With the vicissitudes of this epochal war between antagonistic civilisations the present book is not directly concerned, but only with such echoes and influences of it as reached the Court of Spain. {227} Battles and sieges, the death of heroes and the fall of kings, seared their deep brand upon the page of history. Spain, bereft of commerce and almost of industry, might in its agony protest with passionate tears that it could suffer no more, and lower its dark brows when the arrogant minister who ruled the fainéant King was mentioned.[11] But through it all Madrid laughed and rioted with ghastly gaiety and pagan fatalism, eating, drinking, and making merry, lest before to-morrow it should die. Outside its mud walls the fields lay bare and arid, in the provincial cities sloth and apathy ruled supreme over grass-grown market squares and empty streets; but in the Court, "the only Court," the Madrileños boastfully called it, shameless waste ran riot still; flaunting finery elbowed aside the squalid parasites that sought its smiles and struggled for its scraps; vain shows and vainer posturings filled the hollow days, and the witling who had pompously declaimed a turgid epic upon the nation's glory was held a hundred times a greater hero than he who starved in Flemish dykes, or rotted of putrid fever in overcrowded hosts before a German city, fighting and dying, as scores of thousands of them did, for the vague mirage of Spanish honour, of which the Court of Philip the Great was the centre and the source. [Sidenote: The Policy of Olivares]