Directly she heard of his designs, she wrote to the Pope begging that the administration of the Order might be given into her husband’s hands. Then, having dispatched the messenger, she mounted her horse and set off at once from Valladolid, where she was staying. It was a three days’ journey to Ocaña, and when she reached that town it was already nightfall, and the rain was descending in torrents, but she refused to wait. Continuing her road to Uccles, she appeared before the astonished commanders and told them of the request she had sent to the Pope, begging them to suspend the election until she had received an answer. Don Alonso de Cardenas was not unnaturally sulky at this frustration of his ambitions; but on Isabel’s promise that she would faithfully consider his claims, he at length agreed to withdraw them temporarily, and the King in due course received the administration of the Order.
Alonso de Cardenas now redoubled his efforts to prove his loyalty; and Ferdinand and Isabel at last consented to give him his long-coveted honour; but they took care to make a favour of what he had sought as a right. Each year he paid three millions of maravedis into the royal treasury to be used for the defence of the frontier against the Moors, and on his death his office lapsed finally to the Crown.
During the course of the reign, Ferdinand also assumed the administration of the other two Orders of Calatrava and Alcantara, and thus found himself possessed not only of vastly increased revenues, but of a widely extended patronage.
The absorption of the Military Orders marked the decisive victory in the sovereigns’ war against aristocratic pretensions; but the campaign had other battles no less serious, though they did not involve such important financial considerations. If it had been a difficult matter to impress the idea of justice on the country at large, it was equally arduous to persuade the leading families of Castile that they also stood below the law and were expected to obey it.
They might surrender estates wrongly acquired, and even sink their ambitions before the claims of royalty, but to admit of arbitration in their private feuds, instead of dealing with them by the old-fashioned method of duel or assassination, was a tax on their self-control too great for Castilian pride.
On one occasion, when Queen Isabel was in Valladolid, high words broke out between Don Fadrique Enriquez, son of Ferdinand’s uncle the Admiral of Castile and a certain Ramir Nuñez de Guzman, Lord of Toral. In spite of the fact that his enemy had received a safe-conduct from the Queen, Don Fadrique attacked him in a public square, striking him several times. Isabel’s indignation was unbounded, and she at once rode to Simancas, whose fortress belonged to the Admiral, demanding either its instant surrender or that of his son. The Admiral, faced by this plain issue, dared not disobey; and, since he was ignorant of his son’s hiding-place he gave up the keys of his stronghold. Isabel then returned to Valladolid, but her anger was unappeased; and when questioned as to its cause she replied: “I am suffering from the blows that Don Fadrique hath struck at my safe-conduct.”
Not till the offender appeared himself at Court to sue for pardon would she relax her coldness to his family; and even then she refused to see him, but ordered that he should be led a prisoner through the streets and thence to a fortress at Arévalo. Here he remained in close confinement, until at his relations’ intercession he was instead exiled to Sicily, there to remain at the Queen’s pleasure.
His enemy, Ramir Nuñez de Guzman, refusing to take warning from his rival’s fate, attempted to assassinate the Admiral in revenge for the attack made on himself, as soon as he had recovered from his wounds; with the result that he was brought before the royal judges and deprived of all his goods and revenues.
Such stern but impartial justice was of the type to inspire awe, but severity alone might have defeated its own ends. The chivalry of Castile had been fostered from its cradle in scenes of war and carnage. It could not cool its hot blood suddenly to accept the discipline of what it regarded as inglorious peace. Some outlet must be found for the wild strain that looked to the rapier and the dagger rather than to books or arguments. That outlet the sovereigns provided, when they took up the challenge of the Moorish Sultan, and began again the old crusade, that was the heritage of eight hundred years.
“Master, God give you good fortune against the Moors, the enemies of Our Holy Catholic Faith.” With these words Ferdinand and Isabel had handed to the new Master of Santiago his standards, when they gave him the insignia of his Order at the Cortes of Toledo in 1480. Little over twelve months was to find those standards in the battlefield, and the nobility of Spain risking its life, not in private brawl nor a vain struggle with the law, but against the enemies of its Queen and Faith.