The Mahometan invaders of Spain having accomplished the conquest of that country, again turned their arms northwards, and passed the Pyrenees, but only to encounter, on the plains of Tours, decisive and disastrous defeat.[95] We learn that the Jews were suspected of having invited, or at least encouraged, the attempt. To repeat the remark made in a previous chapter—when we call to mind the treatment they had received at the hands of some of the Frankish kings, and contrast it with the toleration exhibited by the Moslem conquerors of Spain, such an accusation does not seem to us a very improbable one, though no certain evidence of it has been produced. Similarly, some sixty years afterwards,[96] when the Moors again burst into Aquitaine, and were repelled by the Count of Toulouse, the Jews are charged with having betrayed that city into the hands of the invaders. After the retreat of the enemy, and recapture of the town, it is said that the emperor had resolved to punish severely the treachery of the Jewish conspirators, but was persuaded to limit the retribution he exacted to their leaders. Basnage disputes altogether the accuracy of the allegation. But some truth in the story there must be. It is an unquestioned fact that for a considerable period after the Saracen irruption—as late indeed as the twelfth century—it was the custom at Toulouse for a Jew, acting as the representative of the whole of his co-religionists in the city, to appear three times in every year at the gate of one of the churches in Toulouse, and there receive a box (or, as some report, three boxes) on the ear,[97] and at the same time pay over a fine in the shape of thirteen pounds of wax. It would be difficult to understand what could have been the origin of a custom like this,—which reminds us of the penalty imposed on the citizens of Oxford, for their alleged participation in the bloodshed of St. Scholastica’s day, and which was exacted up to the commencement of the present century,—unless it was the story of their betrayal of the city, as above related.