Two striking examples may be given of the opposite kinds of that credulity in Garcilasso which so much impairs the value of his Commentaries. He believed that the subjection of Peru by the Spaniards was predicted by the last of the Incas that reigned before their arrival, (Parte I. Lib. IX. c. 15, and Parte II. Lib. VIII. c. 18,) and he believed that all the Spaniards in the army of Peru, who were notorious blasphemers, perished by wounds in the _mouth_ (Parte II., Lib. IV. c. 21). The publication, in 1610, of “The War of Granada,” by Mendoza, had--as might have been anticipated from its attractive subject and style--an effect on Spanish historical composition; producing, in the course of the century, several imitations more worthy of notice than any thing in their class that appeared after the great work of Mariana. The first of them is by Moncada, a nobleman of the highest rank in the South of Spain, and connected with several of the principal families, both in Catalonia and Valencia. His father was, successively, viceroy of Sardinia and Aragon; he himself was governor of the Low Countries and commander-in-chief of the armies there; and both of them filled, in their respective times, the most important of the Spanish embassies. But the younger Moncada had tastes widely different from the cares that beset his life. In 1623 he published his “Expedition of the Catalans against the Turks and Greeks”; and when he died, in 1635, just after putting to rout two hostile armies, he left several other works, of less value, one or two of which have since been printed. The History of the Catalan Expedition, by which alone he has been known in later times, is on the romantic adventures and achievements of an extraordinary band of mercenaries, who, under Roger de Flor,--successively a freebooter, a great admiral, and a Cæsar of the Eastern Empire,--drove back the Turks, as they approached the Bosphorus in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and then, after being for some time no less formidable to their allies than they had been to the infidel, settled down into a sort of uneasy tranquillity at Athens, where their historian leaves them.