His words are the expression of the aristocratic ideal of life in his own day. It was perhaps most nearly realized in the case of the Grand Masterships of the three great Military Orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara. These Orders had been called into existence by the crusade; but their original purpose was gradually obscured by the wealth and influence that made them the resort of the ambitious rather than of the enthusiast. Like the Monastic Orders, their members were bound by vows: obedience, community of property, strict conjugal fidelity, sometimes celibacy; but dispensations could be bought, and the gains to be reaped more than compensated for any theoretical austerities or submission.
The main canon of their creed, war against the Infidel, was readily accepted by every aspirant knight; the only drawback being that his inborn love of fighting led him to take part as well in whatever other kind of war happened to dawn on the horizon, no matter if it were against his own sovereign. How formidable this would prove for the sovereign we can imagine when we learn that in the fifteenth century the combined revenues of the Orders amounted to something like 145,000 ducats,[[1]] while the Master of Santiago could call into the field a force of four hundred fully-armed cavaliers and one thousand lances. In addition he possessed the patronage of numerous “commanderies,” rich military posts that brought with them the rents of subject towns and villages, and that were eagerly sought by the highest in the land.
[1]. “The monetary unit of Castile was the ‘maravedi,’ anciently a gold coin of value; but, in the fifteenth century, diminished to a fraction of its former estimation.”—Lea, History of Spanish Inquisition, vol. i., Appendix III.
The ducat would be worth about 374 maravedis, or about 8s. 9d. in English money.
Extreme power and privilege are often their own undoing; and from the fruits of its triumph the Castilian aristocracy was to reap a bitter harvest. Had the fight with the Crown been more strenuous and the victory less certain, the ricos-hombres or great men of the land, might have learned to combine if not with other classes at least amongst themselves; but the independence they had gained so easily they placed in jeopardy by individual selfishness and mutual distrust. It has been said with truth that it was almost impossible to persuade the mediæval Castilian noble to act with his fellows. Pride, ambition, the courage that vaunts itself in duels, the revenge that lurks, dagger-drawn, in back streets or lonely roads: these were the source of constant feuds and internecine warfare, incapable of a final settlement save by the pressure of some outside force.
Nor could the noble, who distrusted the members of his own class, rely in times of danger on the co-operation of his humbler neighbours. Believing that war was the profession of the gentleman, he despised the burgher, the artisan, and the farmer. Like the French “seigneur” he had won freedom from direct taxation as the privilege of his Order, and thus lost touch completely with the pecheros or “taxable classes.” He had appropriated the majority of the high-sounding offices of state, the Grand Constable, the Admiral of Castile, and so forth; but he valued them from the wealth or honour they conveyed, not from any sense of responsibility. The very fact that such offices had tended to become hereditary had done much to destroy their official character. An “Enriquez” was Admiral of Castile, not on account of his seamanship, nor even on the system of the modern English Cabinet because of a certain “all-round” ability to deal with public business, but because his father and grandfather had held the post before him. The ricos-hombres might, from personal motives, defy the government or nullify its measures; but in placing themselves above the law they had lost the incentive to control legislation. A world of experience, or rather a lack of it, separated them from those below, to whom edicts and ordinances were a matter of daily concern.
The Castilian Church was also in a sense above the law; for the clergy were exempt from ordinary taxation, paying to the Crown instead a small portion of their tithes. Like the nobles they could neither be imprisoned for debt nor suffer torture; while legally they came under ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and were subject only to its penalties and censures. Archbishops, bishops, and abbots, were for the most part younger sons of wealthy nobles and shared the outlook and ambitions of their class. The Castilian prelate of the early fifteenth century found it as natural to don his suit of mail and draw his sword as to celebrate Mass or hear confessions. It would not be dislike of shedding blood nor a faint heart that would distinguish him from laymen on the battlefield, but the surcoat embroidered with a cross, that he wore in deference to his profession.
The worldly character of the higher ranks of the clergy had permeated also to the lower; and vice, ignorance, and careless levity sapped the influence of the ordinary parish priest and corrupted the monasteries and convents. Here and there were signs of an awakening, but for the most part the spiritual conscience of the Castilian Church lay dormant.
Its sense of nationality on the other hand was strong; that is to say if dislike of foreign interference and strong racial prejudice deserve such a definition. Partly from very worldliness, local and provincial interests tended to predominate over any claims of a universal Church; and submission to Rome was interpreted with a jealous regard to private ambitions. The members of the episcopate, concerned in the civil wars of Henry IV.’s reign, looked on with cool indifference when a papal legate, vainly seeking to arbitrate between the armies on the eve of a battle, was forced to save his life by flight. Similarly, the Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Castile, thought little of throwing into a dungeon the candidate who, armed with letters of appointment from Rome, had dared to dispute a rich living in the diocese with his own nominee. The Pope was a convenient “King Log”; but his subjects had not the least wish for him to develop the authority of a “King Stork.”
The Castilian Church also displayed her national prejudice, as we shall see later, in her hatred and suspicion of the alien races that formed such a large element of the Spanish population. These had sunk their roots deep in the soil during the centuries of Moorish conquest when, from behind the barrier of the Asturian mountains in the far north-west, the pure Castilian alone had been able to beat back the advancing waves of Mahometanism. As he at length descended from his refuge, where the sword or the hunting-spear had been his sole means of livelihood, he might profess to despise the believers in Allah, from whom he wrested back the land of his fathers, but in practice he was glad enough to accept them as a subject race. The Moorish warriors, who fell on the battlefield or retreated southwards before their foes, left in Christian territory a large residue of the more peaceful Arabs and Berbers, willing to till the fields, work at the looms, and fulfil all those other tasks of civilized national life that the Castilian was inclined to imagine degrading to his own dignity. Left behind also were colonies of prosperous Jews, whose ancestors, hounded from every Christian court, had found a home under the tolerant rule of the caliphs of Cordova.