Burke gives the following picturesque, if perhaps somewhat overdrawn estimate of Alfonso: “For nigh on five centuries all that was learned and all that was refined in Spain was found among the Arabs of Andalus. But on the taking of Seville by St. Ferdinand, the centre of gravity was completely changed. In the thirteenth century, Spain was passing through a great social and intellectual revolution, and the first man of intellectual Spain was Alfonso of Castile. If his royal highness, the heir apparent to the crown of England, were a senior wrangler, and a double first-class man at the English universities; if he were called upon to fill the post of Astronomer Royal of England, in default of any other man in the kingdom worthy even to be compared with him in that department of science; if he had written a more brilliant history than Macaulay, and a finer poem than Tennyson; if he were fit to teach Wagner music, and Cayley mathematics; and if in the intervals of his studies he had found time to codify the entire laws of England into a digest which might endure for six hundred years to come: then, and only then, would the practical pre-eminence of his intellectual attainments, in modern England, represent the practical pre-eminence of the _sabiduria_ of Alfonso X, in mediæval Spain. No Spaniard but Isidore of Seville, and no sovereign of any age or nation, not even Alfred the Great, so much surpassed all his contemporaries in learning as the king of Leon and Castile; and the _Siete Partidas_ is a work which as great a scholar as Isidore, and as great a statesman as Alfred, might well have been proud to own. But learning, or even lawgiving is not wisdom, and many a wiser and better king than Alfonso has performed his most elaborate calculations on his ten fingers, and signed his name with the pommel of his sword.”[d] This was still more apparent when, after Alfonso’s death, Sancho IV succeeded to the kingly power (1284). The families of Lara and Haro, with their vast wealth and the great number of their vassals, had attained such overwhelming power that the king was quite subordinate to them. Only their mutual jealousies and conflicting desire for rule made it possible for him to still preserve some power and authority over them; but if he favoured one party he had the other for his bitterest enemy.