Page:A History of the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.djvu/224

198 several foundations in favour of his langue in the kingdom of Aragon.

At length, in the year 1396, Heredia, bowed with years and with the cares of his office, sank into the grave, universally regretted and beloved by his fraternity. The virtues and good deeds of his old age had obliterated the reminiscences of what he had been during the earlier portion of his career. Men forebore to think on all the wrongs which he had wrought against them in former times when contemplating the advantages and the prosperity, which, during his rule of twenty years, he had been the means of promoting. He was, in truth, a strange compound of good and evil. Greedy of wealth he was, yet no miser; he was ever prompt to scatter with a lavish hand, and with the most magnificent profusion, those treasures which he had toiled so incessantly to amass. Ambitious in the highest degree, he scrupled not at the means he employed to attain power; yet, having gained the highest dignity which the Order could bestow, he used that power only for the public service, and for the most beneficent purposes. Indeed, both his rapacity and his ambition seem to have sprung more from the desire to benefit his children than himself. Their position in life once fairly established, much of the eagerness with which he had pursued wealth and power seems to have subsided. He was left in his old age to earn for himself that high position which he undoubtedly occupies as one of the greatest and wisest of those who had as yet swayed the fortunes of the fraternity. Vertot well sums up his career by saying that it would have been good for the Order had he never entered it; or, having once reached the goal, had he been permitted never to be taken away from it. He was buried in the monastery of N. D. de Caste, in Spain, of which he was the founder.

The vacancy caused by his death occurred at a time when the convent was not only distracted by the papal schism still raging in Europe, but also threatened by a new and redoubtable antagonist in the East. Under these circumstances it was necessary that it should be extremely cautious in the selection of a successor. Philibert do Naillac, a native of Bern, grand- prior of Aquitaine, was the knight who enlisted in his favour the majority of suffrages. Subsequent events fully bore out the