The two-handed sword was introduced in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. The Armoury contains a specimen (G15--plate 10) belonging to the first half of the latter era. It comes from Mallorca. The blade is almond-shaped, metre 0.990 long, by 0.038 broad; it has a long ricasso, counter-guard (_falsaguarda_), and three grooves. The guard is of copper, once gilded, with quillons drooping very slightly; the grip, of corded wood, covered with leather; the pommel pear-shaped and facetted. Before the century was three-quarters gone, complete suits of plate-armour were worn in Castile, though the hauberk was still retained, in some cases, as an additional defence. The powerful and ambitious Juan Pacheco, Marques de Villena and Grandmaster of St. James, who died in the same year as his sovereign Enrique IV. (1474), is shown (plate 12) wearing, in addition to the pieces which had now become a regular part of the harness, espaliers in five pieces, and _tassets_ or armour for the hips, of five pieces, in the graceful oak-leaf pattern, which endured till the time of Charles V. The opening between the tassets is defended by the skirt of the hauberk, worn beneath the cuirass. That piece, and the vambraces, are exquisitely chiselled with floral designs. The armour of Don Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, Conde de Tendilla, who died five years after Villena, is very similar. His coudes are very large, chased, and set with gilt studs round the borders. We have now reached the beginning of the most glorious and prosperous epoch in the history of Spain. The chivalric spirit, which had been sedulously fostered in the nation during the two preceding reigns, in the age of the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabel, found its genuine and loftiest expression in enterprises of supreme national importance. This was essentially a martial age--the era of the Conquest of Granada and of the Discovery and Subjugation of the New World. Everything connected with the profession of arms became the subject of close study and a matter for improvement. Farseeing men might have predicted, even as early as the taking of Granada, that the armourer’s craft was a doomed industry. Considering the productions of its latest ages, we might be tempted to impute its extinction to its having reached a point beyond which progress was impossible--where the artificer saw that all attempts to improve on existing models must be vain.