“Do you wish then that there was no King in Castile?” asked the Queen indignantly; to which the Count replied cheerfully: “Not so! I would there were many, for then I should be one of them.” His words are the expression of the aristocratic ideal of life in his own day. It was perhaps most nearly realized in the case of the Grand Masterships of the three great Military Orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara. These Orders had been called into existence by the crusade; but their original purpose was gradually obscured by the wealth and influence that made them the resort of the ambitious rather than of the enthusiast. Like the Monastic Orders, their members were bound by vows: obedience, community of property, strict conjugal fidelity, sometimes celibacy; but dispensations could be bought, and the gains to be reaped more than compensated for any theoretical austerities or submission. The main canon of their creed, war against the Infidel, was readily accepted by every aspirant knight; the only drawback being that his inborn love of fighting led him to take part as well in whatever other kind of war happened to dawn on the horizon, no matter if it were against his own sovereign. How formidable this would prove for the sovereign we can imagine when we learn that in the fifteenth century the combined revenues of the Orders amounted to something like 145,000 ducats,[1] while the Master of Santiago could call into the field a force of four hundred fully-armed cavaliers and one thousand lances. In addition he possessed the patronage of numerous “commanderies,” rich military posts that brought with them the rents of subject towns and villages, and that were eagerly sought by the highest in the land. Footnote 1: “The monetary unit of Castile was the ‘maravedi,’ anciently a gold coin of value; but, in the fifteenth century, diminished to a fraction of its former estimation.”—Lea, _History of Spanish Inquisition_, vol. i., Appendix III. The ducat would be worth about 374 maravedis, or about 8_s._ 9_d._ in English money. Extreme power and privilege are often their own undoing; and from the fruits of its triumph the Castilian aristocracy was to reap a bitter harvest. Had the fight with the Crown been more strenuous and the victory less certain, the _ricos-hombres_ or great men of the land, might have learned to combine if not with other classes at least amongst themselves; but the independence they had gained so easily they placed in jeopardy by individual selfishness and mutual distrust. It has been said with truth that it was almost impossible to persuade the mediæval Castilian noble to act with his fellows. Pride, ambition, the courage that vaunts itself in duels, the revenge that lurks, dagger-drawn, in back streets or lonely roads: these were the source of constant feuds and internecine warfare, incapable of a final settlement save by the pressure of some outside force.