“He is the confessor whom I have long sought,” was the Queen’s comment on this interview, the acknowledgment of her readiness to bow before the spiritual director she could respect. To some minds his answer might have savoured of arrogance; but the friar’s personal humility forbade such an interpretation; and when, on the surrender of Granada in 1492, he was appointed as first Archbishop of that city, he accepted the office with a shrinking reluctance that was wholly sincere. He took away with him to his southern diocese much of the saner and kindlier influences at work on Isabel’s soul; for, though she continued to rely on his advice both in religious and worldly affairs, yet other and less tolerant directors were helping to shape her conscience. The name of her new confessor, Ximenes de Cisneros, is famous in Spanish history,—the name of one of the world’s chosen few, who solely by their natural gifts climb from poverty and obscurity to pluck her richest fruits. His success is the more arresting that, by the irony of fate, he cared nothing for the world or her rewards. Literary fame had stretched before him as chaplain of the cathedral church of Sigüenza, and he deliberately turned his back on it to exchange the free life of the chapter for the monk’s cell. Here he donned the Franciscan habit; not as the cloak for idleness and evil customs it had become with many of the Order but as the rough garment of humility and self-abnegation that Saint Francis had offered to his followers of old. The Franciscan community was split at this time into two distinct sections: the Conventuals, wealthy, influential, and prosperous, who in the decadence of their life had ceased even to realize the loss of their ideals; and the Observants, those who observed the old rules with an austerity and fire that burned all the more brightly for their brothers’ failings. Between these two was war; and it was natural that Cisneros should be found in the camp of the ascetics, natural also that even in this retreat his talent should be discovered, and his gift for preaching and organization win him uncoveted renown. [Illustration: XIMINES DE CISNEROS FROM “ICONOGRAFIA ESPAÑOLA” BY VALENTIN CARDERERA Y SOLANO ] He was already fifty-five years old at the time of the fall of Granada when Cardinal Mendoza, consulted by the Queen as to her new confessor, remembered his own light-hearted days as Bishop of Sigüenza and a certain austere but brilliant chaplain of his cathedral, who had turned his back on the world for the sake of his religious ideals. The portrait caught Isabel’s fancy; and Cisneros was duly summoned to Court and named her confessor, an appointment that filled him with even more dismay than the frivolous courtiers. “Behold!” says Peter Martyr, “an Augustine in his piercing intellect, a Jerome in his self-inflicted penances, an Ambrose in his zeal for the Faith.”