These events had produced a permanent feud between the families of Ayala and Silva, only terminated by the marriage of the heir and heiress of the respective houses. Toledo, during the first three-quarters of the fifteenth century, was a prey to incessant warfare. Sometimes the whole town would be contending against external foes for or against the king, sometimes it would be the nobles contending with the people, or the church with the nobles. Toledo, as a whole, supported its archbishop, Carrillo, when in 1465 he pronounced sentence of dethronement on Enrique IV. Three years later that unlucky monarch managed, by winning over the Ayalas to his side, to make his entry into the city. The proud chief of the family was himself obliged to flee from the town in 1471. The king was besieged in the Alcazar; the balance inclined sometimes to this party, sometimes to that. The old animosities between the Ayalas and the Silvas blazed up again from time to time; and under its weak sovereign Toledo had its fill of fighting. But those brave days were drawing to a close, and in 1474, came one before whom even Toledans had to bend the knee and whom, recognising in her a stronger spirit, they afterwards delighted to honour. The accession of Isabel the Catholic on the death of Enrique IV., and to the exclusion of the rightful heiress, Juana, calumniously nicknamed La Beltraneja, marks the beginning of a new era in the history of Spain, and therefore of Toledo. BUILDINGS OF THE CASTILIAN PERIOD