Nor was royal favour limited to one class of Jews, any more than Jewish usefulness was limited to one province of activity. Henry II. of Castile, the half-brother of Don Pedro, and other Iberian sovereigns employed the talents of the Jews in various capacities. Through their correspondence with their brethren all over Europe and the East, the Jews were the best agents for commercial and political negotiations. Their astronomical science, and their skill in map-drawing and in the construction of nautical instruments, recommended them to princes anxious to profit by the exploration of new lands. Jewish pilots and navigators must have been in great demand, for they subsequently helped Vasco da Gama in his voyages; while Jewish capitalists and adventurers participated in many of the great transatlantic expeditions of later times. ♦1334♦ Jayme III., the last king of Mallorca, describes Juceff Faguin, a Jew of Barcelona, as a man who “had navigated the whole of the then known world”; while Benjamin of Tudela’s older Itinerary is a work of world-wide renown. ♦1404–1454♦ John II. of Castile, in the ensuing century, even sought the assistance of Jews in the compilation of a national _Cancionero_, for the Jews in Christian, as in Mohammedan, Spain attained high distinction as troubadours. One of them, Santob de Carrion, who flourished in Castile in the fourteenth century, produced a Spanish _Book of Maxims_, which, thanks to its charming quaintness, preserved its popularity far into the fifteenth. Not less important are the contributions of Iberian Jews to the vernacular drama. The Jew’s old aversion to the language of Titus, the destroyer of the Temple, had also partially vanished from Spain, and many Jewish politicians employed Latin in the diplomatic correspondence which they conducted for their Christian masters, while the Spanish language in the fourteenth century even bade fair to oust Hebrew, the Book of Esther being, in some parts of the peninsula, read in the vernacular on the Feast of Purim, for the benefit of the women, to whom the sacred tongue was no longer intelligible. Naturally such liberalism scandalised strait-laced pietists, who did their utmost to prevent the profanation of Holy Writ. But the real check to the gradual reconciliation between Jew and Gentile in Spain did not proceed from the Jewish side, as we shall see. ♦1348♦