Aside from the onerous head-tax, there were grave inequalities for the Christian in matters of law and in intermarriage. After the fall of Constantinople, Mohammed the Conqueror gave the Christians a large measure of self-government by putting them in _millets_ (nations) under the headship of the ecclesiastical authorities. But the inequality in the matter of intermarriage has never been done away with. A Moslem may marry a Christian woman, but a Christian is forbidden to marry a Mohammedan woman. In the earliest days, when there was neither racial nor religious antipathy and Christian and Moslem lived in close social intercourse, this law was a powerful proselytizing agency. It furnished a temptation to a change of faith which, whenever it arose, was far stronger than the temptation of lands, of power, of economic independence, or of civil equality. The moment one professed Islam he became an Osmanli. Religion has always been the test of nationality in the Ottoman Empire.[143] The Osmanlis increased from the thousands to the millions, in Macedonia, in Thrace, and in Asia Minor. Ancestry was quickly forgotten in the midst of ever-changing conditions and the founding of a new social order. It is still a characteristic of the Osmanli that he has no surname. The most widely-read English writer of the seventeenth century on the ‘Turks’ emphasized the mixture of blood in the Osmanli, when he wrote: ‘At present the blood of the Turks is so mixed with that of all sorts of Languages and Nations, that none of them can derive his Lineage from the ancient blood of the Saracens.’[144] A majority of the Byzantines whom Orkhan, Murad, and Bayezid conquered must have become Osmanlis. Once the change of religion was made, the development of the new race was not difficult. There was much in common between the Turk of Asia Minor and the Byzantine. An Armenian contemporary wrote of them as if they were alike.[145] The Greeks did not take to heart the new régime,[146] for the fiscal evils of the Byzantine system reconciled them in advance to a change. Nothing could be worse than that which they had suffered.[147]