More than once, indeed, the demand for extradition was made. But save in the case of the Portuguese Jews, on the second marriage of the Princess Isabella to the reigning sovereign of that country, no foreign prince appears to have paid any heed to this savage edict. Nor was it, as a rule, of any material advantage, either at Rome or at Seville, that it should be put in force. Avarice was perhaps the besetting sin of Rome in the fifteenth century; nor was bigotry unknown throughout Western Europe. But in Spain, as the century drew to a close, avarice and bigotry joined hand in hand, and flourished under royal and noble patronage, preached by religion, practiced by policy, and applauded by patriotism. It was not strange that, under such teaching, the people of Castile should have rapidly become demoralized, and that the great race should have begun to develop that sordid and self-satisfied savagery which disgraced the name of the Spaniard, in the heartless and short-sighted plunder of the new world that lay before him. Yet in all human affairs there is something that too often escapes our observation, to explain, if not to excuse, what may seem the most dreadful aberrations of the better nature of man. And it may be that the uncompromising religious spirit, which has had so enormous an influence for evil and for good upon the Spanish people, is to some extent the result of their Semitic environment of eight hundred years. Religious controversy indeed, between rival branches of the Christian Church in the days of the Visigoths, developed religious animosities before the first Moslem landed at Tarifa; yet the Arab and the Moor, fired with the enthusiasm of a new and living faith, brought into their daily life in Spain, in peace and in war, a deep and all-pervading religious spirit--an active recognition of the constant presence of one true God--unknown to the Roman or the Visigoth, which must have had an enormous influence upon the grave and serious Spaniards who lived under the rule of the Arab. Nor was the Moslem the only factor in this medieval development. In no other country in Europe was the Jew, as we have seen, more largely represented, and more powerful, for the first fifteen centuries of our era, than in Spain, whether under Christian or Moslem masters. But the direct and simple monotheism of the Hebrew and the Arab, while it had so great a direct influence upon Spanish Christianity, provoked as part of the natural antagonism to the methods of the rival and the enemy, the counter development of an excessive Hagiolatry, Mariolatry, and Sacerdotalism.