the walls of the ancient city of Burgo de Osma in Old Castile. They had travelled for many days by little-used paths through the mountains of Soria from the Aragonese frontier town of Tarrazona; and, impatient to gain the safe shelter of the fortress of Osma, they banged at the gates demanding admittance. The country was in anarchy. Leagues of churchmen and nobles warred against each other and preyed upon society at large. An impotent king, deposed with ignominy by one faction, had been as ignominiously set up again by another, and royal pretenders to the succession were the puppets of rival parties whose object was to monopolise for themselves all the fruits of royalty, whilst the monarch fed upon the husks. So when the new-comers called peremptorily for admittance within the gates of Osma, the guards upon the city walls, taking them for enemies or freebooters, greeted them with a shower of missiles from the catapults. One murderous stone whizzed within a few inches of the head of a tall, fair-haired lad of good mien and handsome visage, who, dressed as a servant, accompanied the cavalcade. If the projectile had effectively hit instead of missed the stripling, the whole history of the world from that hour to this would have been changed, for this youth was Prince Ferdinand, the heir of Aragon, who was being conveyed secretly by a faction of Castilian nobles to marry the Princess Isabel, who had been set forward as a pretender to her brother’s throne, to the exclusion of the King’s doubtful daughter, the hapless Beltraneja. A hurried cry of explanation went up from the travellers: a shouted password; the flashing of torches upon the walls, the joyful recognition of those within, and the gates swung open, the drawbridge dropped, and thenceforward Prince Ferdinand was safe, surrounded by the men-at-arms of Isabel’s faction. Within a week the eighteen-years-old bridegroom greeted his bride, and before the end of the month Ferdinand and Isabel were married at Valladolid.

To most observers it may have seemed a small thing that a petty prince in the extreme corner of Europe had married the girl pretender to the distracted and divided realm of Castile; but there was one cunning, wicked old man in Barcelona who was fully conscious of the importance of the match that he had planned; and he, John II. of Aragon, had found an apt pupil in his son Ferdinand, crafty beyond his years. To some extent Isabel must have seen it too, for she was already a dreamer of great dreams which she meant to come true, and the strength of Aragon behind her claim would insure her the sovereignty that was to be the first step in their realisation.

This is not the place to tell how the nobles of Castile found to their dismay that in Ferdinand and Isabel they had raised a King Stork instead of King Log to the throne, and how the Queen, strong as a man, subtle as a woman, crushed and chicaned her realms into order and obedience. The aims of Ferdinand and his father in effecting the union of Aragon and Castile by marriage went far beyond the Peninsula in which they lived. For ages Aragon had found its ambitions checked by the consolidation of France. The vision of a great Romance empire, stretching from Valencia to Genoa, and governed from Barcelona or Saragossa, had been dissipated when Saint Louis wrung from James the Conqueror, in the thirteenth century, his recognition of French suzerainty over Provence.

But Aragonese eyes looked still towards the east, and saw a Frenchman ever in their way. The Christian outpost in the Mediterranean, Sicily, already belonged to Aragon; so did the Balearic isles: but an Aragonese dynasty held Naples only in alternation and constant rivalry with the French house of Anjou; and as the strength of the French monarchy grew it stretched forth its hands nearer, and ever nearer, to the weak and divided principalities of Italy with covetous intent. Unless Aragon could check the French expansion across the Alps its own power in the Mediterranean would be dwarfed, its vast hopes must be abandoned, and it must settle down to the inglorious life of a petty State, hemmed in on all sides by more powerful neighbours. But although too weak to vanquish France alone, a King of Aragon who could dispose of the resources of greater Castile might hope, in spite of French opposition, to dominate a united Italy, and thence look towards the illimitable east. This was the aspiration that Ferdinand inherited, and to which the efforts of his long and strenuous life were all directed. The conquest of Granada, the unification of Spain, the greed, the cruelty, the lying, the treachery, the political marriages of all his children, and the fires of the Inquisition, were all means to the end for which he fought.

But fate was unkind to him. The discovery of America diverted Castilian energy from Aragonese objects, and death stepped in and made grim sport of all his marriage jugglery. Before he died, beaten and broken-hearted, he knew that the little realm of his fathers, instead of using the strength of others for its aims, would itself be used for objects which concerned it not. But though he failed his plan was a masterly one. Treaties, he knew, were rarely binding, for the age was faithless, and he himself never kept an oath an hour longer than suited him; but mutual interests by kinship might hold sovereigns together against a common opponent. So, one after the other, from their earliest youth, the children of Ferdinand and Isabel were made political counters in their father’s great marriage league. The eldest daughter, Isabel, was married to the heir of Portugal, and every haven into which French galleys might shelter in their passage from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay was at Ferdinand’s bidding. The only son, John, was married to the daughter of Maximilian, King of the Romans, and (from 1493) Emperor, whose interest also it was to check the French advance towards north Italy and his own dominions. The second daughter, Juana, was married to the Emperor’s son, Philip, sovereign, in right of his mother, of the rich inheritance of Burgundy, Flanders, Holland, and the Franche Comté, and heir to Austria and the Empire, who from Flanders might be trusted to watch the French on their northern and eastern borders; and the youngest of Ferdinand’s daughters, Katharine, was destined almost from her birth to secure the alliance of England, the rival of France in the Channel, and the opponent of its aggrandisement towards the north.

Ferdinand of Aragon and Henry Tudor, Henry VII., were well matched. Both were clever, unscrupulous, and greedy; each knew that the other would cheat him if he could, and tried to get the better of every deal, utterly regardless not only of truth and honesty but of common decency. But, though Ferdinand usually beat Henry at his shuffling game, fate finally beat Ferdinand, and a powerful modern England is the clearly traceable consequence. How the great result was brought about it is one of the principal objects of this book to tell. That Ferdinand had everything to gain by thus surrounding France by possible rivals in his own interests is obvious, for if his plans had not miscarried he could have diverted France whenever it suited him, and his way towards the east would have been clear; but at first sight the interest of Henry VII. in placing himself into a position of antagonism towards France for the benefit of the King of Spain is not so evident. The explanation must be found in the fact that he held the throne of England by very uncertain tenure, and sought to disarm those who would be most able and likely to injure him. The royal house of Castile had been closely allied to the Plantagenets, and both Edward IV. and his brother Richard had been suitors for the hand of Isabel. The Dowager-Duchess of