LITMIR.BIZ

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was of the plainest kind. They were allowed meat only thrice a week, and then only one dish. They were to maintain unbroken silence at the table, in the chapel, and the dormitory; and they were enjoined both to sleep and to worship with the sword girt on their side, in token of readiness for action. In the earlier days of the institution, the spiritual, as well as the military brethren, were allowed to make part of the martial array against the infidel, until this was prohibited, as indecorous, by the Holy See. From this order branched off that of Montesa, in Valencia, which was instituted at the commencement of the fourteenth century, and continued dependent on the parent stock. [38]

      The third great order of religious chivalry in Castile was that of Alcantara, which also received its confirmation from Pope Alexander the Third, in 1177. It was long held in nominal subordination to the knights of Calatrava, from which it was relieved by Julius the Second, and eventually rose to an importance little inferior to that of its rival. [39]

      The internal economy of these three fraternities was regulated by the same general principles. The direction of affairs was entrusted to a council, consisting of the grand master and a number of the commanders (comendadores), among whom the extensive territories of the order were distributed. This council, conjointly with the grand master, or the latter exclusively, as in the fraternity of Calatrava, supplied the vacancies. The master himself was elected by a general chapter of these military functionaries alone, or combined with the conventual clergy, as in the order of Calatrava, which seems to have recognized the supremacy of the military over the spiritual division of the community, more unreservedly than that of St. James.

      These institutions appear to have completely answered the objects of their creation. In the earlier history of the Peninsula, we find the Christian chivalry always ready to bear the brunt of battle against the Moors. Set apart for this peculiar duty, their services in the sanctuary only tended to prepare them for their sterner duties in the field of battle, where the zeal of the Christian soldier may be supposed to have been somewhat sharpened by the prospect of the rich temporal acquisitions, which the success of his arms was sure to secure to his fraternity. For the superstitious princes of those times, in addition to the wealth lavished so liberally on all monastic institutions, granted the military orders almost unlimited rights over the conquests achieved by their own valor. In the sixteenth century, we find the order of St. James, which had shot up to a pre-eminence above the rest, possessed of eighty-four commanderies, and two hundred inferior benefices. This same order could bring into the field, according to Garibay, four hundred belted knights, and one thousand lances, which, with the usual complement of a lance in that day, formed a very considerable force. The rents of the mastership of St. James amounted, in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, to sixty thousand ducats, those of Alcantara to forty-five thousand, and those of Calatrava to forty thousand. There was scarcely a district of the Peninsula which was not covered with their castles, towns, and convents. Their rich commanderies gradually became objects of cupidity to men of the highest rank, and more especially the grand-masterships, which, from their extensive patronage, and the authority they conferred over an organized militia pledged to implicit obedience, and knit together by the strong tie of common interest, raised their possessors almost to the level of royalty itself. Hence the elections to these important dignities came to be a fruitful source of intrigue, and frequently of violent collision. The monarchs, who had anciently reserved the right of testifying their approbation of an election by presenting the standard of the order to the new dignitary, began personally to interfere in the deliberations of the chapter. While the pope, to whom a contested point was not unfrequently referred, assumed at length the prerogative of granting the masterships in administration on a vacancy, and even that of nomination itself, which, if disputed, he enforced by his spiritual thunders. [40]

      Owing to these circumstances, there was probably no one cause, among the many which occurred in Castile during the fifteenth century, more prolific of intestine discord, than the election to these posts, far too important to be intrusted to any subject, and the succession to which was sure to be contested by a host of competitors. Isabella seems to have settled in her mind the course of policy to be adopted in this matter, at a very early period of her reign. On occasion of a vacancy in the grand-mastership of St. James, by the death of the incumbent, in 1476, she made a rapid journey on horseback, her usual mode of travelling, from Valladolid to the town of Ucles, where a chapter of the order was deliberating on the election of a new principal. The queen, presenting herself before this body, represented with so much energy the inconvenience of devolving powers of such magnitude on any private individual, and its utter incompatibility with public order, that she prevailed on them, smarting, as they were, under the evils of a disputed succession, to solicit the administration for the king, her husband. That monarch, indeed, consented to waive this privilege in favor of Alonso de Cardenas, one of the competitors for the office, and a loyal servant of the crown; but, at his decease in 1499, the sovereigns retained the possession of the vacant mastership, conformably to a papal decree, which granted them its administration for life, in the same manner as had been done with that of Calatrava in 1487, and of Alcantara in 1494. [41]

      The sovereigns were no sooner vested with the control of the military orders, than they began with their characteristic promptness to reform the various corruptions, which had impaired their ancient discipline. They erected a council for the general superintendence of affairs relating to the orders, and invested it with extensive powers both of civil and criminal jurisdiction. They supplied the vacant benefices with persons of acknowledged worth, exercising an impartiality, which could never be maintained by any private individual, necessarily exposed to the influence of personal interests and affections. By this harmonious distribution, the honors, which had before been held up to the highest bidder, or made the subject of a furious canvass, became the incentive and sure recompense of desert. [42]

      In the following reign, the grand-masterships of these fraternities were annexed in perpetuity to the crown of Castile by a bull of Pope Adrian the Sixth; while their subordinate dignities, having survived the object of their original creation, the subjugation of the Moors, degenerated into the empty decorations, the stars and garters, of an order of nobility. [43]

      IV. Vindication of ecclesiastical rights belonging to the crown from papal usurpation. In the earlier stages of the Castilian monarchy, the sovereigns appear to have held a supremacy in spiritual, very similar to that exercised by them in temporal matters. It was comparatively late that the nation submitted its neck to the papal yoke, so closely riveted at a subsequent period; and even the Romish ritual was not admitted into its churches till long after it had been adopted in the rest of Europe. [44] But, when the code of the Partidas was promulgated in the thirteenth century, the maxims of the canon law came to be permanently established. The ecclesiastical encroached on the lay tribunals. Appeals were perpetually carried up to the Roman court; and the popes, pretending to regulate the minutest details of church economy, not only disposed of inferior benefices, but gradually converted the right of confirming elections to the episcopal and higher ecclesiastical dignities, into that of appointment. [45]

      These usurpations of the church had been repeatedly the subject of grave remonstrance in cortes. Several remedial enactments had passed that body, during the present reign, especially in relation to the papal provision of foreigners to benefices; an evil of much greater magnitude in Spain than in other countries of Europe, since the episcopal demesnes, frequently covering the Moorish frontier, became an important line of national defence, obviously improper to be intrusted to the keeping of foreigners and absentees. Notwithstanding the efforts of cortes, no effectual remedy was devised for this latter grievance, until it became the subject of actual collision between the crown and the pontiff, in reference to the see of Taraçona, and afterwards of Cuenca. [46]

      Sixtus the Fourth had conferred the latter benefice, on its becoming vacant in 1482, on his nephew, Cardinal San Giorgio, a Genoese, in direct opposition to the wishes of the queen, who would have bestowed it on her chaplain, Alfonso de Burgos, in exchange for the bishopric of Cordova. An ambassador was accordingly despatched by the Castilian sovereigns to Rome, to remonstrate on the papal appointment; but without effect, as Sixtus replied, with a degree of presumption, which might better have become his predecessors of the twelfth century, that "he was head of the church, and, as such, possessed of unlimited power in the distribution of benefices, and that he was not bound to consult the inclination of any potentate on earth, any farther

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