Where war in Southern Italy was concerned, Spain had in many ways the advantage over France, above all in her extensive eastern seaboard and her possession of the island of Sicily, which afforded a convenient base of operations for landing reinforcements and provisions. Louis would have needed to maintain an enormous army had he endeavoured to keep Naples entirely free of Spanish aggression; but his alternative policy of sharing the kingdom bordered quite as close on the impossible. Differences of opinion respecting the imaginary boundary (that had left the ownership of some of the middle provinces undefined); quarrels as to the right of collecting the tolls paid on the cattle and sheep passing from their summer quarters in the Abruzzi to the sheltered valleys of the Capitanata, their winter home; feuds between those Neapolitan barons, who had originally supported the Angevin cause, and their opponents, the former Allies of the Aragonese House—these were matters so productive of strife that any efforts to establish a permanent peace between France and Spain were obviously doomed to failure. Thus, by 1502, the royal thieves had fallen out; and war, occasionally suspended by truces and negotiations, devastated Naples for the next two years. Its course is hardly a highway in Castilian history, though its battles were waged and its victories secured mainly by Castilian soldiers. The ambitions by which it was dictated were purely Aragonese; and the final success of Spanish arms in 1504, that drove the French from Naples, was the crowning triumph of Ferdinand’s career. Yet, in as much as the issue so vitally affected the future of Spain, drawing her definitely into a struggle for the supremacy of Europe, and pitting her against France in a national duel that was to outlast both Ferdinand and Louis, the campaign demands some mention here. Its actual conduct recalls, not only through its deeds of chivalry and daring but in the character of its warfare, the struggle in Granada; and, if Spain owed her success largely to her advantageous position, she was also indebted to the thorough training her soldiers had received in guerilla tactics. The mountainous districts of the kingdom of Naples were peculiarly suited to the quick movements of light-armed horse; but Gonsalvo de Cordova, Ferdinand’s Commander-in-chief, though recognizing and using to the full this knowledge, did not disdain to learn what his enemies could teach him in other branches of military art; and his infantry, patiently drilled on the Swiss method, was soon to prove the equal of any body of troops in Europe.