For several hundred years after the great Saracen invasion in the
beginning of the eighth century, Spain was broken up into a number of
small but independent states, divided in their interests, and often in
deadly hostility with one another. It was inhabited by races, the most
dissimilar in their origin, religion, and government, the least important
of which has exerted a sensible influence on the character and
institutions of its present inhabitants. At the close of the fifteenth
century, these various races were blended into one great nation, under one
common rule. Its territorial limits were widely extended by discovery and
conquest. Its domestic institutions, and even its literature, were moulded
into the form, which, to a considerable extent, they have maintained to
the present day. It is the object of the present narrative to exhibit the
period in which these momentous results were effected,--the reign of
Ferdinand and Isabella.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the number of states, into which
the country had been divided, was reduced to four; Castile, Aragon,
Navarre, and the Moorish kingdom of Granada. The last, comprised within
nearly the same limits as the modern province of that name, was all that
remained to the Moslems of their once vast possessions in the Peninsula.
Its concentrated population gave it a degree of strength altogether
disproportioned to the extent of its territory; and the profuse
magnificence of its court, which rivalled that of the ancient caliphs, was
supported by the labors of a sober, industrious people, under whom
agriculture and several of the mechanic arts had reached a degree of
excellence, probably unequalled in any other part of Europe during the
Middle Ages.

The little kingdom of Navarre, embosomed within the Pyrenees, had often