burnt alive with his wife; while "the bishops were among the largest slave-holders in the realm; and baptised Christians were bought and sold without a blush by the successors of St. Paul and Santiago."[309] It cannot even be said of the Byzantines, any more than of the Protestants of the southern United States of fifty years ago, that they were more humane to their slaves than the earlier pagans had been; for we find Christian Byzantine matrons causing their slave-girls to be tied up and brutally flogged;[310] even as we have the testimony of Salvian to the atrocities committed by Christian slave-owners in Gaul.[311] The admission that the Church, even when encouraging laymen to free their slaves, insisted on retaining its own,[312] is the proof that the urging force was not even then doctrinal, but the perception that the Church's secular interests were served by the growth of an independent population outside its own lands.[313] The spirit of the Justinian code, despite its allusion to the law of nature, and the spirit of the enactments of the early Councils of the Church, are alike opposed to any idea of spiritual equality between bond and free. On the other hand, the simple restriction of conquest limited the possibilities of slavery for Byzantium. Captives were enslaved to the last,[314] but of these there was no steady supply. In the rural districts, again, the fiscal conditions made for at least nominal freedom, as is shown by the historian who has most closely analysed the conditions:--