According to the Christian French traveler and naturalist Eugene Roger “By the middle of the seventeenth century conditions had somewhat improved owing to immigration. Greeks, downtrodden by Muslim rule in their native country, settled in Palestine, where they scattered all over the country, became the supreme authority in the villages, and numbered about one fifth of the population” Source: De Haas, Jacob; History of Palestine – The Last Two Thousand Years. F. Eugene Roger, La Terre Sainte (Paris, 1637), p. 331, cited by de Haas History, p. 342