On the whole the condition of the mass of the people, Christian or renegade, was certainly preferable to their state before the conquest.[1] Those serfs who remained Christian, if they worked on State lands, payed one-third of the produce to the State; if on private lands, four-fifths to their Arab owners.[2] The free Christians retained their goods, and could even alienate their lands.  They paid a graduated tax varying from thirteen pounds to three guineas.[3] In all probability the Christians under Moslem rule were not worse off than their coreligionists in Galicia and Leon.  A signal proof of this is afforded by the fact that, in spite of the distracted state of the country, which would seem to hold out a great hope of success, we hear of no attempts at revolt on the part of the subjected Christians in the eighth century, except at Beja, where the Christians seem to have been led away by the ambition of an Arab chief.[4] They were even somewhat indifferent to the cause of their coreligionists in the North, and the attempts which Pelayo and his successors made to induce them to rise in concert with their brethren met with but scant success.[5]

    [1] See especially Conde, Pref. p. vi.

    [2] Dozy, ii. 39.

    [3] Dozy, ii. 40.

    [4] Dozy, ii. 42.

    [5] Cardonne, i. 106.

There can be no doubt, however, that the good understanding, which at first existed between the Moslems and their Christian subjects, gradually gave place to a very different state of things, owing in no small degree to the free Christians in the North, whose presence on their borders was a continual menace to the Moslem dominion, and a perpetual incentive to the subject Christians to rise and assert their freedom.

Our purpose now is to trace out, so far as the scanty indications scattered in the writers of the time will allow, the relations that existed between the two religions during the 275 years of the Khalifate, and the influence which these relations had upon the development of the one and the other.  It will be agreeable to the natural arrangement to take the former question first.

With a view to the better understanding of the position of Christianity and Mohammedanism at the very beginning of our inquiry, we have thought it advisable to point out in a preliminary sketch the development of Christianity in Spain previous to the period when the Moslems, fresh from their native deserts of Arabia and Africa, bearing the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, possessed themselves of one of the fairest provinces of Christendom.  This having been already done, we can at once proceed to investigate the mutual relations of Christianity and Mohammedanism in Spain during the 300 years of the Khalifate of Cordova.