Spain has been rightly described as ‘one of the most cut up portions of the earth’s surface’. A glance at her map will show the numerous mountain ranges that pierce into the heart of the country, dividing her into districts utterly unlike both in climate and soil. Even rivers that elsewhere in Europe, as in the case of the Rhine and the Danube, act as roads of friendship and commerce, are in Spain for the most part unnavigable, running in wild torrents between precipitous banks so as to form an additional hindrance to intercourse.

Geography thus came to play a very great part in the history of mediaeval Spain, deciding that though overrun by Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, and Saracens, no conquest should be ever quite complete, since the invaded could always find inaccessible refuges amongst the mountains. A spirit of provincial independence was also fostered, as in Italy30—men learning to say first not ‘I am a Spaniard,’ but ‘I am of Burgos,’ or ‘of Andalusia,’ or of ‘Barcelona,’ according to their neighbourhood.

When the Saracens defeated King Rodrigo and his Christian army at the battle of Guadalete,31 we have seen that they found the subjugation of southern and central Spain an easy matter. Rich towns and districts passed into their hands almost without a blow: the Gothic nobles and their families who should have defended them, weakened by tribal dissensions, fled away northwards to the mountains of Leon and Asturias, while the downtrodden masses that they left behind soon welcomed their new masters.

It was the policy of the Moors to grant a slave his freedom on his open acknowledgement of Allah as the one God and Mahomet as his Prophet, while they allowed those Christians and Jews who refused to surrender their faith to live in peace on the payment of a poll-tax not required from Moslems.

The capital of the Saracen kingdom, or ‘Caliphate’, that was destined to survive practically unmolested for some three hundred years, was the town of Cordova, whose capture the Moors believed had been divinely inspired by Allah, since as their army under cover of the darkness swept up to the walls, a terrific hail-storm descended that deadened the clatter of approaching hoofs. From a treacherous shepherd one of the captains learned of a part of the fortifications easy to scale; and, climbing up undetected by means of a fig-tree, he let down his long turban to assist his fellows until a sufficient number had mounted to overpower the guards and open the gates to the main army.

To the Spaniards, thus defeated almost in their sleep, Cordova was a fallen city, disgraced by the presence of infidels; yet these same infidels were to make her luxury and brilliance rival the almost fabulous glories of Bagdad and to win for her culture the grudging admiration of Christian Europe. As we read of her ‘Palace of Pleasures’, ornamented with gold and precious stones, of her woods of pomegranate and sweet almond, of her gardens and perfumed fountains, of her luxurious rest-houses for travellers without the walls, we are back in the atmosphere of some Eastern fairy tale that clings also around the history of her Caliphs, tinging with romance their loves, their hatreds, and their rivalries.

There are other aspects of Moorish Spain hardly less wonderful when contrasted with the haphazard national development of the rest of Europe. Here were agriculture and industry deliberately stimulated by a close and practical study of such branches of knowledge as science and botany, algebra and arithmetic. Arid soil, that under ordinary mediaeval neglect would have been left a desert, became through canals and irrigation a fertile plain, the garden of rice, sugar, cotton, or oranges. Mathematics applied to everyday needs produced the mariner’s compass; scientific brains and intelligent workmen the steel blades of Toledo and Seville, the woven silk fabrics of Granada, and the pottery and velvets of Valencia.

Yet, though knowledge was consciously applied for commercial purposes, the Moors did not set up ‘Utility’ as an idol for their scholars and tell them that only information that brought material wealth in its train was worth having. Philosophy and literature, as well as science, had their lecture-halls: Greece and the East were searched by Caliphs’ orders for manuscripts to fill their libraries; and so world-famous became Cordovan professors that in the twelfth century Christian students hastened to sit at their feet; and the translations of Aristotle by the Arabic professor AverroËs became one of the chief sources of authority for the most orthodox ‘schoolmen’.

In their search after knowledge for its own sake, the Moors accorded toleration to the best brains of all races. Elsewhere in Europe the Jews were held accursed, protected by Christian rulers so long as their money-bags could be squeezed like a sponge, but exposed to insult, torture, and death whenever popular fury, aroused by a crusade or an epidemic, demanded an easy outlet for zeal in burning and pillaging houses.

Christian fanaticism had closed nearly every avenue of life to the Jew save that of money-lender, in which he found few competitors, since the law of the Church forbade usury. It then proceeded to condemn him as a blood-sucker because of the high rate of interest that his precarious position induced him to charge for his loans. Thus, despised, hated, and feared, persecution helped to breed in the average Jew the very vices for which he was blamed, namely, the determination to sweat his Christian neighbours, and an arrogant absorption in his own race to the exclusion of all others.

In the cities of the Moors alone the Jew could rise to public eminence, as in Cordova, where teachers of the race were especially noted for their researches in medicine and surgery. Many Spanish Israelites indeed became doctors, and proved themselves so unmistakably superior in knowledge and skill to the ordinary quacks that rulers of Christian states were thankful to employ them when their health was in danger.

It would seem at first sight as if this happy kingdom of the Moors, where culture, comfort, and toleration reigned, must in time succeed in spreading its civilizing influence over Europe; but there was another and darker side to Moslem Spain. The Caliphate of Cordova, like other Moslem states, was the victim of a form of government whose sole bond was the religion of Islam. Its ruler was a tyrant independent of any popular control, and could send even his Grand Vizier, or chief minister, to death by a word. Such an exalted position had its penalties, and the Caliph must keep continual watch lest he should find enemies ready to slay him, not merely amongst his servants, but even more amongst his sons or brothers. Since polygamy prevailed, in nearly every family there were children of rival mothers, who learned from their cradles to hate and fear each other. It depended only, as it seemed, on a little luck or cunning who would succeed to the royal title, and few scrupled to use dagger or poison to ensure themselves the coveted honour. Out of the feuds and plots of the Moorish court and the rise and fall of Emirs and Sultans in the provinces, Moorish Spain prepared its own downfall during the three centuries that it dominated southern and central Spain.

Away in the north, in Asturias, the ‘cradle of the Spanish race’, where every peasant considers himself an ‘hidalgo’ or noble, in the kingdoms of Leon and Navarre, in the counties of Castile and Barcelona, the descendants of the once enfeebled Goths were meanwhile developing into a race of warriors.

Though ardent in his devotion to Christianity, weaving supernatural aid around every victory, the Spaniard did not, in what might be called the first period of ‘the Reconquest’, show any acute dislike of the Moor. His early struggles were not for religion but for independence, and often a Prince or Count would join with some friendly Emir to overthrow a Christian rival. ‘All Kings are alike to me so long as they pay my price!’ These words of Rodrigo (Ruy) Diaz, the greatest of Spanish heroes, were typical of his race in the age in which he lived.

This Ruy Diaz, ‘El Campeador’, or ‘the Challenger’, as the Christians named him, but more popularly called by his Arabic title ‘Al Said’ or ‘the Cid’, meaning ‘the Chief’, was brave, generous, boastful, and treacherous. A Castilian by race, he held his allegiance to the King of Leon, whose wars he sometimes condescended to wage, as in no way sacred; but when banished by that monarch, who had well-founded suspicions of his loyalty, proceeded unabashed to fight on behalf of his late master’s enemy, the Moorish Sultan of Saragossa.

It is evident from the old chronicles and ballads that the Cid himself could rouse and keep the affection of those who served him. When he sent for his relations and friends to tell them that he had been banished by the King of Leon and to ask who would go with him into exile, we are told that ‘Alvar FaÑez, who was his cousin, answered, “Cid, we will all go with you through desert and through peopled country, and never fail you. In your service will we spend our mules and horses, our wealth and our garments, and ever while we live be unto you loyal friends and vassals”: and they all confirmed what Alvar FaÑez had said.’ Mediaeval Spain was always ready to admire a warrior; and a great part of the Cid’s charm lay, no doubt, in his prowess on the battle-field, when, charging with his good sword ‘Tizona’ in hand, none could withstand the onslaught. To this admiration was added the deeper feeling of fellowship. Their hero might spill the blood of hundreds to attain his ambitions, but he was yet no noble after the mediaeval French type, despising those of inferior rank; rather a full-blooded Spaniard, keen in his sympathy with all other Spaniards.

As he rode from the town of Burgos on his way to exile the Cid called Alvar FaÑez to his side and said, ‘Cousin, the poor have no part in the wrong which the King hath done us.... See now that no wrong be done unto them along our road.’ ‘And an old woman who was standing at her door said, “Go in a lucky minute and make spoil of whatever you wish.”’

The Cid’s ‘luck’, or perhaps it would be truer to say his admirable discretion, carried him triumphantly through many campaigns—at times reconciled with the Christian king and fighting under his banner, at others laying waste his lands as a Moorish ally. At length he reached the summit of his fortunes and carved himself a principality out of the Moorish province of Valencia; and as ruler of this state made little pretence of being any one’s vassal, but boasted that he, a Rodrigo, would free Andalusia as another Rodrigo had let her fall into bondage.

This kingly achievement was denied him, for even heroes fail; so that a time came when he fell ill, and the Moors invaded his land, and because he could no longer fight against them he turned his face to the wall and died. Yet his last victory was still to come; for his followers, who had served him so faithfully, embalmed his body, and they set him on his war-horse and bound ‘Tizona’ in his hand, and so they led him out of the city against his foes. Instead of weeping and lamentations the Cid’s widow had ordered the church bells to be rung and war trumpets to be blown so that the Moors did not know their great enemy was dead; but imagining that he charged amongst them, terrible in his wrath as of old, they broke and fled.

In spite of this victory Valencia fell back under the rule of the Moors, but she never forgot ‘Ruy Diaz’, and is proud to this day to be called ‘Valencia of the Cid’.

The second period of the reconquest of Spain by the Christians may be called the crusading period, and continued until the fall of Granada in 1492. It began not at any fixed date, but in the gradual realization by the Christian states during the twelfth century that their war with the Moors was something quite distinct and ever so much more important than their almost fraternal feuds with one another. This dawning conviction was intensified into a faith, when the Moorish kingdom, that, owing to the feebleness and corruption of its government, had almost ceased to be a kingdom and split up into a number of warring states, was towards the end of the twelfth century overrun and temporarily welded together by a fierce Berber tribe from North Africa, the Almohades.

The Almohades, like earlier followers of Mahomet, were definitely hostile to both Christians and Jews, and so the feeling of religious bitterness grew; and the war that at first was a series of victories for the infidel developed its character of a crusade.

Other crusades, we have seen, gained public support; and at the beginning of the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III, no less alive to his responsibility towards Spain than towards the Holy Land, sent a recruiting appeal to all the countries of Europe. This was answered by the arrival of bands of Templars, Hospitallers, and other young warriors anxious to win their spurs against the heathen. Spain herself founded several Military Orders, of which the most famous was the Order of Santiago, that is, of St. James, called after the national saint, whose tomb at Compostella in the north was one of the favourite shrines visited by pilgrims.

At the head of the Christian host, when it rode across the mountains to the plain of Las Navas de Tolosa, where it was destined to fight one of the most decisive of Spanish battles, was Alfonso VIII, ‘the Good’, of Castile, who had warred against the Moors ever since his coronation as a lad of fifteen. With him went his allies, the King of Navarre, commanding the right wing, and Pedro II, King of Aragon, commanding the left.

All day long the battle raged; and the Christian kings and their knights fought like heroes; but in spite of their efforts they were pressed back and defeat seemed almost certain. ‘Here must we die,’ exclaimed Alfonso bitterly, determined to sell his life at a high price; but Rodrigo Ximenez, the fiery Archbishop of Toledo, replied, ‘Not so, SeÑor, here shall we conquer!’ and with his cross-bearer he charged so resolutely against the foe that the Christians, rallying to save their sacred standard, drove the Moors headlong from the field. So overwhelming was the victory that the advance of the Almohades was completely checked, and the Christian states became the dominating power in the peninsula.

At first in their battles amongst themselves it had been Navarre that took the lead amongst the Christian states; but later this little mountain kingdom, that lay across the Pyrenees like a saddle and was half French in her sympathies and outlook, lost her supremacy. Spanish interest ceased to be centred in France, and focused itself instead in the lands that were slowly being recovered from the Moors. Portugal declared itself an independent kingdom, Castile broke off the yoke of Navarre and united with Leon, Aragon absorbed the important province of Catalonia, with its thriving seaport Barcelona.

One of the most famous of Aragonese heroes in the thirteenth century was James ‘the Conqueror’, son of Pedro II of Aragon, who during the Albigensian Crusade had died fighting on behalf of his brother and vassal, the Count of Provence, against Simon de Montfort.32 James, who was only six at the time, was taken prisoner by the cruel Count, but Innocent III insisted that he should be handed back to his own people, and these gave him to the Templars to educate. It was natural that in such a military environment the boy should grow up a soldier; but he was to prove himself a statesman as well, and a lover of literature, writing in the Catalan dialect a straightforward, manly chronicle of his reign, and encouraging his Catalan subjects in the devotion to poetry they had shared from early days with their ProvenÇal neighbours.

According to contemporary accounts the young king was handsome beyond all ordinary standards, nearly seven feet tall, and well built in proportion. Unfortunately he was so attractive that he became thoroughly spoilt, and was dissolute in his way of life and uncontrolled in his temper. When in one of his rages he was capable of any crime, though ordinarily so generous and tender-hearted that he hated to sign a death-warrant. In his chronicle he tells us how on one of his campaigns he found a swallow had built her nest by the roundel of his tent: ‘So I ordered the men not to take it down,’ he says, ‘until the swallow had flown away with her young, since she had come trusting to my protection.’

The combination of good looks, brains, and chivalry found in James I appealed to the imagination of the Aragonese, but still more did his fighting qualities that were typically Spanish. ‘It has ever been the fate of my race’, he wrote, ‘to conquer or die in battle’; and when quite a small boy he made up his mind that he would become a crusader.

For many years after he was declared old enough to reign for himself King James was forced to spend his time and energy in subduing the nobles who during his long minority had been allowed to become a law unto themselves. This vindication of his authority accomplished, he led his armies against the Moors, and under his conquering banner ‘Valencia of the Cid’ passed finally into Christian hands.

The Moorish kingdom was now reduced to Granada in the south and the dependent province of Murcia to the north-east that was claimed by the Castilians, though Alfonso ‘the Learned’ of Castile was quite unable to make himself master of it.

Hearing of the Aragonese victories in Valencia, Alfonso, who was ‘the Conqueror’s’ son-in-law, asked King James if he would help him by invading Murcia, a project that first aroused the anger of the Aragonese because it seemed to them that they were expected to do the hard work in order that some one else might reap the spoils. King James was more far-seeing than his subjects and held a different view. The Moors were weak at the moment; but, owing to the influx of fresh warriors from North Africa, they had always been able to rally their power in the past and might do so again. ‘If the King of Castile happen to lose his land I shall hardly be safe in mine,’ was his shrewd summary of the case; and with this he invaded and overran Murcia, which he gave to his son-in-law in 1262.

This date, 1262, though it marked no fresh acquisition of territory for Aragon, was nevertheless an epoch in her history. Hitherto her main interest had been identical with Castile’s—namely, the freedom of Spain from the infidel—but now, owing to the conquest of Murcia, she was surrounded by Christian neighbours, and what remained of the crusade had become the business of Castile alone. Early in his reign also, King James had closed another chapter in Aragonese history, when, as a result of his father’s defeat and death, he had been forced to cede all Catalonian claims to Provence, and thus to put away for ever the prospect of absorbing France that had dazzled his ancestors.

Where, then, should Aragon turn her victorious arms? King James, a true Aragonese, had already answered this question, when in 1229 he began the conquest of the Balearic Islands, thus clearly recognizing that his country’s natural outlook for expansion was neither north nor south, but eastwards. Already Catalan fishermen and the merchants of Barcelona were disputing the commercial overlordship of the Mediterranean with their fellows of Marseilles and the Italian Republics, and thenceforward Aragonese kings were to take a hand in the game, supporting commerce with diplomacy and the sword.

James ‘the Conqueror’ did not die in battle-harness, as he had predicted, but in the robe of a Cistercian monk, expiating in the seclusion of a monastery the sins of his tempestuous, pleasure-loving youth. His tradition as a warrior descended to his son Pedro III, under whose rule Aragon entered on her campaign of Italian conquests.

Both the excuse for this undertaking and the occasion have been noticed elsewhere in another connexion. The excuse was the execution of Conradin,33 last legitimate descendant of the Neapolitan Hohenstaufen. As he stood on the scaffold calmly awaiting his death, the boy, for he was little more, had flung his gauntlet amongst the crowd. The action spoke for itself, the one bitter word ‘revenge’; and a partisan who witnessed it, kneeling swiftly, picked up the glove and bore it away to Spain. Here he presented it to Pedro III, to whose wife Constance, the daughter of an illegitimate son of Frederick II, the claims of the Italian Hohenstaufen had descended.

Pedro did not forget the glove or its message; and when the Sicilians, rising in wrath at the Easter Vespers,34 massacred their Angevin tyrants, it was Aragonese ships that brought them succour, and Pedro who defied the anathemas of the Pope and the power of France to drive him from his new throne.

All the failures and victories of the years that followed, when Aragonese and Angevin claimants deluged ‘the Kingdom’ and adjoining island with blood, are more a matter of Italian than Spanish history, and it is with Castile that the interests of the peninsula become mainly concerned.

Castile in later mediaeval times consisted of some two-thirds of the whole area of Spain, stretching from the Bay of Biscay in the north to the confines of the Moorish kingdom of Granada in the south. As her name suggests, she was a land of castles, built originally, not like the strongholds of Stephen’s lawless barons in England—to maintain a tyranny over the countryside—but as military outposts in each fresh stage of the reconquest from Islam. Naturally those who lived in such outposts, and might be wakened any night to take part in a border foray or to withstand a surprise attack, expected to receive special privileges in compensation. This was as it should be, and grateful Kings of Castile, in order to encourage traders as well as knights and princes to settle on their dangerous southern border, offered concessions in the form of charters and revenues with a reckless prodigality at which other European monarchs would have shuddered. Trouble began when, with the steady advance of the crusading armies, outposts ceased to be outposts; and yet their inhabitants, naturally enough again, saw no reason why they should be deprived of the privileges and riches that they had won in the past. Had they known how to use their independence, when danger from the Moors diminished, in securing a government conscious of national needs and aspirations, Spain might have become the political leader of Europe. Unfortunately the average Castilian felt only a selfish sense of the advantages that liberty might afford, without realizing in the least that their possession entailed heavy responsibilities. Thus he allowed his country to degenerate into anarchy.

War seemed the natural atmosphere of life to the Castilian of pure blood, whose ancestors had all been crusaders. Unable to compete in agriculture or industry with the thrifty Moslems or Jews who remained behind on the lands that he reconquered, he decided that labour, except with the sword, was the hall-mark of slaves; and this unfortunate fallacy, widely adopted, became the ultimate ruin of Spain. It turned her from the true road of national prosperity, which can be gained only by solid work, while it prevented nobles and town representatives from understanding one another, and so rendered them incapable of common action in the ‘Cortes’, or national parliament. The fallacy went farther, for it made war between noble and noble seem a natural outlet for martial zeal when no Moslem force was handy on which to whet Christian swords.

The part played by the King in this land of independent crusaders and aristocratic cut-throats was difficult and precarious. Though not so legally bound by the concessions he had been forced to make as in Aragon—where no king might pass a law without the consent of his Cortes and where the ‘Justiciar’, a popular minister, disputed his supreme right of justice—mediaeval Castilian monarchs were in practice very much at the mercy of their subjects.

Henry II of England had been able to burn down his barons’ castles and hang some of their owners, thus paving the way of royal supremacy; but kings of Castile could scarcely adopt such drastic measures against subjects usually more wealthy than themselves, whose castles were required as national fortresses, and whose retainers formed the main part of Christian armies against the Moors. Instead, custom and circumstances seemed ever forcing the rulers of Castile to grant new liberties, and to alienate their lands and revenues in constant rewards and bribes.

This was one of the failings of Alfonso ‘the Learned’, who in spite of his boast, ‘Had I been present at the Creation I would have arranged the world better,’ was certainly not ‘the Wise’, as he is sometimes called. Alfonso was a great reader and a scientist in advance of his day; but the best work that he ever did for his kingdom was the publication of the Siete Partidas (Seven Divisions), a compilation of all the previous laws of Spain, both Roman and Gothic, drawn up and arranged in a single code. For the rest, apart from his somewhat academic cleverness, he was vain, irresolute, and superficial. On one occasion he divorced his wife; and then, when the new wife he had chosen, a Norwegian princess, had already arrived at a Spanish port, he decided to send her away and retain the old. This capriciousness was of a piece with the rest of his actions.

During the ‘Great Interregnum’35 Alfonso was one of the claimants for the imperial crown, but had neither money nor sufficient popularity to carry through this foolish project, for which he heavily overtaxed his people. He also planned an invasion of Africa in grand crusading style, but had to turn his attention instead to struggling against unruly sons. He died with little accomplished save his reputation for wisdom.

The reign of Alfonso X was a prelude to a century and a half of anarchy in Castile, a period when few of her kings could claim to be either ‘wise’ or ‘learned’, and when four of them by ill fortune ascended the throne in childhood, and so presented their nobles with extra opportunities for seeking their own ambitions at the royal expense.

On one struggle during this century and a half we have already touched—the bitter feud between Pedro ‘the Cruel’, the Nero of Spain, and his half-brother, Henry of Trastamara.36 There is no end to the list of crimes of which this monster has been accused, from strangling his rival’s mother, and calmly watching while his half-brother, a twin of Henry of Trastamara, was pursued and cut down unarmed by the royal guard, to ordering that the young bride with whom he had refused to live should be given poisonous herbs that she might die.

Stained, indeed, must the Black Prince have felt his honour when he discovered what a brother-in-arms he had crossed the Pyrenees to aid—one who would massacre prisoners for sheer love of butchery, burn a priest for prophesying his death, and murder an archbishop in a fit of savagery. It is probably true to describe this worst of the Spanish kings as mad: many of his atrocities were so meaningless, such obvious steps to his own downfall, because they alienated those who tried to remain loyal to his cause. His end, when it came, rejoiced the popular heart and imagination, for Pedro, according to tradition, was at last entrapped by the crafty Du Guesclin, lately released from imprisonment by the Black Prince, and once more in the service of Henry of Trastamara.

King Pedro believed that every man had a price, and, on Du Guesclin’s pretence that he might be bought over, stole secretly one night to the Frenchman’s tent. Here he found his hated brother with some of his courtiers who cried aloud ‘Look, SeÑor, it is your enemy.’ ‘I am! I am!’ screamed Pedro furiously, seeing he was betrayed, and flung himself on his brother, while the latter struck at him with his dagger. Over and over they rolled in the half-light of a tallow candle, until Pedro, who had gained the upper hand, fumbled for his poignard with which to strike a fatal blow. Then, according to the old ballad, Du Guesclin interfered. ‘I neither make king nor mar king, but I serve my master,’ he said, and turned Pedro over on his back, enabling those who were standing by to dispatch him with their knives. The tale, if creditable to Du Guesclin’s loyalty, is hardly so to his love of fair play, but the murdered king had lived like a wild animal, and it is difficult to feel any regret that he died like one instead of in battle as a knight.

The House of Trastamara was now established on the Castilian throne by the triumphant Henry II. Some years later it gave also a king to its eastern neighbour, when the royal House of Aragon had become extinct in the male line. This was the Infante Ferdinand, a man of mature judgement, who had already won golden opinions for his honesty and statesmanship when acting as guardian for his young nephew, John II of Castile.

Both kingdoms, but more especially Castile, were to remain victims of civil wars and of frequent periods of anarchy for another half-century. John II, deprived of his uncle’s wise guidance, devoted his time to composing love-songs and surrendered his weak will to a royal favourite, Alvaro de Luna, without whose consent, tradition says, he dared not even go to bed. The result was incessant turbulence, for the nobles hated the arrogant and all-powerful upstart, who managed the court as he pleased, and steadily added to his own estates and revenues. Yet, having brought about his downfall and death, they had no better government with which to replace his tyranny.

Under John’s son and successor Castile fared even worse; for Henry IV was not merely weak but vicious, so that he rolled the crown in the mire of scandal and degradation. Government of any sort was now at an end. ‘Our swords’, wrote a contemporary Castilian, recalling this time of nightmare, ‘were employed, not to defend the boundaries of Christendom, but to rip up the entrails of our country.... He was most esteemed among us who was strongest in violence: justice and peace were far removed.’

In their efforts to save something of their lives and fortunes from this wreck, towns and villages formed Hermandades or ‘brotherhoods’—that is, troops of armed men who pursued and punished criminals; but these leagues without support from the crown were not strong enough to deal with the worst offenders, the wealthy nobles, who could cover their misdeeds with lavish bribery or threats.

At this moment in Castile’s history, when she had sunk to a depth from which she could not save herself, Henry IV died, and was succeeded on the throne by his sister, Isabel, a girl in years but already a statesman in outlook and discretion. Henry IV had attempted to secure personal advantages in his lifetime by arranging various marriages for Isabel, first with a French prince, then with the King of Portugal, and finally with one of his own worthless favourites, and his sister had won his dislike by her steady refusal to agree to any of these alliances. Secretly, indeed, she had married her cousin Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon, a youth already distinguished for his military abilities and shrewd common sense.

As joint rulers of Castile and Aragon Isabel and Ferdinand dominated Spain, and were able to impose their will even on the most powerful of their rebellious subjects, taking back the crown lands that had been recklessly given away, organizing a Santa Hermandad, or ‘Holy Brotherhood’, on the model of previous local efforts to ensure order, and themselves holding supreme tribunals to judge important cases of robbery and murder. In this display of authority the land not merely acquiesced but rejoiced, utterly weary of an independence the misuse of which had produced licence instead of freedom.

Thus it was that a strong monarchy, such as Louis XI was able to establish in France at the end of the Hundred Years’ War, and the Tudors in England after the Wars of the Roses, was also organized and maintained in Spain. Under its despotic sway many popular liberties were lost, but peace was gained at home, and glory and honour abroad above all expectations. The perpetual crusade against the Moors had always touched the imagination of Europe—now its crowning achievement, the Conquest of Granada, dazzled their eyes with all the pageantry and pomp of victory so dear to mediaeval minds.

Hardly was this wonder told when news came that a Genoese adventurer had discovered, in the name of Isabel and Ferdinand, a Spanish empire of almost fabulous wealth beyond the Atlantic.37 To these triumphs were added conquests in Italy, fruits of Ferdinand’s Aragonese ambitions.

The glory of Spain belongs to modern not to mediaeval history; but just as a man or woman is a development of the child, so this, the first nation in Europe as she became in the sixteenth century, proved the outcome of the qualities and vices of an earlier age. Above all things she became, as we should expect, a nation of warriors, inspired with ardour for the Catholic Faith, arrogant and ambitious. To her strength was added a fatal weakness bred of conceit and a narrow outlook, that is the intolerance that admired Ferdinand and Isabel’s ruthless Inquisition and rejoiced in the expulsion of thousands of thrifty Jews and Moors.

Spain was a born conqueror among nations, but what she conquered she had learned neither the sympathy nor adaptability to govern. Thus the empire won by her courage and endurance was destined to slip from her grasp.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.