There were other reasons beside the growing peacefulness of the Spaniards why Granada was left to develop in comparative security for two centuries. It was impossible that adjacent ambitious kingdoms, such as Navarre, Castile, Aragon, Leon, and Portugal, with indefinite and disputed boundaries, and, on account of intermarriages between the kingdoms, with indefinite and disputed successions, should ever be at peace. In the perpetual strife and warfare which prevailed on account of royal European alliances, the fate of foreign princes and princesses were often involved, and hence European states stood ready to take a hand.

Castile and Aragon had gradually absorbed the smaller states, excepting Portugal on the one side and Navarre on the other. The history of Spain at this time is a history of the struggles of these two states for supremacy. The most eventful as well as the most lurid period of this prolonged civil war was while Pedro the Cruel was king of Castile, 1350-69. This Spanish Nero, when sixteen years old, commenced his reign by the murder of his mother. A catalogue of his crimes is impossible. Enough to say that assassination was his remedy, and means of escape, from every entanglement in which his treacheries involved him. It was the unhappy fate of Blanche de Bourbon, sister of Charles V., King of France, to marry this King of Castile, and when he refused to live with her and had her removed from his palace the Alcazar to a fortress, and finally poisoned her, the French King determined to avenge the insult to his royal house. He allied himself with the King of Aragon to destroy Pedro, with whom the King of Aragon was of course at war.

Edward, the "Black Prince," was then brilliantly invading France and extending the kingdom of his father Edward III. He was the kinsman of Pedro, and when appealed to by his cousin for aid in protecting his kingdom from the King of Aragon and his French allies, Edward gallantly consented to help him; and in the spring of 1367, for the second time, a splendid army advanced through the Pass at Roncesvalles, and a great battle, worthy of a better cause, was fought and won.

So this most atrocious king—perhaps excepting Richard III. of England, whom he resembled—had for his champion the victor of Cressy and Poictiers. He was restored to his throne, which had been usurped by his brother Enrique (or Henry), but in a personal encounter with Enrique soon after (which was artfully brought about by the famous Breton knight, Bertrand du Guesclin), he met a deserved fate (1369).

Constanza, the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, had been married to John of Gaunt (Duke of Lancester), brother of the Black Prince and son of Edward III. As Constanza was the great-grandmother of Isabella I. of Spain, so in the veins of that revered Queen there flowed the blood of the Plantagenets, as well as that of Pedro the Cruel!

Because of the number of doubtful pretenders always existing in Spain, disputes about the royal succession also always existed. Such a dispute now led to a long war with Portugal, where King Fernando had really the most valid hereditary claim to the throne made vacant by Pedro's death. If his right had been acknowledged, Portugal and Spain would now be united; Isabella would have remained only a poor and devout princess, and would never have had the power to win a continent for the world. So impossible is it to remove one of the links forged by fate, that we dare not regret even so monstrous a reign as that of Pedro the Cruel!

Enrique's right to the vacant throne of his brother had two disputants. Besides the King of Portugal, John of Gaunt, who had married the lady Constanza,—by virtue of her rights as daughter of Pedro,—claimed the crown of Castile. This Plantagenet was actually proclaimed King of Castile and Leon (1386). For twenty-five years he vainly strove to come into his kingdom as sovereign; but finally compromised by giving his young daughter Catherine to the boy "Prince of Asturias," the heir to the throne. He was obliged to content himself by thus securing to his child the long-coveted prize. And it was this Catherine, who at fourteen was betrothed to a boy of nine, who was the grandmother of Isabella, Queen of Castile.

When such was the private history of those highest in the land we can only imagine what must have been that of the rest. Feudalism, which was a part of Spain's Gothic inheritance, had always made that country one of its strongholds, and chivalry had nowhere else found so congenial a soil. There was no great artisan class, as in France, creating a powerful "bourgeoisie"; no "guilds," or simple "burghers," as in Germany, stubbornly standing for their rights; no "boroughs" and "town meetings," where the people were sternly guarding their liberties, as in England.

The history of other nations is that of the struggles of the common people against the tyranny of kings and rulers. If there were any "common people" in Spain, they were so effaced that history makes no mention of them. We hear only of kings and great barons and glorious knights; and their wonderful deeds and their valor and prowess—excepting in the wars with the Moors—were always over boundary-lines and successions, or personal quarrels more or less disgraceful, with never a single high purpose or a principle involved. It was all a gay, ambitious pageant, adorned by a mantle of chivalry, and made sacred by the banner of the Cross. In the history of no other European country do we see a great state develop under despotism so unredeemed by wholesome ideals, and so unmitigated and unrestrained by gentle human impulses.