never spare their Suffragans; these latter torment the Papas: the Papas flea the Parishioners and hardly sprinkle the least drop of Holy Water, but what they are paid for beforehand. If afterwards the Patriarch has occasion for money, he farms out the gathering of it to the highest bidder among the Turks: he that gives most for it, goes into Greece to cite the Prelates. Usually for twenty thousand crowns that the clergy is tax’d at, the Turk extorts two and twenty; so that he has the two thousand crowns for his pains, besides having his charges borne in every diocese. In virtue of the agreement he has made with the Patriarch, he deprives and interdicts from all ecclesiastical functions, those prelates who refuse to pay their tax.” [533] The Christian clergy are even said to have carried off the children of the parishioners and sold them as slaves, to get money for their simoniacal designs. [534] The extortions practised in the seventeenth have found their counterpart in the nineteenth century, and the sufferings of the Christians of the Greek Church in Bosnia, before the Austrian occupation, exactly illustrate the words of Tournefort. The Metropolitan of Serajevo used to wring as much as £10,000 a year from his miserable flock—a sum exactly double the salary of the Turkish Governor himself—and to raise this enormous sum the unfortunate parishioners were squeezed in every possible way, and the Turkish authorities had orders to assist the clergy in levying their exactions; and whole Christian villages suffered the fate of sacked cities, for refusing, or often being unable, to comply with the exorbitant demands of Christian Prelates. [535] Such unbearable oppression on the part of the spiritual leaders who should protect the Christian population, has often stirred it up to open revolt, whenever a favourable opportunity has offered itself. [536] It is not surprising then to learn that many of the Christians went over to Islam, to deliver themselves from such tyranny. [537] Ecclesiastical oppression of a rather different character is said to have been responsible for the conversion of the ancestors of a small community of about 4000 Southern Rumanians, at Noanta in the Meglen district of the vilayet of Salonika; they have a tradition that in the eighteenth century the Patriarch of Constantinople persuaded the reigning Sultan that only the Christians who spoke Greek could be loyal subjects of the Turkish empire; the Sultan thereupon forbade the Christians to speak anything but Greek, on pain of having their tongues cut out; when the news of this reached Noanta, a part of the population fled into the woods and founded fresh villages, but those who were left behind went over to Islam, with their bishop at their head, in order thereby to retain their mother-tongue. [538]