As the elder Zurita continued to be much trusted by Charles the Fifth, and as his son’s connections were chiefly with persons of great consideration, the progress of the future historian was, at first, rather in the direction of public affairs. But in 1548, under circumstances peculiarly honorable to him, he was appointed historiographer of Aragon; being elected unanimously by the free Cortes of the kingdom to the office, which they had just established, and as a candidate for which he had to encounter the most powerful and learned competitors. The election seems to have satisfied his ambition, and to have given a new direction to his life. At any rate, he immediately procured a royal warrant to examine and use all documents needful for his purpose that could be found in any part of the empire. Under this broad authority he went over much of Spain, consulting and arranging the great national records at Simancas, and then visited Sicily and Naples, from whose monasteries and public archives he obtained further ample and learned spoils. The result was, that between 1562 and 1580 he published, in six folio volumes, “The Annals of Aragon,” from the invasion of the country by the Arabs to 1516, the last third of his labor being entirely given to the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic, for which the recollections of his father’s life at the court of that monarch probably afforded some of the more interesting materials. The whole work is more important for Spanish history than any that had preceded it. It has hardly any thing of the monkish credulity of the old chronicles, for Zurita was a man of the world, and always concerned in the stirring interests of his time; first, from having been intrusted with the municipal affairs of one of the principal cities of the kingdom; next, from being charged with the general correspondence of the Inquisition; and finally, from his duties as one of the secretaries of Philip the Second, which kept him much at court and about the king’s person. It shows, too, not unfrequently, a love for the ancient privileges of Aragon, and a generosity of opinion on political subjects, remarkable in one who was aware that whatever he wrote would not only be submitted before its publication to the censorship of jealous rivals, but read by the wary and severe monarch on whom all his fortunes depended. Its faults are its great length and a carelessness of style, scarcely regarded as faults at the time when it was written.[202]