The development of these early liberties, and the progress of the cause of toleration and of true civilization in Spain, were checked by circumstances which would assuredly have acted in a similar way in any other nation. The establishment of the military orders, the conquest of the south, especially the last campaign against Granada, put forces into the hand of the king greater than those possessed at that time by any other monarch. The richest half of Spain, the newly-conquered Mussulman provinces, had not only no liberties of their own except those granted in their respective capitulations, and which were speedily revoked, but had neither knowledge of, nor any interest in the liberties of the north. They were entirely at the mercy of their conquerors, Ferdinand and Isabella, who had the control of the finest army of Christendom. The mastership of all the great semi-monastic military orders, which had hitherto been elective, was now granted to Ferdinand by Pope Innocent VIII. (1492), and they were incorporated with the crown by a bull of Adrian VI. (1523). An almost equally powerful engine in the royal hands was the secret police of the Santa Hermandad (1476), founded to restrain the excesses of the nobles and the practice of private war. The success of this institution in the cause of order explains both the institution and the popularity of the inquisition. It is easy to see what a leverage was thus put into the royal hands to destroy the liberties of the north of Spain. Add to this that the separate kingdoms, Navarre, Aragon, Valencia, the Castiles, and the Basque Provinces had not yet been united under a single head, nor had learned to work together, except in war, for a single purpose. Catalonia and Aragon had indeed some sympathy with each other, but they had none with Leon and Castile; their peculiar language and habits isolated the Basque Provinces and Navarre from any of the rest. A century of free representation and debate in a national Cortes might have changed all this, but the opportunity was not given. The discovery and the conquest of America, and the subsequent emigration of the bolder spirits, turned men's thoughts away from internal reform and the home constitution. Next the fatal election to the empire of Charles V. threw into his hands fitting agents, in his foreign and ecclesiastical ministers and governors, wherewith to crush any rising of the people. Cardinal Ximenes was the only minister in Europe who at that date could have pointed to a standing army with the proud words, "With these I govern Castile; and with these I will govern it, until the king, your master and mine, takes possession of his kingdom."