The position of Spain, to take that outlying part of the big story first, is that she has just succeeded in overthrowing the Moors in their last Spanish stronghold in Granada. She has almost completed national unity by the marriage of Isabella, the Queen of Castile, with Ferdinand, the King of Aragon. Then, with all her long sea-coast and the sea-going habits of its inhabitants, she will become for a while the greatest naval power in the world and play a leading part in the story. Portugal is independent of her and is opening up the trade with the East round the Cape of Good Hope. Italy, as we have seen, is split into the five principal States, and has far to go yet before she can be one nation. {232} France has unified herself, and so has England, but we have to notice this difference between the conditions of the one and of the other, that in France the king has made himself despotic over his nobles and all his people. England, no longer hampered by the possession of any territory on the Continent except the single city of Calais, which will be lost to her in the course of the century to follow, is more fortunate than France in that her nobles have won from the king a more liberal constitution, based upon Magna Carta. She will attain a freedom equal to that of France by less terrible means, though not without wars of Royalists and Puritans and the beheading of a king. Scandinavian countries have for a time, as we have seen, been of the greatest importance in our story, pouring forth swarms of Northmen to make settlement and conquest in all quarters of the known world, but it has not been as nations, but rather in companies of sea-going raiders, that they have so wrought. For the moment those nations are not in the forefront of the world story. Neither have the German States formed themselves as yet into any formidable nation. The power, always rather vague and ill-defined, of the Emperor has much decreased, and Switzerland and other States have shaken themselves free of it. The Turk is pressing Austria and Hungary very hard. He holds, for a time, large provinces which had been Austria's, and which will be hers again, and, besides, he has established himself in that territory which is now the Balkan States and Greece, and is in possession of all that he now has of Asia Minor, with Egypt and the northern African coast in addition. Poland, though she too has felt the Turkish pressure, has become a strong kingdom, and Russia, from her capital of Moscow, is growing in power after {233} combining with those Tartar tribes which at one time threatened to destroy her.