Constantine came the great change; he turned Imperial Caliph law on to the creed-community of Christianity in lieu of that of Syncretism, and thereby constituted the Christian Nation. The labels "devout" and "unbeliever" changed places. From Constantine onwards the quiet transformation of "Roman" law into orthodox Christian law proceeded more and more decisively, and it was as such that converted Asiatics and Germans received and adopted it. Thus a perfectly new law came into being in old forms. According to the old marriage-law it was impossible for a Roman burgher to marry the daughter of, say, a Capuan burgher if legal community, connubium, was not in force between the two cities.[1] But now the question was whether a Christian or a Jew — irrespective of whether he was Roman, Syrian, or Moor — could legally marry an infidel. For in the Magian law-world there was no connubium between those of different faiths. There was not the slightest difficulty about an Irishman in Constantinople marrying a Negress if both were Christians, but how could a Monophysite Christian marry a Nestorian maiden who was his neighbour in their Syrian village? Racially they were probably indistinguishable, but they belonged to legally different nations.
This Arabian concept of nationality is a new and wholly decisive fact. The frontiers between "home" and "abroad" lay in the Apollinian world between every two towns, and in the Magian between every two creed-communities. What the "enemy," the peregrin, was to the Roman, the Pagan was to the Christian, the Amhaarez to the Jew. What the acquisition of Roman citizenship meant for the Gaul or the Greek in Cæsar's time, Christian baptism meant for him now — entry into the leading nation of the leading Culture.[2] The Persians of the Sassanid period no longer conceived of themselves, as their predecessors of Achæmenid times had done, as a unit by virtue of origin and speech, but as a unit of Mazdaist believers, vis-à-vis unbelievers, irrespective of the fact that the latter might be of pure Persian origin (as indeed the bulk of the Nestorians were). So also with the Jews, and later the Mandæans and Manichæans, and later again the Monophysite and the Nestorian Christians — each body felt itself a nation, a legal community, a juristic person in a new sense.
Thus there arises a group of Early Arabian laws, differentiated according to religions as decisively as Classical laws are differentiated according to cities. In the realm of the Sassanids schools arose for the teaching the Zoroastrian law proper to them; the Jews, who formed an exceedingly large portion of the population from Armenia to Sahara, created their proper law in the Talmud, which was completed and closed some few years before the Corpus Juris. Each one of these Churches had its peculiar jurisdiction, independent of the geo-
