The war which had effected the conquest and enslavement of the Moriscoes lasted a little more than three years. No period of the same duration in the history of the Peninsula was fraught with more important consequences. The Spaniards lost by the casualties of battle, exposure, and disease sixty thousand men. The losses of the Moors were much greater; twenty thousand were killed with arms in their hands, but no account has survived of those who were massacred in cold blood. The expense involved in the destruction of the most useful element of the population appalled the corrupt and incompetent financiers of the kingdom. Extraordinary and unwise fiscal methods, devised to remedy the evil, only rendered it more aggravated and desperate. Repeated campaigns of desolation had turned the whole country into a waste. Not only was the material wealth annihilated, but the means of recuperation were forever removed. Under the iron hand of remorseless persecution, industry had vanished. In vain the government offered alluring inducements to immigrants and colonists,--fertile lands, moderate rents, nominal taxation. Few accepted these offers and still fewer remained. The provinces of the South continued a prey to the brigands of the mountains and the corsairs of Barbary. Life and property were notoriously insecure. Castilian pride and indolence were unequal to the patient drudgery which had made hill-side and valley blossom with teeming vegetation; and men whose chosen trade for ages had been war were wholly destitute of the agricultural experience and skill necessary to reproduce these marvellous effects. The royal demesnes, in 1592, yielded annually a sum equal to fifteen thousand dollars; during the closing years of Moslem rule, when the kingdom had been exhausted by incessant war and rebellion, the revenues from this source produced by territory of equal area and fertility had been more than ten times as great. Plundered, tortured, expatriated, the Moriscoes were still subjected to innumerable vexations; the curse of their race was ever upon them. But they were at last comparatively exempt from the odious imputation of heresy. After 1595 the most rigid inquisitorial vigilance was unable or unwilling to detect any heterodox opinions or breaches of ecclesiastical discipline among these unpromising proselytes. And yet it was notorious that they were ignorant of the doctrines of the Church, and that competent persons were not appointed to instruct them. Some zealots, indeed, maintained that they should not be permitted to communicate, and that the exposure of the Host in their churches was a desecration; others, on the other hand, refused absolution to such as would not acknowledge apostasy. Their confessions were often regarded as feigned, and the priests who received them did not hesitate to violate the obligations of their order by divulging privileged confidences to the magistrate. The Morisco could not change