=5. Some Effects of this Policy.=――The Empire of the Kaliphs was of immense extent. By the tenth century it had three separate seats of government――at Bagdad, at Cairo, and at Cordova, and the influence of each of these three kaliphates was felt even beyond its own immediate boundary. The Carlovingian dynasty in France caught for a while something of the enlightened spirit of the Mahomedan rulers, and in France as in Spain, Jewish physicians and Jewish teachers and Jewish merchants became quite the fashion. Not only did there come to be crowded colleges presided over by Jewish Rabbis in the sunny southern cities of Europe, but fleets of trading vessels, commanded by Jewish captains, were to be seen sailing in the Mediterranean. The sight awoke some slumbering enmities. In the ninth century a certain Archbishop of Lyons was as concerned for the worldly interests of his countrymen as the most zealous of Church dignitaries could have been for their spiritual ones. This Archbishop Agobard presented a petition, in 829, to his royal master, Louis le Débonnaire, praying that the commerce of good French Christians might be protected against the wicked Jews. Conscience would have been a safer cry than commerce to have raised, and a fairer one to have invoked religious legislation about. King Louis refused to receive the worthy archbishop’s petition. He was evidently in favour of free trading, and so long as the vessels were seaworthy, and the freight honest, he did not appear to consider the religious opinions of the supercargos to be any of his business, or of his archbishop’s either. King Louis had a Jewish physician, and it seems as if this doctor――Zedekiah was his name――managed to keep his royal patient healthy in mind as well as in body. At any rate, whether from nature or from ‘treatment,’ this King of France was, certainly, possessed of fine principles. ‘Divine law,’ we find him writing in one of his despatches, ‘bids me protect my subjects who share my belief; but it nowhere forbids me to be just towards those who differ from me.’ His acts matched his convictions, and under the more tolerant treatment, which had been first introduced by the Mahomedans, the Jewish position in all the south of Europe improved greatly in the eighth and ninth centuries. Not only were commercial operations extended, but Jews were largely employed in public and in private positions of trust. They were often made collectors of revenue, and stewards in the great households of the nobles. They were allowed to serve in the army, and there is evidence that at least in one province, that of Languedoc, they were permitted to be landowners. In Narbonne, for years, one of the two annually elected prefects or mayors of the town was a Jew. Their synagogues and their schools multiplied, and those of Salerno, and Montpelier, and Toulouse, and Marseilles, and, a little later on, of Paris, produced some famous Rabbis, and many crops of diligent students.