Almost equally renowned was Jayme I, the King of Aragon, who took the Balearic Isles from the Moors in 1229, Valencia in 1237, the province of Murcia in 1266, and who, before he died in 1276, had gained thirty pitched battles with the enemy, and had founded, some say, more than two thousand Christian churches. But he has the credit of having introduced into Spain the terrible Inquisition (in 1232), and that goes far toward counterbalancing his meritorious work for the freedom of his country. Alfonso X, called “the Wise,” because he was more a scholar than soldier, succeeded St. Ferdinand, and under him, it is recorded, the Castilian became the national language. Slowly but steadily the ancient Gothic had been changing, and it was now in a sense crystallized when Alfonso caused the Bible to be translated into the Castilian, as well as works on chemistry and philosophy, and wrote a chronicle of Spain down to the time of Ferdinand, his father and predecessor. The “Fuero Juzgo, or Forum Judicum,” the ancient Visigothic code of laws, which he translated and codified, became the law of the land and the model of yet existing laws in Spain. But, though quite learned, Alfonso was not morally much in advance of his time, for he caused his brother to be strangled, and provoked a rebellion of his sons, by which he was driven from his throne two years before his death. His son, Sancho IV, who was as vigorous as his father was feeble, drove the Emir of Morocco back to Africa in 1291, and after a short reign left the kingdom to his son, Ferdinand IV, who, dying in 1312, was succeeded by Alfonso XI of Castile. He was the last of that name to sit on the throne until Alfonso XII, father of the boy king of our time, Alfonso XIII, after an interval of five hundred and sixty years. Ferdinand IV was an infant too young to reign at the death of his father, but affairs of the kingdom were ably managed by the queen regent, his mother, and when he reached man’s estate he nobly devoted himself to the great work bequeathed him by his ancestors. Under him the Castilian frontiers were extended to Gibraltar, the fortress of which he took, in the year 1302. But his reign was likewise short, and at his death he left the kingdom to an infant son, and the regency to his mother, Maria, who a second time assumed the cares of royalty without its remunerations.