evincing the paucity of authentic data." Fortunately, however, we labor under no such embarrassment as regards Castile in Isabella's reign. By an official report to the crown on the organization of the militia, in 1492, it appears that the population of the kingdom amounted to 1,500,000 vecinos, or householders; or, allowing four and a half to a family (a moderate estimate), to 6,750,000 souls. 143 This census, it will be observed, was limited to the provinces immediately composing the crown of Castile, to the exclusion of Granada, Navarre, and the Aragonese dominions.

It

142 The pretended amount of population has been generally in the ratio of the distance of the period taken, and, of course, of the difficulty of refutation. A few random remarks of ancient writers have proved the basis for the wildest hypotheses, raising the estimates to the total of what the soil, under the highest possible cultivation, would be capable of supporting. Even for so recent a period as Isabella's time, the estimate commonly received does not fall below eighteen or twenty millions. The official returns, cited in the text, of the most populous portion of the kingdom, fully expose the extravagance of preceding estimates.

143 These interesting particulars are obtained from a memorial, prepared by order of Ferdinand and Isabella, by their contador, Alonso de Quintanilla, on the mode of enrolling and arming the militia, in 1492; as a preliminary step to which, he procured a census of the actual population of the kingdom. It is preserved in a volume entitled Relaciones tocantes á la junta de la Hermandad, in that rich national repository, the archives of Simancas. See a copious extract, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Apend. 12.

144 I am acquainted with no sufficient and authentic data for computing the population, at this time, of the crown of Aragon, always greatly below that of the sister kingdom. I find as little to be relied on, notwithstanding the numerous estimates, in one form or another, vouchsafed by historians and travellers, of the population of Granada. Marineo enumerates fourteen cities and ninety-seven towns (omitting, as he says, many places of less note) at the time of the conquest; a statement obviously too vague for statistical purposes. (Cosas memo

was taken, moreover, before the nation had time to recruit from the long and exhausting struggle of the Moorish war, and twenty-five years before the close of the reign, when the population, under circumstances peculiarly favorable, must have swelled to a much larger amount. Thus circumscribed, however, it was probably considerably in advance of that of England at the same period." How have the destinies of the two countries since been reversed!

145

The territorial limits of the monarchy, in the mean time, went on expanding beyond example ;-Castile and Leon, brought under the same sceptre with Aragon

rables, fol. 179.) The capital, swelled by the influx from the country, contained, according to him, 200,000 souls at the same period. (Fol. 177.) In 1506, at the time of the forced conversions, we find the numbers in the city dwindled to fifty or at most seventy thousand. (Comp. Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 23, and Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 159.) Loose as these estimates necessarily are, we have no better to guide us in calculating the total amount of the population of the Moorish kingdom, or of the losses sustained by the copious emigrations during the first fifteen years after the conquest, although there has been no lack of confident assertion, as to both, in later writers. The desideratum in regard to Granada will now probably not be supplied; the public offices in the kingdom of Aragon, if searched with the same industry as those in Castile, would doubtless afford the means for correcting the crude estimates so current respecting that country.

145 Hallam, in his "Constitutional History of England," estimates the population of the realm, in 1485, at 3,000,000 (vol. i. p. 10). The discrepancies, however, of the best historians on this subject, prove the difficulty of arriving at even a probable result. Hume, on the authority of Sir Edward Coke, puts the population of England (including people of all sorts) a century later, in 1588, at only 900,000. The historian cites Lodovico Guicciardini, however, for another estimate, as high as 2,000,000, for the same reign of Queen Elizabeth. History of England, vol. vi. Append. 3.

and its foreign dependencies, Sicily and Sardinia, with the kingdoms of Granada, Navarre, and Naples; with the Canaries, Oran, and the other settlements in Africa; and with the islands and vast continents of America. To these broad domains the comprehensive schemes of the sovereigns would have added Portugal; and their arrangements for this, although defeated for the present, opened the way to its eventual completion* ander Philip the Second.146

The petty states, which had before swarmed over the Peninsula, neutralizing each other's operations, and preventing any effective movement abroad, were now amalgamated into one whole. Sectional jealousies and antipathies, indeed, were too sturdily rooted to be wholly extinguished; but they gradually subsided under the influence of a common government and community of interests. A more enlarged sentiment was infused into the people, who, in their foreign relations, at least, assumed the attitude of one great nation. The names of Castilian and Aragonese were merged in the comprehensive one of Spaniard; and Spain, with an empire which stretched over three quarters of the globe, and which almost realized the proud boast that the sun never set within her borders, now rose, not to the first class only, but to the first place, in the scale of European powers.

146 Philip II. claimed the Portuguese crown in right of his mother, and his wife, both descended from Maria, third daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, who, as the reader may remember, married King Emanuel.

[It is scarcely correct to speak of the "completion" of a unioa which, effected through conquest and usurpation, lasted only sixt years.-ED.]