Last of the nations let us glance at Spain, at the close of the fifteenth century just emerging triumphant from eight centuries of warfare against the Moors and girding herself for a great and magnificent career. Her training in war had been against an Oriental foe, swift, active, and cunning, and it is not surprising that when first she entered the field of Italy and met the massive columns of the Swiss at Seminara she should have given way before them. But at the head of the Spanish troops was a man of genius, Gonsalvo of Cordova, who was quick to learn from his enemies. Confining himself for a time to the guerilla warfare which he understood the best, he mingled pikes among the short swords and bucklers which were the distinctive weapons of the Spanish infantry, and within a year had gained his first victory over the Swiss. His next campaign found him with a body of landsknechts in his pay, when he quickly perceived the possibilities that lay not only in the pikes but still more in the fire-arms which they brought with them. Before the year was past he had routed Swiss infantry and French cavalry in two brilliant actions at Cerignola and on the Garigliano, and fairly driven them out of Naples. He then set himself to remodel the Spanish foot by the experience which he had gathered in his later campaigns, and this with full appreciation of the moral and physical peculiarities of his countrymen. Thus though it was in the Spanish tongue that the pike was first named the queen of weapons, yet the value of the sword in the hand of a supple active people was never overlooked, and at Ravenna no less than Cerignola the rush of nimble stabbing Spaniards under the hedge of pikes had proved fatal to the lumbering unwieldy Teuton. [Sidenote: 1522.] [Sidenote: 1525.]