CHAPTER VI

THEIR CATHOLIC MAJESTIES

THE BANISHMENT OF THE JEWS--INTERNATIONAL NEGOTIATIONS--THE SPANIARDS IN ITALY--THE VICTORIES OF GONSALVO--THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA

The fall of Granada left the Catholic sovereigns free to turn their attention more completely to the domestic affairs of the kingdom; and it seems moreover to have increased the bigotry both of the Church and of the Court, and to have added new zeal to the fury of the Inquisition.

The conquest of the Moorish kingdom was said by pious ecclesiastics to be a special sign or manifestation of the approval by Heaven of the recent institution of the Holy Office. The knights and nobles, proud of their military successes, may have attributed the victory to causes more flattering to their valor, their skill, and their perseverance. The common people, as yet not demoralized, but gorged with plunder, and invited to occupy without purchase the fairest province in the Peninsula, were little disposed to quarrel with the policy of Ferdinand; and far from feeling any pity for the sufferings of the vanquished Moors, they sighed for new infidels to pillage. And new infidels were promptly found.

The Inquisition so far had troubled itself but little with Christian heretics. The early Spanish Protestantism of the thirteenth century had died away. The later Spanish Protestantism of the sixteenth century had not yet come into existence. Few men had done more than Averroes of Cordova and Ramon Lull of Palma to awaken religious thought in Medieval Europe; yet speculative theology has never been popular among the Spanish people. It was against the Jews, renegade or relapsed, even more than the avowedly unconverted, that the Holy Office directed all its exertions until the end of the fifteenth century. By April, 1492, although a great number of the unfortunate Hebrews had already found their way to the Quemadero, there was still a very large Jewish population in Spain, the most industrious, the most intelligent, the most orderly, but, unhappily for themselves, the most wealthy of all the inhabitants of the Peninsula.

The Spanish Jews, as we have seen, were treated on the arrival of the Arab conquerors not only with consideration, but with an amount of favor that was not extended to them under any other government in the world; nor was this wise liberality, as time went on, displayed only by the Moslem in Spain. At the Christian courts of Leon, of Castile, and of Catalonia, the Jews were welcomed as lenders of money and as healers of diseases, and as men skilled in many industrial arts; and they supplied what little science was required in northern Spain, while their brethren shared in the magnificent culture and extended studies of Cordova. When the rule of the Arab declined, and Alfonso el Sabio held his court at southern Seville, the learned Jews were his chosen companions. They certainly assisted him in the preparation of his great astronomical tables. They probably assisted him in his translation of the Bible.

Nor does this court favor appear to have caused any serious jealousy among Christian Spaniards. The fellow-student of Alfonso X., the trusted treasurer of Peter the Cruel, the accommodating banker of many a king and many a noble--the Jew was for some time a personage of importance rather than a refugee in the Peninsula. And during the whole of the thirteenth century, while the Jews were exposed throughout western Europe to the most dreadful and systematic persecutions, they enjoyed in Spain not only immunity, but protection, not only religious freedom, but political consideration.

Under Alfonso XI. they were particularly regarded, and even under Peter the Cruel, who, though he tortured and robbed his Hebrew treasurer, did not at any time display his natural ferocity in any form of religious persecution. Yet, as we are told that his rival and successor, Henry of Trastamara, sought popular favor by molesting the Jews, it would seem that already by the end of the fourteenth century they were becoming unpopular in Castile. But on the whole, throughout the Peninsula, from the time of James I. of Aragon, who is said to have studied ethics under a Jewish professor, to the time of John II. of Castile, who employed a Jewish secretary in the compilation of a national “Cancionero,” or ballad book, the Jews were not only distinguished, but encouraged, in literature and abstract science, as they had always been in the more practical pursuits of medicine and of commerce.

But in less than a century after the death of Alfonso X. the tide of fortune had turned. Their riches increased overmuch in a disturbed and impoverished commonwealth, and public indignation began to be displayed, rather at their un-Christian opulence than at their Jewish faith. Inquisition was made rather into their strongboxes than into their theology; and it was their debtors and their rivals, rather than any religious purists, who, toward the end of the fourteenth century, and more especially in Aragon, stirred up those popular risings against their race that led to the massacres and the wholesale conversions of 1391. The first attack that was made upon the persons and property of the Jews was in 1388, and it was no doubt provoked by the preaching of the fanatic archdeacon Hernando Martinez at Seville. But it was in nowise religious in its character, and was aimed chiefly at the acquisition and destruction of the property of the rich and prosperous Hebrews. The outbreaks which took place almost simultaneously in all parts of Spain were disapproved both by kings and councils. Special judges were sent to the disturbed cities, and a considerable amount of real protection was extended to the plundered people. No one said a word about conversion; or at least the conversion was that of ancient Pistol, the conversion of the property of the Jews into the possession of the Christians. When the Jewish quarter of Barcelona was sacked by the populace, and an immense number of Hebrews were despoiled and massacred throughout the country, John of Aragon, indolent though he was, used his utmost endeavors to check the slaughter. He punished the aggressors, and he even caused a restitution of goods to be made to such of the victims as survived.

The preaching of St. Vincent Ferrer, during the early part of the fifteenth century, was addressed largely to the Jews in Spain, but little or no religious persecution seems to have been directed against them in consequence of his harangues. On the contrary, we read of friendly conferences or public disputations between Jewish and Christian doctors in Aragon, where the Inquisition was, at least, nominally established. Such conferences could hardly be expected to convince or convert the advocates of either faith, but they tell at least of an amount of toleration on the part of the Christian authorities of the day that was certainly not to be found in Spain at the close of the century; and there is no doubt that they were followed by a very large number of conversions of the more malleable members of the Hebrew community. But it is a far cry from St. Vincent Ferrer to the uncanonized Tomas de Torquemada.

Yet, even in outward conformity to the established religion, the Jews, as time went on, found no permanent safety from persecution and plunder. John II. indeed had little of the bigot in his composition; it was Politics and not Persecution that, under his successor, engrossed the attention of clergy and laity in Castile; but, as soon as the power of Isabella was formally established, the destruction of all that was not orthodox, Catholic, and Spanish became the keynote of the domestic policy of the new government of Spain.

The earliest efforts of the Spanish Inquisition were directed, as we have seen, almost exclusively against those converted Jews, or the sons and daughters of converts, who were known by the expressive name of New Christians, a title applied also to Christianized Moslems, and which distinguished both classes from the Old Christians or Cristianos Viejos, who could boast of a pure Castilian ancestry. These New Christians, as a whole, at the end of the fifteenth century, were among the richest, the most industrious, and the most intelligent of the population, and they were regarded with considerable envy by their poorer neighbors, whose blue blood did not always bring with it either wealth or fortune. The Rules and Regulations for the guidance of the Inquisitors were therefore specially framed to include every possible act or thought that might bring the members of the classes specially aimed at within the deadly category of the Relapsed. If the “New Christian” wore a clean shirt, or spread clean table-linen on a Saturday (Art. 4), if he ate meat in Lent (7), observed any of the Jewish fasts (8-17), or sat at table with any Jew of his acquaintance (19); if he recited one of the Psalms of David without the addition of the Doxology (20), if he caused his child to be baptized under a Hebrew name (23), he was to be treated as a renegade and condemned to the flames.

With every act of his life thus at the mercy of spies and informers, his last end was not unobserved by the Dominicans and the Familiars of the Holy Office. If in the article of death he turned his weary face (31) to the wall of his chamber, he was adjudged relapsed, and all his possessions were forfeit; or if the sorrowing children of even the most unexceptionable convert had washed his dead body with warm water (32) they were to be treated as apostates and heretics, and were at least liable to suffer death by fire, after their goods had been appropriated by the Holy Office or by the Crown.

In the sentences which condemned to the stake, to confiscation, and to penances which were punishments of the severest description, we find enumerated such offenses as the avoiding the use of fat, and especially of lard; preparing amive, a kind of broth much appreciated by the Jews; or eating “Passover bread”; reading, or even possessing, a Hebrew Bible; ignorance of the Pater noster and the Creed; saying that a good Jew could be saved, and a thousand other equally harmless deeds or words.

But with the professed and avowed Jew, unpopular as he may have been with his neighbors, and exposed at times to various forms of civil and religious outrage, the Holy Office did not directly concern itself. The Hebrew, like the Moslem, was outside the pale even of Christian inquiry.

There is no doubt that it was the success of the operations against the Moors of Granada that suggested to Ferdinand and Isabella the undertaking of a campaign, easier by far, and scarcely less lucrative, against the unhappy descendants of Abraham who had made their home in Spain.

The annual revenue that was derived by the Catholic sovereigns from the confiscations of the Inquisition amounted to a considerable income; and the source as yet showed no signs of drying up. Yet cupidity, marching hand in hand with intolerance--the Devil, as the Spanish proverb has it, ever lurking behind the Cross--the sovereigns resolved upon the perpetration of an act of State more dreadful than the most comprehensive of the Autos da Fe.

The work of the Holy Office was too slow. The limits of the Quemadero were too small. Half a million Jews yet lived unbaptized in Spain. They should be destroyed at a single blow. The Inquisition might be left to reckon with the New Christians whose conversion was unsatisfactory.

As soon as the Spanish Jews obtained an intimation of what was contemplated against them, they took steps to propitiate the sovereigns by the tender of a donative of thirty thousand ducats, toward defraying the expenses of the Moorish war; and an influential Jewish leader is said to have waited upon Ferdinand and Isabella, in their quarters at Santa Fe, to urge the acceptance of the bribe. The negotiations, however, were suddenly interrupted by Torquemada, who burst into the apartment where the sovereigns were giving audience to the Jewish deputy, and drawing forth a crucifix from beneath his mantle, held it up, exclaiming, “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver; Your Highnesses would sell him anew for thirty thousand; here he is, take him and barter him away.” The extravagant presumption of the Inquisitor-general would not perhaps have been as successful as it was had it not been obvious to the rapacious Ferdinand that thirty thousand ducats was a trifle compared with the plunder of the entire body of Jews in Spain. Yet the action of Torquemada was no doubt calculated to affect the superstitious mind of Isabella, and even the colder spirit of Ferdinand.

Whatever may have been the scruples of the Spanish sovereigns, the fanaticism of the Spanish people had been at this critical juncture stirred up to an unusual pitch of fury by the proceedings and reports of the Holy Office in a case which has attracted an amount of attention so entirely disproportionate to its apparent importance that it merits something more than a passing notice.

In June, 1490, a converted Jew of the name of Benito Garcia, on his way back from a pilgrimage to Compostella, was waylaid and robbed near Astorga, by some of the Christian inhabitants. A Jew, converted or otherwise, was a legitimate object of plunder. The contents of his knapsack not being entirely satisfactory, and the ecclesiastical authorities sniffing sacrilege in what was supposed to be a piece of the consecrated wafer, Garcia, and not the robbers, was arrested, subjected to incredible tortures, and finally handed over to the local inquisitors.

His case was heard with that of other Conversos; first at Segovia and afterward at Avila. Tortures were repeated. Spies were introduced in various guises and disguises, but no confession could be extorted.

At length, after a year and a half of such practices, the endurance of one of the accused gave way--the dreadful story affords some slight notion of the methods of the Inquisition--and the unhappy man invented a tale in accordance with what was demanded of him; the crucifixion of a Christian child; the tearing out of his heart, the theft of the Host from a Christian Church, and a magical incantation over the dreadful elements, directed against Christianity, and more particularly against the Holy Office. The Tribunal having been thus satisfied of the guilt of the accused, a solemn Auto da Fe was held at Avila, on the 16th of November, 1491, when two of the convicts were torn to death with red-hot pincers; three who had been more mercifully permitted to die under the preliminary tortures were burned in effigy; while the remaining prisoners were visited only with the slight punishment of strangulation before their consignment to the inevitable fire. That no boy, with or without a heart, could be found or invented, by the most rigorous examination; that no Christian child had disappeared from the neighborhood of the unhappy Jews at the time of their arrest--this surprised no one. In matters of Faith such evidences were wholly superfluous. Secura judícat Ecclesia.

That these poor Hebrews should have suffered torture and death for an imaginary sacrilege upon the person of an imaginary boy was indeed a thing by no means unexampled in the history of religious fanaticism. But the sequel is certainly extraordinary. With a view of exciting the indignation of the sovereigns and of the people against the Jews at an important moment, Torquemada devoted much attention to the publication throughout Spain of the dreadful story of the murdered boy, the Niño of La Guardia, the village where the crime is supposed to have taken place. As to the name of the victim, the authorities did not agree. Some maintained that it was Christopher, while others declared for John. But the recital of the awful wickedness of the Jews lost none of its force by adverse criticism. The legend spread from altar to altar throughout the country. The Niño de la Guardia at once became a popular hero, in course of time a popular saint; miracles were freely worked upon the spot where his remains had not been found, and something over a century later (1613) his canonization was demanded at Rome.

His remains, it was asserted by Francisco de Quevedo, could not be found on earth, only because his body as well as his soul had been miraculously carried up to heaven, where it was the most powerful advocate and protector of the Spanish monarchy. The story, moreover, has been twice dramatized--once by Lope de Vega--and no less than three admiring biographies of this imaginary martyr have been published in Spain within the last forty years of this nineteenth century.

At length from conquered Granada, on the 30th of March, 1492, the dreadful edict went forth. By the 30th of July not a Jew was to be left alive in Spain. Sisenand, indeed, nine hundred years before, had promulgated such an edict. But the Visigoth had been too tender-hearted to enforce it. Isabella, whose gentleness and goodness historians are never tired of applauding, was influenced by no such considerations, and the sentence was carried out to the letter. With a cruel irony, the banished people were permitted to sell their property, yet forbidden to carry the money out of the kingdom, a provision which has obtained the warm approval of more than one modern Spanish historian, by whom it is accepted as a conclusive proof that this wholesale depopulation did not and could not diminish the wealth of Spain!

Thus two hundred thousand Spaniards, men, women, and children of tender years, rich and poor, men of refinement and of position, ladies reared in luxury, the aged, the sick, the infirm, all were included in one common destruction, and were driven, stripped of everything, from their peaceful homes, to die on their way to some less savage country. For the sentence was carried out with the most relentless ferocity. Every road to the coast, we read, was thronged with the unhappy fugitives, struggling to carry off some shred of their ruined homes. To succor them was death; to pillage them was piety. At every seaport, rapacious shipmasters exacted from the defenseless travelers the greater part of their remaining possessions, as the price of a passage to some neighboring coast; and in many cases the passenger was tossed overboard ere the voyage was completed, and his goods confiscated to the crew. A rumor having got abroad that the fugitives were in the habit of swallowing jewels and gold pieces in order to evade the royal decree, thousands of unhappy beings were ripped up by the greedy knife of the enemy, on land or sea, on the chance of discovering in their mutilated remains some little store of treasure.

And thus, north, south, east, and west, the Jews straggled and struggled over Spain; and undeterred by the manifold terrors of the sea, a vast multitude of exiles, whose homes in Spain once lay in sunny Andalusia, sought and found an uncertain abiding place in neighboring Africa.

Of all Christian countries, it was in neighboring Portugal that the greatest number of the exiles found refuge and shelter; until, after five brief years of peace and comparative prosperity, the heavy hand of Castilian intolerance once more descended upon them, and they were driven out of the country, at the bidding of Isabella and her too dutiful daughter, the hope of Portugal and of Castile.

But to every country in Europe the footsteps of some of the sufferers were directed. Not a few were permitted to abide in Italy and Southern France; some of the most distinguished found a haven in England; many were fortunate enough to reach the Ottoman dominions, where, under the tolerant government of the Turk, they lived and prospered, and where their descendants, at many of the more important seaports of the Levant, are still found to speak the Castilian of their forefathers.

That the edict of banishment was meant to be, as it so constantly was, a doom of death, and not merely a removal of heretics, is clear from the action of the Spanish sovereigns, who, at the instigation of Torquemada, procured from the pliant Innocent VIII. a Bull enjoining the authorities of every country in Christian Europe to arrest and send back to Spain all _fugitive_ Jews under penalty of the Greater Excommunication.

More than once, indeed, the demand for extradition was made. But save in the case of the Portuguese Jews, on the second marriage of the Princess Isabella to the reigning sovereign of that country, no foreign prince appears to have paid any heed to this savage edict. Nor was it, as a rule, of any material advantage, either at Rome or at Seville, that it should be put in force.

Avarice was perhaps the besetting sin of Rome in the fifteenth century; nor was bigotry unknown throughout Western Europe. But in Spain, as the century drew to a close, avarice and bigotry joined hand in hand, and flourished under royal and noble patronage, preached by religion, practiced by policy, and applauded by patriotism. It was not strange that, under such teaching, the people of Castile should have rapidly become demoralized, and that the great race should have begun to develop that sordid and self-satisfied savagery which disgraced the name of the Spaniard, in the heartless and short-sighted plunder of the new world that lay before him.

Yet in all human affairs there is something that too often escapes our observation, to explain, if not to excuse, what may seem the most dreadful aberrations of the better nature of man. And it may be that the uncompromising religious spirit, which has had so enormous an influence for evil and for good upon the Spanish people, is to some extent the result of their Semitic environment of eight hundred years.

Religious controversy indeed, between rival branches of the Christian Church in the days of the Visigoths, developed religious animosities before the first Moslem landed at Tarifa; yet the Arab and the Moor, fired with the enthusiasm of a new and living faith, brought into their daily life in Spain, in peace and in war, a deep and all-pervading religious spirit--an active recognition of the constant presence of one true God--unknown to the Roman or the Visigoth, which must have had an enormous influence upon the grave and serious Spaniards who lived under the rule of the Arab.

Nor was the Moslem the only factor in this medieval development. In no other country in Europe was the Jew, as we have seen, more largely represented, and more powerful, for the first fifteen centuries of our era, than in Spain, whether under Christian or Moslem masters. But the direct and simple monotheism of the Hebrew and the Arab, while it had so great a direct influence upon Spanish Christianity, provoked as part of the natural antagonism to the methods of the rival and the enemy, the counter development of an excessive Hagiolatry, Mariolatry, and Sacerdotalism.

It would be strange enough if the religious fervor which doomed to death and torment so many tens of thousands of Semites in Spain should be itself of Semitic suggestion. It is hardly less strange that the Greek Renaissance, which revolutionized the Christian world, and whose anti-Semitic influence to the present day is nowhere more marked than in every department of religious thought, should by the irony of fate have been forestalled by a writer, at once Spanish and Semitic; and when, by the sixteenth century, the rest of modern Europe had been led by the teaching of Averroes to accept the philosophy of Aristotle, Spain, the earliest home of Hellenism, new born in Europe, had already turned again to a religious Philistinism or Phariseeism of the hardest and most uncompromising type, Semitic in its thoroughness, Greek only in its elaborate accessories, and Spanish in its uncompromising rigor.

Thus it was that the Arab and the Jew, parents, in some sense, of the religious spirit of Ximenez and of Torquemada, became themselves the objects of persecution more bitter than is to be found in the annals of any other European nation. The rigors of the Spanish Inquisition, and the policy that inspired and justified it, are not to be fully explained by the rapacity of Ferdinand, the bigotry of Isabella, the ambition of Ximenez, or the cruelty of Torquemada. They were in a manner the rebellion or outbreak of the old Semitic spirit against the Semite, the ignorant jealousy of the wayward disciple against the master whose teaching has been but imperfectly and unintelligently assimilated--perverted, distorted, and depraved by the human or devilish element which is to be found in all religions, and which seems ever striving to destroy the better, and to develop the worser part of the spiritual nature of man.

We now enter upon a period of European history which is but feebly characterized by the term interesting, and which has been too accurately chronicled and too severely investigated to be called romantic; when a well-founded jealousy, or fear of the growing power of France, alone supplies the key to the ever-changing foreign policy of the sovereigns of Spain. Genuine State papers of the fifteenth century are by no means numerous. In such of them, however, as are still extant, we find the fear expressed over and over again that the kings of France would render themselves “masters of the world,” would “establish a universal empire,” or “subject the whole of Christendom to their dictation.” The best means to avert such a danger appeared to contemporary statesmen to be the foundation of another European State as a counterpoise. Ferdinand the Catholic, ambitious, diplomatic, and capable, was the first prince who undertook the enterprise.

Within less than three years after the Inquisition had been established at Seville, Louis XI. of France, the old rival and colleague of John II. of Aragon, had died in Paris, August 30, 1483. He was succeeded by his son Charles VIII., a young prince whose ignorance was only equaled by his vanity, and was if possible exceeded by his presumption. With such an antagonist, Ferdinand of Aragon was well fitted to deal, with advantage to himself and to Spain. To win over the Duchess of Bourbon, who had virtually succeeded to the government of France on the death of Louis XI., and to marry his eldest daughter Isabella to the young King Charles VIII., were accordingly the first objects of his negotiations. But in spite of all the flattery lavished on the duchess, Ferdinand did not succeed in obtaining the crown for the Infanta. A more richly dowered bride was destined for the King of France, to whom the acquisition of the province of Brittany was of far greater importance than the doubtful friendship of Spain; and after much public and private negotiation, the Spanish embassador was reluctantly withdrawn from Paris in the summer of 1487 (29th of July).

Disappointed in his dealing with the court of France, the ever-watchful and persistent Ferdinand turned his eyes to England; and in the last days of the year 1487 an embassador from the Spanish sovereigns, Roderigo de Puebla, doctor of canon and civil law, arrived at the court of London. Henry VII., who greatly desired to establish a closer alliance with Spain, succeeded in flattering the new envoy, and rendering him almost from the first subservient to his personal interests. Yet the King of England and the Spanish embassador together were no match for Ferdinand of Aragon. The negotiations between the sovereigns were prolonged for two years, and in the end Henry was worsted at every point. He had signed a treaty of offensive alliance with Spain against France, with which power he wisely desired to maintain friendly relations, and he had been prevailed upon to send some English troops into Brittany to co-operate with a Spanish contingent which never arrived, in the expulsion of the French from that country. He had concluded further treaties of friendship and alliance with the King of the Romans, who was actually encouraging Perkin Warbeck to assert his claim to the crown of England, and with the Archduke Philip, whom he personally and independently hated. And he had been forced to content himself with the promise of a very modest dowry with the Spanish princess who was affianced to his son Arthur, Prince of Wales.

Relatively too, as well as positively, he had been falsely borne in hand. Maximilian, who had been no less ready than Henry with his promises to Ferdinand, did not send a single soldier into Brittany, but endeavored to overreach Henry, Charles, and Ferdinand by a hasty marriage--by proxy--with the young duchess, without the consent or knowledge of either England or Spain. Yet this diplomatic victory over the very astute Englishman did not satisfy Ferdinand and Isabella, who, fearful lest they should “become the victims of their honesty” if they permitted Maximilian to surpass them in political perfidy, immediately renewed secret negotiations with France, and declared themselves ready to abandon the king, the duchess, and the emperor. Charles, they promised, should obtain what he wished, without risking the life of a single soldier, if only he would marry a Spanish Infanta. And they offered him, not Isabella, their eldest born, but their second daughter, Joanna.

Charles, however, had other views, and finding no cohesion or certainty in Ferdinand’s league against him, strengthened his cause and his kingdom by marrying the Duchess Anne of Brittany himself, and uniting her hereditary dominions forever to the crown of France, a fair stroke of policy for a foolish sovereign in the midst of crafty and unscrupulous adversaries. (December 13, 1491.)

Ferdinand replied by calling on Henry VII. to fulfill his engagements and invade France. Henry accordingly, on the 1st of October, 1492, landed an army at Calais, and marched on Boulogne; while Ferdinand, without striking a blow either for Spain or for England, took advantage of the English expedition to extort from the fears and folly of Charles VIII. the favorable conditions of peace and alliance that were embodied in the celebrated Convention which was signed at Barcelona on the 19th of January, 1493. By this instrument it was provided that each of the high contracting parties should mutually aid each other against all enemies, the Vicar of Christ alone excepted, that the Spanish sovereigns should not enter into an alliance with any other power, to the prejudice of the interests of France, and finally, that the coveted provinces of Roussillon and Cerdagne, whose recovery had long been one of the chief objects of Ferdinand’s ambition, should be immediately handed over to Spain.

The services of England being no longer needed by the peninsular sovereigns, Ferdinand abruptly broke off all further negotiations with Henry VII.; the signatures of Ferdinand and Isabella to the treaty which had already been ratified were disposed of by the simple but effective expedient of cutting them out of the parchment with a pair of scissors; and the contract of marriage between Arthur, Prince of Wales, and the Infanta Catharine--having served its immediate diplomatic purpose--was removed, for the time being,[7] from the sphere of practical politics.

It is sufficiently characteristic of both parties, that in the treaty of Barcelona, between Charles and Ferdinand, Naples, the true objective of the young king of France, was not even mentioned. Ferdinand, well content with the immediate advantages obtained by the treaty, was by no means imposed upon by such vain reticence, while Charles, pluming himself upon the success of his diplomacy in his treaties with England, with Spain, and with the empire, looked forward to establishing himself without opposition on the throne of Naples, on his way to assume the Imperial purple at Constantinople.

The kingdom of Naples, on the death of Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon, had passed, we have already seen, to his illegitimate son Ferdinand, who proved to be a tyrant of the worst Italian type, worthless, contemptible and uninteresting. To expel this hated monarch, for whom not one of his Neapolitan subjects would have been found to strike a blow in anger, seemed but a chivalrous and agreeable pastime to the vain and ignorant youth who had succeeded Louis XI. upon the throne of France. His more experienced neighbors indeed smiled with some satisfaction at his presumption. Yet, strange to say, the judgment of the vain and ignorant youth was just; and the wise men, who ridiculed his statesmanship, and scoffed at his military ineptitude, were doomed to great and astounding disappointment.

Before the French preparations for the invasion of Italy were fairly completed, in the early spring of 1494, Ferdinand of Naples died, and was succeeded by his son Alfonso I., the cousin-german of Ferdinand of Aragon. This change of rulers altered in no way the wild schemes of Charles of France, nor, although the new king of Naples was far less odious than his father had been in his own dominions, did it make any important change in the condition of Italian politics. By the month of June, 1494, the French preparations were so far advanced that Charles judged it opportune to acquaint his Spanish allies with his designs on Naples, and to solicit their active co-operation in his undertaking.

That Ferdinand should, under any possible circumstances, have been found to spend the blood and treasure of Spain in assisting any neighbor, stranger, or ally, in any enterprise, without direct advantage to himself, was a supposition entirely extravagant. But that he should assist a feather-headed Frenchman to dispossess a son of Aragon of a kingdom from which his own ancestors had thrice driven a French pretender, and where, if any change were to be made in the sovereignty, his own rights of succession were far superior to the shadowy claims derived from the hated Angevins: this was a thing so grotesquely preposterous that it is hard to suppose that even Charles of France should have regarded it as being within the bounds of possibility. Ferdinand contented himself for the moment with expressions of astonishment and offers of good advice, while Charles pushed forward his preparations for the invasion of Italy. Don Alfonso de Silva, dispatched by the court of Spain as a special envoy, came up with the French army at Vienne, on the Rhone, toward the end of June, 1494. But he was instructed rather to seek, than to convey, intelligence of any sort; nor was it to be supposed that his grave remonstrances or his diplomatic warnings should have had much effect upon the movements of an army that was already on the march.

In August, 1494, thirty thousand men, hastily equipped, yet well provided with the new and dreadful weapon that was then first spoken of as a cannon, crossed the Alps, and prepared to fight their way to Naples. But no enemy appeared to oppose their progress. The various States of Italy, jealous of one another, if not actually at war, were unable or unwilling to combine against the invader; the roads were undefended; the troops fled; the citizens of the isolated cities opened their gates, one after the other, at the approach of the strange and foreign invader. The French army, in fine, after a leisurely promenade militaire through the heart of Italy, marched unopposed into Rome on the last day of the year 1494.

Ferdinand and Isabella had, in the first instance, offered no serious opposition to the French enterprise, which appeared to them to be completely impracticable; and they had awaited with diplomatic equanimity the apparently inevitable disaster, which, without the loss of a single Spanish soldier or the expenditure of a single maravedi, would at once have served all the purposes of Ferdinand, and permitted him to maintain his reputation for goodwill toward Charles, which might have been useful in future negotiations. The astonishing success of the French invasion took the Spanish sovereigns completely by surprise, and it became necessary for Ferdinand to adopt, without haste, but with prudent promptitude, a new policy at once toward France and toward the various parties in Italy.

The boldest and the most capable of all the sovereigns of Italy, in these trying times, was the Spanish Pontiff, who by a singular fate has been made, as it were, the whipping boy for the wickedness of nineteen centuries of popes at Rome, and who is known to every schoolboy and every scribbler as the infamous Alexander VI. Roderic Lenzuoli, or Llançol, was the son of a wealthy Valencian gentleman, by Juana, a sister of the more distinguished Alfonso Borja, bishop of his native city of Valencia.

Born at Valencia about 1431, Roderic gave evidence from his earliest years of a remarkable strength of character, and of uncommon intellectual powers. While still a youth, he won fame and fortune as an advocate. But his impatient nature chafed at the moderate restraint of a lawyer’s gown; and he was on the point of adopting a military career, when the election of his uncle to the Supreme Pontificate as Calixtus III. in 1455 opened for him the way to a more glorious future. At the instance of the new Pope, Roderic adopted his mother’s name, in the Italian form already so well known and distinguished at the court of Rome, and taking with him his beautiful mistress, Rosa Vanozza, whose mother he had formerly seduced, he turned his back upon his native Valencia, and sought the fortune that awaited him at the capital of the world.

Unusually handsome in person, vigorous in mind and body, masterful, clever, eloquent, unscrupulous, absolutely regardless of all laws, human or divine, in the gratification of his passions and the accomplishment of his designs, Roderic, the Pope’s nephew, was a man made for success in the society in which he was to find himself at Rome. On his arrival at the Papal court in 1456 he was received with great kindness by his uncle, and was soon created Archbishop of Valencia, Cardinal of St. Nicholas _in Carcere Tulliano_, and Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church. On the death of Calixtus in 1458, the Cardinal Roderic Borgia sank into comparative insignificance; and during the reigns of Pius II., Paul II., Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII. we hear little of him but that he was distinguished for his amours, for his liberality in the disposal of his fortune, and for his attention to public business. Having thus secured the goodwill of many of the cardinals and the affection of the Roman people, he had no difficulty, on the death of Innocent VIII. in July, 1492, in making a bargain with a majority of the members of the Sacred College, in accordance with which he was elected Pope, and took the title of Alexander VI. on the 26th of August, 1492.

His election was received by the Roman people with the utmost satisfaction, and celebrated with all possible demonstrations of joy. His transcendent abilities and his reckless methods could not fail to render him obnoxious to his companions and his rivals in Italy; but it is due rather to his foreign origin, his Valencian independence of character, and above all his insolent avoidance of hypocrisy in the affairs of his private life, that he has been made a kind of ecclesiastical and Papal scapegoat, a Churchman upon whose enormous vices Protestant controversialists are never tired of dilating, and whose private wickedness is ingenuously admitted by Catholic apologists as valuable for the purposes of casuistic illustration, as the one instance of a divinely infallible judge whose human nature yet remained mysteriously impure, and whose personal or individual actions may be admitted to have been objectively blamable.

To measure the relative depths of human infamy is an impossible as well as an ungrateful task. It is not given to mortals to know the secrets of the heart. But bad as Alexander undoubtedly was, he was possibly no worse than many of his contemporaries in the Consistory, less wicked than some of his predecessors at the Vatican. The guilt of greater and more vigorous natures passes for superlative infamy with the crowd; but when dispassionately compared with that of his immediate predecessors, Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII., the character of Alexander VI. is in almost every respect less flagitious and more admirable.

So unblushing was the venality of the Holy See in the fourteenth century that sacred dialecticians and jurists of high authority were found seriously to argue that the Pope was not subjectively capable of committing the offense of Simony. It might have been contended with equal justice that in every other respect he was at once above, or without, the scope of the entire moral law. Nor can it be said that the fifteenth century brought any serious amendment.

From the death of Benedict XI., in 1303, to the death of Alexander VI., in 1503, the night was dark before the inevitable dawn; and in every phase of human depravity, in every development of human turpitude, in arrogance, in venality, in cruelty, in licentiousness, medieval Popes may be found pre-eminent among contemporary potentates. Thus, if the wickedness of Alexander was extravagant, it was by no means unparalleled, even among the Popes of a single century. His cruelty was no greater than that of Urban VI., or of Clement VII., or of John XXII. His immorality was, at least, more human than that of Paul II. and of Sixtus IV., nor were his amours more scandalous than those of Innocent VIII. His sacrilege was less dreadful than that of Sixtus IV. His covetousness could hardly have exceeded that of Boniface IX.; his arrogance was less offensive than that of Boniface VIII. If he was unduly subservient to Ferdinand and Isabella in his toleration of the enormities of Torquemada, his necessities as an Italian sovereign rendered the Spanish alliance a matter of capital importance. As a civil potentate and as a politician, he was not only wiser, but far less corrupt than Sforza, less rapacious than Ferdinand, more constant than Maximilian of Germany, less reckless than Charles of France. His administrative ability, his financial enlightenment, his energy as regards public works, were no less remarkable than his personal liberality, his affability, and his courage. His division of the New World by a stroke of the pen was an assumption of imperial power which was at least justified by the magnitude of its success. As he sat in his palace on the Mons Vaticanus, he was the successor, not of Caligula, but of Tiberius--not of Commodus, but of Diocletian.

Of the misfortunes of his eldest son, created by Ferdinand Duke of Gandia; of the wickedness of his second son, the fifteenth century Cæsar, who succeeded his father as Cardinal Archbishop of Valencia; of the profligacy of his daughter, so unhappily named Lucretia; of the marriage of his youngest son Geoffrey to a daughter of Alfonso of Naples, as a part of the treaty of alliance between the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the States of the Church, in 1494; of the alliance between Alexander and Bajazet, and the poisoning of the Sultan’s brother, Zem, after thirteen years’ captivity, on receipt of an appropriate fee; of the elevation of a facile envoy to the full rank of Cardinal, to please the Grand Turk; of all these things nothing need be said in this place.

We are more immediately concerned to know that on New Year’s Day, 1495, Pope Alexander VI., a refugee, if not actually a prisoner, in the Castle of St. Angelo, was fain to accept the terms that were imposed upon him by the victorious Frenchmen--masters for the nonce of Italy and of Rome.

As Charles VIII. was marching through Italy, and was approaching, all unopposed, the sacred city of Rome, Alexander VI., anxious at all hazards to obtain the assistance of his countrymen in the hour of danger, had sent an envoy to the Spanish court representing the critical state of affairs in Italy, assuring the king and queen of his constant goodwill, in spite of certain disputes as to the Papal authority in Spain, and conveying to them, with other less substantial favors, the grant of the Tercias, or two-ninths of the tithes throughout all the dominions of Castile, an impost which, until the middle of the present century, formed a part of the revenues of the Spanish monarchy. He also conceded to the Spanish crown the right of dominion over the whole of northern Africa, except Fez, which had been given to the King of Portugal.

A projected marriage between the Duke of Calabria, eldest son of the King of Naples, and the Infanta Maria, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, served to give the King of Spain an opportunity for negotiating with the Neapolitan court; and Ferdinand at the same time dispatched the celebrated Garcilaso de la Vega as his embassador, with instructions to return the most comforting assurances to the Pope at Rome. Yet he refrained from making any definite promises, or from committing himself to any definite policy. He was not a man to do anything rashly; and he preferred to await the course of events. Meanwhile, having sent a second mission from Guadalajara to the French court or camp, with good advice for his young friend and ally Charles VIII., Ferdinand betook himself with Isabella to Madrid, where the Spanish sovereigns devoted themselves to the preparation and equipment of an army to be dispatched at an opportune moment to any part of Italy where subsequent events might render its presence necessary. As, for various reasons, it was impossible that either Ferdinand or Isabella should accompany their army abroad, it became necessary to select a general. Among all the skillful leaders and gallant knights who had signalized themselves in the wars of Granada, it was somewhat difficult to decide upon a commander. But Isabella had never lost sight of Gonsalvo de Cordova, in whom she discerned traces of rare military talent; and from the moment the Sicilian expedition was planned she determined that he should be captain-general of the royal forces. The greater experience and apparently superior claims of many who had distinguished themselves in battle against the Moors were urged by Ferdinand without avail. The command was given to Gonsalvo de Cordova.

But while the Spanish fleet, under the gallant Count of Trivento, was riding at anchor at Alicante, and Gonsalvo was preparing to embark his army on board the ships in that harbor, the Spanish sovereigns dispatched a final embassy to Charles in Italy. On the 28th of January, 1495, as the king was leaving Rome on his way toward Naples, the embassadors, Juan de Albion and Antonio de Fonseca, arrived at the Vatican. They found Pope Alexander smarting under the humiliation of his recent treaty with the invader, and willing to assist them in any scheme for his discomfiture. They accordingly followed the French army with all speed, overtook it within a few miles of Rome, and immediately demanded an audience of Charles, even before his troops had come to a halt. They delivered up to him their credentials as he was riding along, and peremptorily required him to proceed no further toward Naples. The haughty tone of the Spaniards, as may be supposed, excited the greatest indignation in the breast of Charles and those who surrounded him; high words arose on both sides, and finally Fonseca, giving way to a simulated transport of rage, produced a copy of the once prized treaty of Barcelona, tore it to pieces, and threw down the fragments at Charles’s feet. Paul Jove seems to think that this violent and unjustifiable conduct on the part of the Spanish embassador was entirely unpremeditated; but it is certain that the whole scene had been preconcerted with either Ferdinand or the Pope. Zurita and the other chroniclers are silent on the point, but Peter Martyr in one of his letters affirms that the mutilation of the treaty in Charles’s presence was included in the secret instructions given to Fonseca by Ferdinand.

The envoys, as was expected, were promptly ordered to quit the French camp; and retiring with all speed to Rome, they hastened to transmit to Spain the earliest intelligence of the success of their mission. They were also permitted to inform their sovereigns of the new honor that had been conferred upon them by his Holiness Alexander VI., in the shape of the grant to them and to their heirs forever on the throne of Spain of the title of “Catholic Kings.”

Meanwhile Charles VIII. had reached Naples, which had at once opened its gates to the invaders, and the Castel Nuovo and the Castel d’Uovo were reduced to submission by their well-served artillery. King Alfonso abdicated the crown, and Fabricio Colonna ravaged the whole kingdom of Naples to the very gates of Brindisi, dispersing the little band of troops that had been collected by Don Cæsar of Aragon, illegitimate brother of the king; while Perron dei Baschi and Stuart d’Aubigny overran the whole country almost without striking a blow; and the greater part of the Neapolitan nobility gave their adhesion to the French. Nothing, however, could be more impolitic or more ungrateful than the manner in which Charles made use of his unexpectedly acquired authority, and it soon became evident that the new state of affairs in Naples would not be of very long duration. The moment for the judicious interference of Ferdinand of Aragon had not been long in arriving.

The conduct of the French at Naples showed pretty clearly to the Italian States the mistake they had made in permitting Charles to enter the country, and they were not slow to accept the suggestions of the Spanish embassador, Don Lorenzo Suarez de Mendoza y Figueras, that they should form a league with the object of expelling the French from Italy. The attitude of the Duke of Orleans, who had remained at Asti, toward the duchy of Milan, and the favorable reception accorded by Charles to Giovanni Trivulzio, Cardinal Fregosi, and Hybletto dei Fieschi, the chiefs of the banished nobles, and the sworn enemies of Ludovico Sforza, showed that prince how little he had to expect from the French alliance; and the conduct of Charles toward the Florentines, and indeed toward every government whose dominion he had traversed throughout Italy, terrified and enraged every statesman from Milan to Syracuse.

The envoys of the various states assembled at Venice. The deliberations in the council chamber were brief and decisive; and such was the secrecy with which the negotiations were conducted that the astute statesman and historian Philip de Commines, who then represented France at the court of Venice, remained ignorant that any league or convention was even contemplated by the various powers, until he was informed by the Doge Agostino Barberigo, on the morning of the 1st of April, 1495, that the treaty had been signed on the previous day. The avowed objects of this Most Holy League, which was entered into by Spain, Austria, Venice, Milan and the Court of Rome, were the recovery of Constantinople from the Turks, and the protection of the interests of the Church; but the secret articles of the treaty, as may be supposed, went much further, and provided that Ferdinand should employ the Spanish armament, now on its way to Sicily, in re-establishing his kinsman on the throne of Naples; that a Venetian fleet of forty galleys should attack the French positions on the Neapolitan coasts, that the Duke of Milan, the original summoner, should expel the French from Asti, and blockade the passage of the Alps, so as to prevent the arrival of further re-enforcements, and that the Emperor and the King of Spain should invade France on their respective frontiers, while the expense of all these warlike operations should be defrayed by subsidies from the allies. The Sultan Bajazet II., though not included in the League, offered, and was permitted, to assist the Venetians both by sea and land against the French. Thus we see the strange spectacle of the Pope and the Grand Turk--the Prince of Christendom and the Prince of Islam--united against the first Christian Power of Europe, under the leadership of The Most Christian King.

Within six weeks of the signature of this important treaty, Charles VIII. of France had caused himself to be crowned at Naples, with extraordinary pomp, not only as king, but as emperor; and, having thus gratified his puerile vanity, he abandoned his fantastic empire, and flying from the dangers that threatened him in Italy he returned to Paris. His army in Naples was intrusted to his cousin, Gilbert de Bourbon, Duc de Montpensier, who was invested with the title of viceroy, and instructed by the fugitive king to maintain his position in the country against all opponents.

It is not within the scope of this history to give any detailed account of the retreat of the French through Italy, of the wonderful passage of the Apennines at Pontremoli, and the still more wonderful victory of Fornovo on the Taro, when the French, whose entire force did not exceed ten thousand soldiers, completely routed the Italian army of thirty-five thousand men, under the command of Gonzago, marquis of Mantua. The French forces that remained in southern Italy were doomed to a very different fate. The command of the French army had been intrusted to the celebrated Stuart d’Aubigny, a knight of Scottish ancestry, who had been invested by Charles VIII. with the dignity of Constable of France, and who was accounted one of the most capable officers in Europe. But a greater captain than D’Aubigny was already on his way from Castile, who was in a single campaign to restore the reputation of the Spanish infantry to the proud position which they had once occupied in the armies of ancient Rome.

Landing at Reggio in Calabria, on the 26th of May, 1495, with a force of all arms not exceeding five thousand fighting men, Gonsalvo de Cordova speedily possessed himself of that important base of operations, established himself on the coast, captured several inland towns, was victorious in many skirmishes, and would soon have overrun the whole of Calabria, had not the rashness of Frederic, the young king of Naples, who had succeeded but a few months before to the crown which Alfonso had abdicated after a reign of less than one year, led to a disastrous check at Seminara. But Gonsalvo rapidly reorganized his army, and showing himself, like a great general, no less admirable in repairing a defeat than in taking advantage of a victory, he had kept D’Aubigny so completely in check that he had been unable even to go to the assistance of Montpensier, who was in sore straits in Naples. The citizens soon opened their gates to their lawful sovereign, and Montpensier retreated with his remaining forces to Avella, on the banks of the Lagni, twenty miles northeast of the city of Naples, whither Gonsalvo promptly marched to besiege him. Having received intelligence in the course of his march--Gonsalvo was ever well informed--that a strong body of French, with some Angevin knights and nobles, were on their way to effect a junction with D’Aubigny, he surprised them by a night attack in the fortified town of Lino, where he captured every one of the Angevin lords, no less than twenty in number, and immediately marching off to Avella with his spoils and prisoners, and an immense booty, he arrived at Frederic’s camp early in July, just thirteen months after their separation on the disastrous field of Seminara.

On hearing of Gonsalvo’s approach, the king marched out to meet him, accompanied by Cæsar Borgia, the Papal Legate, and many of the principal Neapolitan nobles and commanders, who greeted the victorious Castilian with the proud title of “The Great Captain,” by which he was already known to some of his contemporaries, and by which he has ever since been distinguished by posterity. At Avella he found a re-enforcement of five hundred Spanish soldiers, a welcome addition to his small force, which amounted on his arrival to only two thousand one hundred men, of whom six hundred were cavalry. With such an army, less numerous than a modern German regiment, did Gonsalvo overrun Calabria, out-general the most renowned French commanders, and defeat their gallant and well-disciplined forces, emboldened by uninterrupted success.

The siege operations at Avella, which had been conducted without energy by the Neapolitans, received a new impetus from the presence of the Spaniard, who displayed such skill and vigor that in a few days the French, defeated at every point, were glad to sue for terms, and on the 21st of July, 1496, signed a capitulation which virtually put an end to the war. It was meet that Gonsalvo should now pay a visit to his countryman at the Vatican, and having, on his way to Rome, delivered the town of Ostia from the dictatorship of a Basque adventurer of the name of Guerri, the last remaining hope of the French in Italy, he was received by Alexander VI. with such splendor that his entry into the city is said to have resembled rather the _triumph_ of a victorious general into ancient Rome than the visit of a modern grandee.

The streets were lined with enthusiastic crowds, the windows were filled with admiring spectators, the very tops of the houses were covered with lookers-on, as Gonsalvo marched into and through the city, preceded by bands of music, and accompanied by his victorious army. The entire garrison of Ostia, with Manuel Guerri at their head, mounted on a wretched horse, was led captive to the Vatican, where Roderic Borgia, in the full splendor of his tiara and pontifical robes, and surrounded by his cardinals, sat on his throne awaiting the coming of his victorious countryman. When Gonsalvo reached the foot of the throne, he knelt down to receive the pontifical benediction, but Alexander raised him in his arms, and presented to him the Golden Rose, the highest and most distinguished honor that a layman could receive from the hands of the sovereign Pontiff.

The Great Captain now returned to Naples, into which city he made an entry scarcely less splendid than that into Rome; and he received at the hands of Frederic more substantial honors than those of a golden rose, in the shape of the dukedom of Santangelo, with a fief of two towns and seven dependent villages in the Abruzzo. From Naples the new duke sailed for Sicily, which was then in a state of open insurrection, in consequence of the oppressive rule of Giovanni di Nuccia, the Neapolitan viceroy. By the intervention of Gonsalvo, the inhabitants were satisfied to return to their allegiance; and order was restored without the shedding of a single drop of blood. After some further services to the state, and to the cause of peace, services both diplomatic and military, in Naples, in Sicily and in Calabria, adding in every case to his reputation as a soldier and a statesman, and above all as a great Castilian gentleman, Gonsalvo returned to his native Spain, where he was received with the applause and respect that is not always granted to great men by their own sovereigns, or even by their own countrymen.

His last service to King Frederic and his people, ere he quitted the country, was no less honorable than wise. Frederic was engaged in the siege of the last city in the kingdom of Naples that refused to recognize the dominion of Aragon, the ancient and noble city of Diano, whose inhabitants, vassals of that Prince of Salerno who was attached to the Angevin cause, refused to listen to the terms which were proposed. Gonsalvo took charge of the operations; and the citizens, convinced of the hopelessness of holding out any longer against so vigorous a commander, surrendered a few days afterward at discretion. Gonsalvo, whether touched at their bravery and their forlorn condition, or merely being adverse from severity for which he saw no reason, obtained from the king favorable terms for the garrison.

The expulsion of the French from Naples put an end, as might have been supposed, to The Most Holy League. For the high contracting parties, finding themselves secure from immediate danger, conceived themselves no longer bound by its provisions. Maximilian, ever penniless and generally faithless, had made no attempt to engage in any operations on the French frontier, nor had any one of the allies contributed to defray the heavy charges incurred by the Spanish sovereigns in fulfilling their part of the agreement. The Venetians were rather occupied in securing for themselves as much of the Neapolitan territory as they could acquire, by way of indemnification for their own expenses. The Duke of Milan had already made a separate treaty with Charles VIII. Each member of the league, in fact, after the first alarm had subsided, had shown himself ready to sacrifice the common cause to his own private advantage; and Ferdinand of Aragon, who had already suspended his operations on the frontiers of Spain in October, 1496, had no difficulty in agreeing to a further truce as regarded Naples and Italy, which was signed on the 5th of March, 1497.

The Spaniards had borne the entire burden of the late war. They had been virtually abandoned by their allies, and their unassisted operations had led to the deliverance of Naples, to the safety of the Italian States, and the humiliation and the defeat of the French. Their immediate objects having been thus happily accomplished, Ferdinand and Isabella proposed to Charles VIII., without shame or hesitation, that the French and Spaniards should enter into an immediate treaty of alliance, with a view to drive out the reigning sovereign of Naples, and divide his kingdom between themselves! Meanwhile the Castilian envoy to the Holy See endeavored to induce Alexander VI. to withhold the investiture of his kingdom from Frederic, the new sovereign of Naples, on the ground that he was friendly to the Angevin party in Italy, the hereditary enemies of Spain. But Alexander paid no heed to Garcilaso de la Vega. Charles showed himself not only willing but eager to treat with Fernando de Estrada; but unwilling at once to abandon all his claims to Italian sovereignty, he offered to cede Navarre to Ferdinand, and keep all Naples to himself. Proposals and counter proposals thus passed between France and Spain; but before any definite programme had been agreed to, the negotiations were cut short by the sudden death of the French monarch, in the tennis court at Amboise, on the eve of Easter, 1498.

The success of the Spanish arms under Gonsalvo de Cordova in Italy was but the beginning of a long career of triumph. From the great victory at Seminara, in 1503, to the great defeat of Rocroy, in 1643, the Spanish infantry remained unconquered in Europe. The armies of Castile had been, indeed, as Prescott has it, “cooped up within the narrow limits of the Peninsula, uninstructed and taking little interest in the concerns of the rest of Europe.” But the soldiers and sailors of Aragon and Catalonia had fought with distinction, not only in Italy and in Sicily, but in the furthest east of Europe, for two hundred years before the Great Captain of the United Kingdom set foot on the shores of Calabria. Yet the victories of Gonsalvo were the beginning of a new era, and his life is interesting, not only as that of a brave soldier and an accomplished general, who flourished at a very important period of the history of Europe; but it is further and much more interesting as being the history of a man who united in himself many of the characteristics of ancient and modern civilization, and who himself appears as a sort of middle term between medieval and modern times.

In personal valor, in knightly courtesy, in gaudy display, he was of his own time. In astute generalship, and in still more astute diplomacy, an envoy not an adventurer, the servant and not the rival of kings, he belongs to a succeeding age, when the leader of a victorious army is prouder to be a loyal subject than a rash rebel. The Castilian lords of earlier days had ever been brave knights; their followers had ever been hardy and untiring combatants. But Gonsalvo was not only a tactician, but a strategist. The men whom he commanded were soldiers. Newly armed and admirably disciplined, the regiments were no longer the followers of some powerful nobleman; they formed a part of the national army of Spain. The short sword of their Celtiberian ancestors was once more found in their hands. The long lances of the Swiss mercenaries were adopted with conspicuous success. The drill-sergeant took the place of the minstrel in the camp.

Nor was this revolution in the art of war confined to the conduct of the Spanish troops in the field. Before the close of the campaign a national militia, or rather a standing army, had taken the place of the brave but irregular levies of medieval Spain. A royal ordinance regulated the equipment of every individual, according to his property. A man’s arms were declared free from seizure for debt, even by the Crown, and smiths and other artificers were restricted, under severe penalties, from working up weapons of war into articles of more pacific use. In 1426 a census was taken of all persons capable of bearing arms; and by an ordinance issued at Valladolid, on February 22d of the same year, it was provided that one out of every twelve inhabitants, between twenty and forty-five years of age, should be enlisted for the service of the State, whether in the conduct of a foreign war or the suppression of domestic disorder.