[397] I should think there are accounts of twenty or thirty such tournaments in the Chronicle of John II. There are many, also, in that of Alvaro de Luna; and so there are in all the contemporary histories of Spain during the fifteenth century. In the year 1428, alone, four are recorded; two of which involved loss of life, and all of which were held under the royal auspices. [398] See the account of the Passo Honroso already given, to which add the accounts in the Chronicle of John II. of one which was attempted in Valladolid, by Rui Diaz de Mendoza, on occasion of the marriage of Prince Henry, in 1440, but which was stopped by the royal order, in consequence of the serious nature of its results. Chrónica de Juan el IIº, Ann. 1440, c. 16. [399] Ibid., Ann. 1435, c. 3. [400] Claros Varones de Castilla, Título XVII. He boasts, at the same time, that more Spanish knights went abroad to seek adventures than there were foreign knights who came to Castile and Leon; a fact pertinent to this point. A state of society like this was the natural result of the extraordinary development which the institutions of chivalry had then received in Spain. Some of it was suited to the age, and salutary; the rest was knight-errantry, and knight-errantry in its wildest extravagance. When, however, the imaginations of men were so excited as to tolerate and maintain, in their daily life, such manners and institutions as these, they would not fail to enjoy the boldest and most free representations of a corresponding state of society in works of romantic fiction. But they went farther. Extravagant and even impossible as are many of the adventures recorded in the books of chivalry, they still seemed so little to exceed the absurdities frequently witnessed or told of known and living men, that many persons took the romances themselves to be true histories, and believed them. Thus, Mexia, the trustworthy historiographer of Charles the Fifth, says, in 1545, when speaking of “the Amadises, Lisuartes, and Clarions,” that “their authors do waste their time and weary their faculties in writing such books, which are read by all and believed by many. For,” he goes on, “there be men who think all these things really happened, just as they read or hear them, though the greater part of the things themselves are sinful, profane, and unbecoming.”[401] And Castillo, another chronicler, tells us gravely, in 1587, that Philip the Second, when he married Mary of England, only forty years earlier, promised, that, if King Arthur should return to claim the throne, he would peaceably yield to that prince all his rights; thus implying, at least in Castillo himself, and probably in many of his readers, a full faith in the stories of Arthur and his Round Table.[402] [401] Historia Imperial, Anvers, 1561, folio, ff. 123, 124. The first edition was of 1545. [402] Pellicer, note to Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 13.