Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/263

119 DEATH OF HENRY IV. 119 against the Moors, displaying on several occasions chapter an uncommon degree of enterprise and personal 1 - heroism. On succeeding to his paternal honors, his haughty spirit, impatient of a rival, led him to re- vive the old feud with the duke of Medina Sidonia, the head of the Guzmans, who, though the most powerful nobleman in Andalusia, was far his inferior in capacity and military science. ^° On one occasion the duke of Medina Sidonia mustered an army of twenty thousand men against his antagonist ; on another, no less than fifteen hundred houses of the Ponce faction were burnt to the ground in Seville. Such were the potent en- gines employed by these petty sovereigns in their conflicts with one another, and such the havoc which they brought on the fairest portion of the Peninsula. The husbandman, stripped of his har- vest and driven from his fields, abandoned himself to idleness, or sought subsistence by plunder. A scarcity ensued in the years 1472 and 1473, in which the prices of the most necessary commodities rose to such an exorbitant height, as put them beyond the reach of any but the affluent. But it would be wearisome to go into all the loathsome details of wretchedness and crime brought on this unhappy country by an imbecile government and a disputed succession, and which are portrayed with 10 Bernaldez, Reyes Catolicos, Mendoza, (Toledo, 1625.) pp. 138, MS., cap. 3. — Salazar de Mendo- 150. — Zuiiiga, Anales de Sevilla, za, Cronica de el Gran Cardenal de p. 362. Espana, Don Pedro Gonzalez de