Alexandria, writing in 1625, mentions various devices adopted by the Christians for escaping from the burden of this tax, e.g. they purchased Muhammadan boys and represented them to be Christians, or they bribed the collectors to take Christian boys who were of low birth or had been badly brought up or such as “deserved hanging.” [467] Thomas Smith, among others, speaks of the possibility of buying off the children, so impressed: “Some of their parents, out of natural pity and out of a true sense of religion, that they may not be thus robbed of their children, who hereby lie under a necessity of renouncing their Christianity, compound for them at the rate of fifty or a hundred dollars, as they are able, or as they can work upon the covetousness of the Turks more or less.” [468] The Christians of certain cities, such as Constantinople, and of towns and islands that had made this stipulation at the time of their submission to the Turks, or had purchased this privilege, were exempted from the operation of this cruel tax. [469] These extenuating circumstances at the outset, and the ease with which men acquiesce in any established usage—though serving in no way as an excuse for so inhuman an institution—may help us to understand what a traveller in the seventeenth century calls the “unaccountable indifference” [470] with which the Greeks seem to have fallen in with this demand of the new government, which so materially improved their condition. Further, the Christian subjects of the Turkish empire had to pay the capitation-tax, in return for protection and in lieu of military service. The rates fixed by the Ottoman law were 2½, 5 and 10 piastres a head for every full-grown male, according to his income, [471] women and the clergy being exempt. [472] In the nineteenth century the rates were 15, 30 and 60 piastres, according to income. [473] Christian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries generally speak of this tax as being a ducat a head, [474] but it is also variously described as amounting to 3, 5 or 5⅞ crowns or dollars. [475] The fluctuating exchange value of the Turkish coinage in the seventeenth century is the probable explanation of the latter variations. To estimate with any exactitude how far this tax was a burden to those who had to pay it, would require a lengthened disquisition on the purchasing value of money at that period and a comparison with other items of expenditure. [476] But by itself it could hardly have formed a valid excuse for a change of faith, as Tournefort points out, when writing in 1700 of the conversion of the Candiots: “It must be confessed, these Wretches sell their Souls a Pennyworth: all they get in exchange for their Religion, is a Vest, and the Privilege of being exempt from the Capitation-Tax, which is not above five Crowns a year.” [477] Scheffler also, who is anxious to represent the condition of the Christians under Turkish rule in as black colours as possible, admits