens, to a hearth tax, a coronation tax, a tax on various kinds of their own food, and a tax for the King’s dinner. In Portugal, under Sancho II., they had to pay, besides other things, a fleet tax, and were obliged to supply a new anchor and cable to every vessel built for the royal marine. On the other hand, they enjoyed a large measure of communal autonomy, settled their disputes in their own Beth-Din, or religious tribunal, and even passed capital sentence on culprits of their own persuasion. Despite manifold restrictions in the exercise of certain trades and handicrafts, they often succeeded in eluding the law, which in the earlier days was not rigorously enforced, and in pursuing a variety of occupations. They dealt in corn, cattle, silk, spices, timber, and slaves. They were goldsmiths, mechanics, peddlers, and pawnbrokers. The trade in cloth and wool, both domestic and foreign, was largely in their hands; but they abstained from the manufacture of cloth, partly owing to prohibitive legislation by the State, as was the case in Majorca during the fourteenth century, and partly in obedience to the Talmud, which denounced weaving as an immoral occupation, inasmuch as it tended to facilitate undesirable propinquity between the sexes. Many of the upper classes found equally, or more, lucrative employment as physicians, clerks of the Treasury, and public officials.