maintained any longer than suited the convenience of the respective
parties. The French monarch, indeed, seems to have prepared, from the
first, to dispense with it, as soon as he had secured his own moiety of
the kingdom; [1] and sagacious men at the Spanish court inferred that King
Ferdinand would do as much, when he should be in a situation to assert his
claims with success. [2]

It was altogether improbable, whatever might be the good faith of the
parties, that an arrangement could long subsist, which so rudely rent
asunder the members of this ancient monarchy; or that a thousand points of
collision should not arise between rival hosts, lying as it were on their
arms within bowshot of each other, and in view of the rich spoil which
each regarded as its own. Such grounds for rupture did occur, sooner
probably than either party had foreseen, and certainly before the king of
Aragon was prepared to meet it.

The immediate cause was the extremely loose language of the partition
treaty, which assumed such a geographical division of the kingdom into
four provinces, as did not correspond with any ancient division, and still
less with the modern, by which the number was multiplied to twelve. [3]
The central portion, comprehending the Capitanate, the Basilicate, and the
Principality, became debatable ground between the parties, each of whom
insisted on these as forming an integral part of its own moiety. The
French had no ground whatever for contesting the possession of the
Capitanate, the first of these provinces, and by far the most important,
on account of the tolls paid by the numerous flocks which descended every
winter into its sheltered valleys from the snow-covered mountains of
Abruzzo. [4] There was more uncertainty to which of the parties the two
other provinces were meant to be assigned. It is scarcely possible that
language so loose, in a matter requiring mathematical precision, should