3

The condition of the common people can readily be imagined in this perpetual strife between warlike, ambitious and unprincipled nobles, now uniting in factions which involved the whole realm in war, and now contenting themselves with assaults upon their neighbors. The land was desolated; the husbandman scarce could take heart to plant his seed, for the harvest was apt to be garnered with the sword and thrust into castles. to provision them against siege. As a writer of the period tells us, there was neither law nor justice save that of arms.1 In a letter describing the universal anarchy, written by Hernando del Pulgar from Madrid, in 1473, he says that for more than five years there has been no communication from Murcia, where the family of Fajardo reigned supreme-it is, he says, as foreign a land as Navarre. That the roads were unsafe for trade or travel was a matter of course; every petty hidalgo converted his stronghold into a den of robbers, and what these left was swept away by bands of Free Companions. Disorder reigned supreme and all-pervading. The crown was powerless and the royal treasury exhausted. Improvident grants of lands and revenues and jurisdictions, to bribe the treacherous fidelity of faithless nobles, or to gratify worthless favorites, were made, till there was nothing left to give, and then Henry IV bestowed licenses for private mints, until there were a hundred and fifty of them at work, flooding the land with base money, to the unutterable confusion of the coinage and the impoverishment of the people. The Córtes of Madrid, in 1467, and of Ocaña in 1469, called on Henry to resume his improvident grants, and those of Madrigal, in 1476, repeated the urgency to Ferdinand and Isabella, who had been forced to follow his example. To this the sovereigns replied thanking the Córtes and postponing the matter. They did not feel themselves strong enough until 1480, when at the Córtes of Toledo, they resumed thirty million maravedís of revenue which had been alienated during

(Memorial histórico español, T. VI, pp. 123, 126).-Hernando del Pulgar, Crónica, P. 1, cap. lxxxiii.

1 Maldonado, op. cit., pp. 23, 52, 71, 73.

2 Clemencin, Elógio de Doña Isabel, p. 127.

3 Castillo, Crónica de Enrique IV, cap. cliii.

* Pulgar, Claros Varones de España (Elzevir, 1670, p. 6).—Castillo, op. cit. cap. cxliii.-Saez, Monedas de Enrique IV, pp. 3, 7, 23 (Madrid, 1805). At the Córtes of Segovia, in 1471, Henry ordered the destruction of all the private mints,

the troubles, and this after an investigation which left untouched the gifts to loyal subjects and only withdrew such as had been extorted. Respect for the crown had fallen as low as its revenues. A story told of the Count of Benavente shows how difficult it was, even after the accession of Isabella, for the nobles to recognize that they owed any obedience to the sovereign. He was walking with the queen when a woman came weeping and begging justice, saying that he had had her husband slain in spite of a royal safe-conduct. She showed the letter which her husband had carried in his breast, pierced by the blow which had ended his life, when the count jeeringly remarked "A cuirass would have been of more service." Piqued by this Isabella said Count do you then not wish there was no king in Castile?" Rather," said he, "I wish there were many." "And why?" "Because then I should be one of them."2

In such a chaos of lawless passion it is not to be supposed that the Church was better than the nobles who filled its high places with worthless scions of their stocks, or than the lower classes of the laity who sought in it provision for a life of idleness and licence. The primate of Castile was the Archbishop of Toledo, who was likewise ex officio chancellor of the realm and whose revenues were variously estimated at from eighty to a hundred thousand ducats, with patronage at his disposal amounting to a hundred thousand more. The occupant of this exalted position, at the accession of Isabella, was Alonso Carrillo, a turbulent prelate,

3

but it is not likely that he was obeyed (Córtes de Leon y de Castilla, III, 830, Madrid, 1866). Garcia López de Salazar, a contemporary, tells us that the gold Enriques were originally 234 carats fine, but those struck in the royal mints gradually fell to seven carats, while the private mints made them what they pleased. -Saez, p. 418.

Spanish coinage is an intricate subject, and as some knowledge of it is necessary for the proper understanding of sums of money referred to hereafter, I have given a brief account of it in the Appendix.

1 Córtes de los antiguos Reinos de Leon y de Castilla, IV, 59-68.-Novisima Recopilacion, Lib. 1, Tit. v, ley 10, 11.-Barrantes, Ilustraciones de la Casa de Niebla, Lib. VIII, cap. xxii.-Garibay, Compendio Historial, Lib. xvIII, cap. xvi.-Don Clemencin (op. cit. p. 146).

At the death of Henry IV, in 1474, the royal revenue had fallen to about ten million maravedís. By 1477 it increased to 27,415,626, by 1482 to 150,695,288, and in 1504, at the death of Isabella, it was 341,733,597.-Clemencin, p. 153. 2 Miscelánea de Zapata (Mem. hist. español, T. XI, p. 332).

L. Marinæus Siculus de Reb. Hispan. (R. Beli Rer. Hispan. Scriptt, p. 774). -Damiani a Goes Hispania (Ibid. p. 1237).

delighting in war, foremost in all the civil broils of the period, who, not content with the immense income of his see, lavished extravagant sums in alchemy. Hernando del Pulgar, in a letter of remonstrance, said to him, "The people look to you as their bishop and find in you their enemy; they groan and complain that you use your authority not for their benefit and reformation but for their destruction; not as an exemplar of kindness and peace but for corruption, scandal, and disturbance." When, in 1495, the puritan Ximenes was appointed to the archbishopric, one of his first acts is said to have been the removal, from near the altar of the Franciscan church of Toledo, of a magnificent tomb which Carrillo had erected to his bastard, Troilo Carrillo.1

His successor in the see of Toledo has a special interest for us in view of his labors to purify the faith which culminated in establishing the Inquisition. Pero González de Mendoza was one of the notable men of the day, whose influence with Ferdinand and Isabella won for him the name of "the third king." While yet a child he held the curacy of Hita; at twelve he had the archdeaconry of Guadalajara, one of the richest benefices in Spain, which he retained during the successive bishoprics of Calahorra and Sigüenza and the archbishopric of Seville; the see of Sigüenza he kept during the whole tenure successively of the archiepiscopates of Seville and Toledo, in addition to which he was a cardinal and titular Patriarch of Alexandria. With his kindred of the powerful house of Mendoza he adhered to Henry IV, until they effected the sale of the hapless Beltraneja, who was in their hands, to her father, Henry, for certain estates and the title of Duke del Infantado for Diego Hurtado, the head of the family, after which Pero González and his kinsmen promptly transferred their allegiance to Isabella. His admiring biographer assures us that he was more ready with his hands than with his tongue, that he was a gallant knight and that there was never a war in Spain during his time in which he did not personally take part or at least have his troops engaged. Though he had no leisure

1 Pulgar, Claros Varones, Tit. xx; Letras No. iii.-Fléchier, Histoire du Cardinal Ximenes, II, 291 (Ed. 1693).

The Córtes of Toledo, in 1462, among their grievances, include the factious turbulence of the clergy-"bien sabe vuestra alteza commo algunos obispos e abades e otras eclesiasticas personas se han fecho y de cada dia se fazen de vandos, e algunos dellos tanto e mas escandalizan vuestras cibdades e villas que los legos dellas."-Córtes de Leon y de Castilla, III, 711 (Madrid, 1866).

to attend to his spiritual duties, he found time to yield to the temptations of the flesh. When, in 1484, he led the army of invasion into Granada he took with him his bastard, Rodrigo de Mendoza, a youth of twenty, who was already Señor del Castillo del Cid, and who, in 1492, was created Marquis of Cenete on the occasion of his marriage, amid great rejoicings, in the presence of Ferdinand and Isabella, to Leonor de la Cerda, daughter and heiress of the Duke of Medina Celi and niece of Ferdinand himself. This was not the only evidence of his frailty of which he took no shame, for he had another son named Juan, by a lady of Valladolid, who was married to Doña Ana de Aragon, another niece of Ferdinand.1

With such men at the head of the Church it is not to be expected that the lower orders of the clergy should be models of decency and morality, rendering Christianity attractive to Jew and Moslem. Alonso Carrillo, the archbishop of Toledo, can scarce be regarded as a strict disciplinarian, but even he felt obliged, when holding the council of Aranda in 1473, to endeavor to repress the more flagrant scandals of the clergy. As a corrective of their prevailing ignorance it was ordered that in future none should be ordained who could not speak Latin-the language of the ritual and the foundation of all instruction, theological and otherwise. They were forbidden to wear silk or gaily colored garments. As their licentiousness rendered them contemptible to the people, they were commanded to part with their concubines within two months. As their fondness for dicing led to perjuries, scandals and homicides, they were required thereafter to abstain from it, privately as well as publicly. As many priests disdained to celebrate mass, they were ordered to do so at least four times a year; bishops, moreover, were urged to celebrate at least thrice a year, under pain of severe penalties to be determined at the next council. The absurdities poured forth in their sermons by wandering priests and friars were to be repressed by requiring examinations prior to issuing licenses to preach, and the scandals of the pardonsellers were to be diminished by subjecting them to the bishops. The bishops were also urged to make severe examples of offenders in the lower orders of the clergy, when delivered to them by the

1 Francisco de Medina, Vida del Cardenal Mendoza (Mem. hist. español, T. VI, pp. 156, 190, 193-4, 255, 293-4, 297, 304).

secular courts, and not to allow their enormities to enjoy continued immunity. The bishops, moreover, were commanded to make no charge for conferring ordinations; they were exhorted, and all other clerics were required, not to lead a dissolute military life or to enter the service of secular lords excepting of the king and princes of the blood. As duels were forbidden, both laity and clergy were warned that if slain in such encounters they would be refused Christian burial. That this effort at reform was, as might be expected, wholly abortive is evidenced from the description of the vices of the ecclesiastical body when Ferdinand and Isabella subsequently endeavored to correct its more flagrant scandals. It was wholly secularized and only to be distinguished from the laity by the sacred functions which rendered its vices more abhorrent, by the immunities which fostered and stimulated those vices and by the intolerance which, blind to all aberrations of morals, proclaimed the stake to be the only fitting punishment for aberration in the faith. While powerless to reform itself it yet had influence enough to educate the people up to its standard of orthodoxy in the ruthless persecution of all whom it pleased to designate as enemies of Christ.

Yet in Spain the immunities and privileges of the Church were less than elsewhere throughout Christendom. The independence which the secular power in Castile had always manifested toward the Holy See and its disregard of the canon law are points which will occasionally inanifest themselves hereafter and are worthy of a moment's consideration here. I have elsewhere shown that, alone among the Latin nations, Castile steadily refused to admit the medieval Inquisition and disregarded completely the prescriptions of the Church regarding heresy. the twelfth century the popular feeling toward the papacy is voiced in the ballads of the Cid. When a demand for tribute to the Emperor Henry IV is said to be made through the pope, Ruy Diaz advises King Fernando to send a defiance from both of them to the pope and all his party, which the monarch accordingly does. So when the Cid accompanies his master to a great

In

1 Concil. Arandens. ann. 1473, cap. 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 25 (Aguirre, V, 344-50).

2 L. Marinæi Siculi de Rebus Hispan. Lib. XIX.-Raynald. Annal. ann. 1483, n. 15; ann. 1485, n. 26.

S History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, Vol. II, pp. 180 sqq.