It will be readily conceived that trade, agriculture, and every branch of industry must have languished under the misrule of preceding reigns. In addition to pestilences a fatal shock was given to commercial credit by the adulteration of the coin. Under Henry IV it is computed that there were no less than 150 mints openly licensed by the crown, in addition to many others erected by individuals without any legal authority; and the little trade which remained in Castile was carried on by barter, as in the primitive stages of society.
The magnitude of the evil was such as to claim the earliest attention of the cortes under the new monarchs. Acts were passed, fixing the standard and legal value of the different denominations of coin. A new coinage was subsequently made. Five royal mints were alone authorised, afterwards augmented to seven, and severe penalties denounced against the fabrication of money elsewhere. The reform of the currency gradually infused new life into commerce, as the return of the circulations, which have been interrupted for a while, quickens the animal body. This was furthered by salutary laws for the encouragement of domestic industry. Internal communication was facilitated by the construction of roads and bridges. Absurd restrictions on change of residence, as well as the onerous duties which had been imposed on commercial intercourse between Castile and Aragon, were repealed. Public credit was re-established by the punctuality with which the government redeemed the debt contracted during the Portuguese war; and notwithstanding the repeal of various arbitrary imposts which enriched the exchequer under Henry IV, such was the advance of the country, under the wise economy of the present reign, that the revenue was augmented nearly sixfold between the years 1477 and 1482.
Thus released from the heavy burdens imposed on it, the spring of enterprise recovered its former elasticity. The productive capital of the country was made to flow through the various channels of domestic industry. The hills and the valleys again rejoiced in the labour of the husbandman; and the cities were embellished with stately edifices, both public and private, which attracted the gaze and commendation of foreigners. The writers of that day are unbounded in their plaudits of Isabella, to whom they principally ascribe this auspicious revolution in the condition of the country and its inhabitants, which seems almost as magical as one of those transformations in romance wrought by the hands of some benevolent fairy.
The Pre-eminence of the Royal Authority
This, which, we have seen, appears to have been the natural result of the policy of Ferdinand and Isabella, was derived quite as much from the influence of their private characters as from their public measures. Under such a sovereign, the court, which had been little better than a brothel under the preceding reign, became the nursery of virtue and generous ambition.
Isabella watched assiduously over the nurture of the high-born damsels of her court, whom she received into the royal palace, causing them to be educated under her own eye, and endowing them with liberal portions on their marriage. By these and similar acts of affectionate solicitude she endeared herself to the higher classes of her subjects, while the patriotic tendency of her public conduct established her in the hearts of the people. She possessed, in combination with the feminine qualities which beget love, a masculine energy of character which struck terror into the guilty. She enforced the execution of her own plans, oftentimes even at great personal hazard, with a resolution surpassing that of her husband. Both were singularly temperate, indeed frugal, in their dress, equipage, and general style of living; seeking to affect others less by external pomp than by the silent though more potent influence of personal qualities. On all such occasions as demanded it, however, they displayed a princely magnificence, which dazzled the multitude, and is blazoned with great solemnity in the garrulous chronicles of the day.
Thus laudable objects were gradually achieved by a course of measures equally laudable; and the various orders of the monarchy, brought into harmonious action with each other, were enabled to turn the forces which had before been wasted in civil conflict to the glorious career of discovery and conquest which it was destined to run during the remainder of the century.
No sooner had Ferdinand and Isabella restored internal tranquillity to their dominions, and made the strength effective which had been acquired by their union under one government, than they turned their eyes to those fair regions of the peninsula over which the Moslem crescent had reigned triumphant for nearly eight centuries. Fortunately, an act of aggression on the part of the Moors furnished a pretext for entering on their plan of conquest at the moment when it was ripe for execution.
Mulei Abul-Hassan, who succeeded his father in 1466, was of a very different temperament. His fiery character prompted him, when very young, to violate the truce by an unprovoked inroad into Andalusia. When, in 1476, the Spanish sovereigns required, as the condition of a renewal of the truce which he solicited, the payment of the annual tribute imposed on his predecessors, he proudly replied that the mints of Granada coined no longer gold, but steel. His subsequent conduct did not belie the spirit of this Spartan answer.
[1481-1482 A.D.]