The royalist ideal was manifested strikingly in the relations of the Catholic Kings with the Castilian _Cortes_. From 1475 to 1503 the _Cortes_ was summoned but nine times, and during the years 1482 to 1498, at a time when Granada was being conquered, America discovered and occupied, the new Inquisition instituted, and the Jews expelled, it did not meet even once. Its decline was evidenced still further in the increasingly respectful language employed whenever it addressed the monarch and its growing dependence on the _Consejo Real_, which body subjected the acts of the _Cortes_ to its own revision and whose president acted in a similar capacity for the _Cortes_. [Sidenote: Decline of the Aragonese _Cortes_ and of the power of Barcelona.] Ferdinand followed the same policy in Aragon. The various _Cortes_ of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia and the general _Cortes_ of all three were infrequently called; the king acted in an arbitrary manner in his methods of raising funds, without observing the spirit of the laws. It was in his dealings with Barcelona that he most clearly manifested the royalist tendency, for that city was the most powerful element in the kingdom. Through his intervention the practice of electing the five _concelleres_, or councillors, was suspended in favor of royal appointment, and the _Consell_, or council of a hundred, was altered so that it was no longer democratic but represented the will of the monarch. The fact that these changes were made without provoking resistance and almost without protest shows how utterly dead were the political ideals of the past. [Sidenote: The new bureaucracy.]