Charles V. was the first evil genius of Spain; thinking far more of his German and Italian possessions than of the country of his mother, poor mad Juana, he exhausted the resources of Spain in his endless wars outside the country, and inaugurated her actual decline at a moment when, to the unthinking, she was at the height of her glory. The influence of the powerful nobility of the country had been completely broken by Isabella and Ferdinand, and the device of adopting the Burgundian fashion of keeping at the Court an immense crowd of nobles in so-called "waiting" on the Monarch flattered the national vanity, while it ensured the absolute inefficacy of the class when it might have been useful in stemming the baneful absolutism of such lunatics as Felipe II. and the following Austrian monarchs, each becoming more and more effete and more and more mad. The very doubtful "glory" of the reign of the Catholic Kings in having driven out the Moors after eight centuries of conflict and effort, proved, in fact, no advantage to the country; but twenty thousand Christian captives were freed, and every reader of history must, for the moment, sympathise with the people who effected this freeing of their country from a foreign yoke. Looking at the marvellous tracery of the church of San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo, picked out by the actual chains broken off the miserable Christian captives, and hanging there unrusted in the fine air and sunshine of the country for over four hundred years, one's heart beats in sympathy with the pride of the Spaniards in their Catholic Kings. But Toledo, alas! is dead; the centre of light and learning is mouldering in the very slough of ignorance, and Christianity compares badly enough with the rule of Arab and Jew. Nevertheless, it must be said that, had matters been left as Isabella and Ferdinand left them, Spain might have benefited by the example of her conquerors, as other countries have done, and as she herself did during the Roman occupation. Philip II. was too wise to expel the richest and most industrious of his subjects so long as they paid his taxes and, at least, professed to be Christians. It was not until the reign of Philip III. and his disgraceful favourite Lerma, himself the most bigoted of Valencian "Christians," that, by the advice of Ribera, the Archbishop of Valencia, these industrious, thrifty, and harmless people were ruthlessly driven out. They had turned Valencia into a prolific garden,--even to-day it is called the _huerta_,--their silk manufactures were known and valued throughout the world; their industry and frugality were, in fact, their worst crimes; they were able to draw wealth from the sterile lands which "Christians" found wholly unproductive. "Since it is impossible to kill them all," said Ribera, the representative of Christ, he again and again urged on the King their expulsion.