to the soldiers of Islam,--their fortunes, their liberties, their lives, and their religion. The prospect was far from encouraging. The enemy had the advantage in numbers, in organization, in discipline. Their forces, sixty thousand in all, exceeded those of the Mussulmans in the overwhelming proportion of three to one. The Castilians were superior in the strength of their horses, in the character of their weapons, in the weight and temper of their armor. Conspicuous among them were the French knights completely sheathed in glittering steel. The Christians were, to a man, warriors tried in many a bloody fray; they were animated by a common purpose and obedient to a single commander; and they considered the enterprise in which they had embarked as one peculiarly favored by Heaven. Their zeal was inflamed daily by distinguished prelates, whose presence imparted additional sanctity to a crusade nominally waged for the glory and the propagation of the Faith. On the eve of battle, these ecclesiastical counsellors, in all the splendor of full canonicals, harangued the ranks of the soldiery; and not infrequently were they to be found, like the members of the ancient Visigothic hierarchy, contending with carnal weapons in the heat and peril of deadly conflict, where their words of sympathy brought composure and hope to the dying, and their consecrated hands performed, with its impressive ceremonial, the last solemn rites of the Church for the dead. Despite the weakness of faith characteristic of the military profession, and especially marked in the minds of soldiers of fortune, the exhortations and labors of the Spanish clergy played no inconsiderable part in the Reconquest. No matter how skeptical a Castilian prince might be on inconvenient points of doctrine,--and few in that age were sincerely devout,--they rarely neglected the punctilious observance of the ritual of the Church, and, what was even more indispensable in the eyes of the clergy, the constant and liberal support of its ministers.