ing population and organizing conquered frontiers, which subsequently became inland, led to granting improvidently liberal franchises to settlers, which weakened the powers of the crown,1 without building up, as in France, a powerful Third Estate to serve as a counterpoise to the nobles and eventually to undermine feudalism. In Spain the business of the Castilian was war. The arts of peace were left with disdain to the Jews and the conquered Moslems, known as Mudéjares, who were allowed to remain on Christian soil and to form a distinct element in the population. No flourishing centres of industrious and independent burghers arose out of whom the kings could mould a body that should lend them efficient support in their struggles with their powerful vassals. The attempt, indeed, was made; the Córtes, whose co-operation was required in the enactment of laws, consisted of representatives from seventeen cities, who while serving enjoyed personal inviolability, but so little did the cities prize this privilege that, under Henry IV, they complained of the expense of sending deputies. The crown, eager to find some new sources of influence, agreed to pay them and thus obtained an excuse for controlling their election, and although this came too late for Henry to benefit by it, it paved the way for the assumption of absolute domination by Ferdinand and Isabella, after which the revolt of the Comunidades proved fruitless. Meanwhile their influence diminished, their meetings were scantily attended and they became little more than an instrument which, in the interminable strife that cursed the land, was used alternately by any faction as opportunity offered.3

The crown itself had contributed greatly to its own abasement. When, in the thirteenth century, a ruler such as San Fernando III. made the laws respected and vigorously extended the bound

1 See, for instance, the charter granted by Raymond Berenger IV of Barcelona, in 1108, to Olerdula, after a devastating Saracen inroad, and the charter of Lérida in 1148, after its capture from the Moors.-Marca Hispanica, pp. 1233, 1305. The same causes were operative in Castile.

The cities entitled to send procurators to the Córtes were Burgos, Leon, Ávila, Segovia, Zamora, Toro, Salamanca, Soria, Murcia, Cuenca, Toledo, Seville, Córdova, Jaen, Valladolid, Madrid and Guadalajara.-Pulgar, Crónica, P. II, cap. xcv.

' Marina, Teoria de las Córtes, P. 1, cap. xvi, xx. (Madrid, 1820.).—Siete Partidas, P. II, Tit. xvi, ley 4.-Modesto de Lafuente, Hist. Gen. de España, IX, 34.-J. Bernays, Zur inneren Entwicklung Castiliens (Deutsche Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 1889, pp. 381 sqq.).

aries of Christianity, Castile gave promise of development in power and culture which miserably failed in the performance. In 1282 the rebellion of Sancho el Bravo against his father Alfonso was the commencement of decadence. To purchase the allegiance of the nobles he granted them all that they asked, and to avert the discontent consequent on taxation he supplied his treasury by alienating the crown lands. Notwithstanding the abilities of the regent, María de Molina, the successive minorities of her son and grandson, Fernando IV and Alfonso XI, stimulated the downward progress, although the vigor of the latter in his maturity restored in some degree the lustre of the crown and his stern justice re-established order, so that, as we are told, property could be left unguarded in the streets at night. His son, Don Pedro, earned the epithet of the Cruel by his ruthless endeavor to reduce to obedience his turbulent nobles, whose disaffection invited the usurpation of his bastard brother, Henry of Trastamara. The throne which the latter won by fratricide and the aid of the foreigner, he could only hold by fresh concessions to his magnates which fatally reduced the royal power. This heritage he left to his son, Juan I, who forcibly described, in the Córtes of Valladolid in 1385, how he wore mourning in his heart because of his powerlessness to administer justice and to govern as he ought, in consequence of the evil customs which he was unable to correct. This depicts the condition of the monarchy during the century intervening between the murder of Pedro and the accession of Isabella-a dreary period of endless revolt and civil strife, during which the central authority was steadily growing less able to curb the lawless elements tending to eventual anarchy. The king was little more than a puppet of which rival factions sought to gain possession in order to cover their ambitions with a cloak of legality, and those which failed to secure his person treated his authority with contempt, or set up some rival in a son or brother as an excuse for rebellion. The work of the Reconquest which, for six hundred years, had been the leading object

1 Crónica de Don Alfonso X, cap. clxxvi.-Barrantes, Ilustraciones de la Casa de Niebla, Lib. 1, cap. xiv (Memorial histórico español, VIII).

2 Crónica de Don Alfonso XI, cap. lxxx.-Barrantes, op. cit. Lib. 1, cap. xxvi, lxxx.

⚫ Córtes de los antiguos Reinos de Leon y de Castilla, II, 330 (Madrid, 1863).

of national pride was virtually abandoned, save in some spasmodic enterprise, such as the capture of Antequera, and the little kingdom of Granada, apparently on the point of extinction under Alfonso XI, seemed destined to perpetuate for ever on Spanish soil the hateful presence of the crescent.

The long reign of the feeble Juan II, from 1406 to 1454, was followed by that of the feebler Henry IV, popularly known as El Impotente. In the Seguro de Tordesillas, in 1439, the disaffected nobles virtually dictated terms to Juan II. In the Deposition of Ávila, in 1465, they treated Henry IV with the bitterest contempt. His effigy, clad in mourning and adorned with the royal insignia, was placed upon a throne and four articles of accusation were read. For the first he was pronounced unworthy of the kingly station, when Alonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, removed the crown; for the second he was deprived of the administration of justice, when Álvaro de Zuñiga, Count of Plasencia, took away the sword; for the third he was deprived of the government, when Rodrigo Pimentel, Count of Benavente, struck the sceptre away; for the fourth he was sentenced to lose the throne, when Diego López de Zuñiga tumbled the image from its seat with an indecent gibe. It was scarce more than a continuation of the mockery when they elected as his successor his brother Alfonso, a child eleven years of age.2

The lawless independence of the nobles and the effacement of the royal authority may be estimated from a single example. At Plasencia two powerful lords, Garcí Alvárez de Toledo, Señor of Oropesa, and Hernan Rodríguez de Monroy, kept the country in an uproar with their armed dissension. Juan II sent Ayala, Señor of Cebolla, with a royal commission to suppress the disorder. Monroy, in place of submitting, insulted Ayala, who as a "buen caballero" disdained to complain to the king and preferred to avenge himself. Juan on hearing of this summoned to his presence Monroy, who collected all his friends and retainers and set out with a formidable army. Ayala made a similar levy and set upon him as he passed near Cebolla. There was a desperate battle in which Ayala was worsted and forced to take refuge in Cebolla, while Monroy passed on to Toledo

1 Seguro de Tordesillas, Madrid, 1784.

' Castillo, Crónica de Enrique IV, cap. lxxiv.-Valera, Memorial de diversas Hazañas, cap. xxviii.—Pulgar, Crónica, p. 3 (Ed. 1780).

and, when he kissed the king's hands, Juan told him that he had sent for him to cut off his head, but as Ayala had preferred to right himself he gave Monroy a God-speed on his journey home and washed his hands of the whole affair.1

The ricosomes who thus were released from all the restraint of law had as little respect for those of honor and morality. The virtues which we are wont to ascribe to chivalry were represented by such follies as the celebrated Passo Honroso of Suero de Quiñones, when that knight and his nine comrades, in 1434, kept, in honor of their ladies, for thirty days against all comers, the pass of the Bridge of Orbigo, at the season of the feast of Santiago and sixty-nine challengers presented themselves in the lists. With exceptions such as this, and a rare manifestation of magnanimity, as when the Duke of Medina Sidonia raised an army and hastened to the relief of his enemy, Rodrigo Ponce de Leon besieged in Alhama,3 the record of the time is one of the foulest treachery, from which truth and honor are absent and human nature displays itself in its basest aspect. According to contemporary belief, Ferdinand was indebted for the crown of Aragon to the poisoning of his brother, the deeply mourned Carlos, Prince of Viana, while the crown of Castile fell to Isabella through the similar taking off of her brother Alfonso.

A characteristic incident is one involving Doña María de Monroy, who married into the great house of Henríquez of Seville, and was left a widow with two boys. When the youths were respectively eighteen and nineteen years old they were close friends of two gentlemen of Seville named Mançano. The younger brother, dicing with them in their house, was involved in a quarrel with them, when they set upon him with their servants and slew him. Then, fearing the vengeance of the elder brother, they sent him a friendly message to come and play with them; when he came they led him along a dark corridor in which they suddenly turned upon him and stabbed him to death. When

1 Maldonado, Hechos de Don Alonso de Monrroy (Memorial histórico español, T. VI, p. 14).

'Juan de Pineda, El Libro del Passo Honroso, Madrid, 1784.—Pulgar, Claros Varones, Tit. xiv.

* Barrantes, Ilustraciones de la Casa de Niebla, Lib. VIII, cap. xxiv.

Valera, Memorial de diversas Hazañas, cap. xix., xl.—Amador de los Rios, Historia de los Judíos, III, 205.

the disfigured corpses of her boys were brought to Doña María she shed no tears, but the fierceness of her eyes frightened all who looked upon her. The Mançanos promptly took horse and fled to Portugal, whither Doña María followed them in male attire with a band of twenty cavaliers. Her spies were speedily on the track of the fugitives; within a month of the murders she came at night to the house where they lay concealed; the doors were broken in and she entered with ten of her men while the rest kept guard outside. The Mançanos put themselves in defence and shouted for help, but before the neighbors could assemble she had both their heads in her left hand and was galloping off with her troop, never stopping till she reached Salamanca, where she went to the church and laid the bloody heads on the tomb of her boys. Thenceforth she was known as Doña María la Brava, and her exploit led to long and murderous feuds between the Monroyes and the Mançanos.1

Doña María was but a type of the unsexed women, mugeres varoniles, common at the time, who would take the field or maintain their place in factious intrigue with as much ferocity and pertinacity as men. Ferdinand could well look without 'surprise on the activity in court and camp of his queen Isabella, when he remembered the prowess of his mother, Juana Henríquez, who had secured for him the crown of Aragon. Doña Leonora Pimentel, Duchess of Arévalo, was one of these; of the Countess of Medellin it was said that no Roman captain could get the better of her in feats of arms, and the Countess of Haro was equally noted. The Countess of Medellin, indeed, kept her own son in prison for years while she enjoyed the revenues of his town of Medellin and, when Queen Isabella refused to confirm her possession of the place, she transferred her allegiance to the King of Portugal to whom she delivered the castle of Merida. At the same time the Moorish influence, which was so strong in Castile, occasionally led to the opposite extreme. The Duke of Najera kept his daughters in such absolute seclusion that no man, not even his sons, was permitted to enter the apartments reserved for the women, and the reason he alleged-that the heart does not covet what the eye does not see-was little flattering to either sex."

1 Maldonado, Hechos de Don Alonso de Monrroy, pp. 17-19.

2 Maldonado, op. cit. pp. 65, 71, 72, 83.-Barrantes, Ilustraciones de la Casa de Niebla, Lib. VIII, cap. iii.-Hazañas valerosas de Pedro Manrique de Lara