All of these institutions were heavily endowed when they were not actually supported by the government, and the officials in charge of them were important people. Take the orphan homes, for example. There were forty orphan homes in Constantinople alone. Each was headed by an _orphanotrope_. The Grand Orphanotrope who was over all of them, was appointed by the emperor himself. He held one of the highest offices in the empire. Many of the Byzantine laws were Christian as well. In the old days of the ancient Roman Empire, the father was the absolute master of the family. His wife’s property, including her dowry, became his, and if he did not like her, he could divorce her with little more than a word. At least in the very early days, he had power of life and death over his slaves and almost as much over his children. If a son did not please him, he did not have to leave him a penny in his will. But the Byzantines did not want laws like that. They wanted laws that the Saviour would approve of. In their opinion, Christ would not have approved of divorce, and so although they could not stop it altogether, they made it much more difficult to get. At one time there were only four recognized reasons for divorce. One of them was that you could get a divorce if your husband (or wife) tried to murder you! Women were given many other rights by the Byzantines. If a child wanted to marry, he had to get his mother’s permission as well as his father’s. A woman’s property did not belong exclusively to her husband; her property and her husband’s property now belonged to both of them. If the father died, the mother could become her child’s guardian. The child also got some new advantages. If you got a job in the old Roman days, your earnings went to your father. Under the Byzantines, you could keep them yourself. Slaves also had to be treated with justice. Under Christianity, even the most wretched slave was a human being with a soul which he could lose or save. He was no longer cattle, and his master could not slay him at will. He could not even treat him inhumanely. Even the laws about business were based on the idea that the good of everybody was more important than the good of any individual. In fact, the Byzantines had an almost socialistic control of everything and everybody that made money. Every branch of Byzantine industry was organized into corporations or guilds, and these corporations had the right to fix prices and wages down to the last penny. They had the right to decide who could go into a trade or business. They had the right to decide the exact place where a shop or booth or factory could be set up; for example, no shop selling wax and candles could be less than seventy yards from another candle shop. They also had the right to decide what goods could be imported, and what kind of goods, and in what amounts, could be shipped abroad.