Here they remained unmolested until the conversion of the country to Christianity, when the familiar process began. The new religion, having wiped out idolatry, sought a fresh field among the Jews. Their infidelity justified persecution; their wealth and their weakness invited it. As early as the reign of Constantine the Great we find Bishop Severus of Magona, in the island of Minorca, burning their synagogues and forcing them to embrace Christianity, and Bishop Hosius of Cordova prohibiting Christians, under pain of excommunication, from trading, intermarrying, or otherwise mixing with the contaminated race. ♦320♦ But the lot of Israel did not become unbearable until long after the Visigoths from the North invaded, devastated, and permanently occupied the peninsula. The first Arian kings, while persecuting the Catholics, allowed full liberty, civil and political, to the Israelites, who consequently rose to great affluence and to the most important dignities in the state. This happy period ended in the sixth century when King Reccared abjured the Arian heresy and was received into the bosom of the Church. Then came orthodoxy, and with it persecution. In 589 the Council of Toledo forbade the Jews to own Christian slaves, and to hold public offices. The Jews tried to avoid the first restriction by offering a great sum of money to King Reccared. ♦599♦ But he refused the offer, and earned the eulogies of Pope Gregory the Great, who compared him to King David; for as David had poured the water brought to him out before the Lord, so had Reccared sacrificed to God the gold offered to him. This was precisely the principle which nine centuries later dictated Ferdinand and Isabella’s policy towards the Jews. Indeed, early Visigothic legislation supplies many curious precedents for mediaeval Spanish bigotry. As time went on it doomed the whole Jewish race to servitude, and invented many of the maxims and methods afterwards adopted and perfected by the Inquisition.