With this mutual understanding a strange day dawned for Galicia. Here were a governor and corregidor established in Santiago, just and incorruptible, who enforced their sentences with a swift certainty that struck terror into the most hardened bravado. Fired by this example the Procuradores, when they went to their own homes, adopted like measures, and within three months over 1500 robbers had been driven from the province to seek fresh fields of plunder. Many of the leaders were dead. They had been unable to believe that money would not save their lives when captured, and eagerly but in vain had made offers of their ill-gotten riches. Royal agents, both in Galicia and other parts of Castile, might have proved more susceptible to bribery but for the example set by the Queen herself, whose path of justice was not without its temptations. On one occasion, when in Medina del Campo, a poor woman threw herself at her feet and begged for assistance and protection. Her husband, who was a notary, had disappeared and she felt certain he was the victim of some cruel plot. Isabel commanded her officials to make instant enquiry, and the body of the notary was discovered, buried in the courtyard of a certain wealthy noble of the neighbourhood, called Alvar Yañez. At the trial it was proved that Yañez had first induced his victim to sign a forged document, by which he himself hoped to gain possession of a neighbour’s property, and that he had then murdered his witness, never expecting that anyone would dare to lay the accusation at his door, far less that he would be punished if discovered. On account of his wealth he still hoped to save his life, and cunningly offered, in return for a pardon, the enormous sum of 40,000 ducats to go towards the expenses of a war against the Infidel. This was a project that Isabel was known to have much at heart; and, since its main hindrance had been the poverty of the royal exchequer not a few of her counsellors urged her to let such a pious gift atone for the crime. “The Queen,” we are told, “preferred justice to money”; and Alvar Yañez was beheaded. Even then she might, on some specious pretext, have seized the guilty man’s possessions; but instead she commanded that the inheritance should go to his sons, so that all might recognize her object in maintaining the sentence had not been to enrich herself but to punish evil. Other instances of her rigorous justice there are many, but none more characteristic than her famous “Audiences” in Seville. Thither she had gone in the spring of 1477 to supervise the pacification of Southern Spain; while Ferdinand in the north kept watch over the Portuguese army and the chronic disturbances on the Pyrenean border.