Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. II.djvu/99

75 SIEGE OF BAZA. /O mense host, notwithstandine: the severe famine of chapter . . . XIV. the preceding year, were punctually furnished, in ^- spite of every embarrassment presented by the want of navigable rivers, and the interposition of a pre- cipitous and pathless sierra. The history of this campaign is, indeed, most isabeiia^s •/ r o ' ' popularity honorable to the courage, constancy, and thorough ence"'^"' discipline of the Spanish soldier, and to the patriot- ism and general resources of the nation ; but most of all to Isabella. She it was, who fortified the of our best authorities during the remainder of the history, was a native of Arona (not of Anghiera, as commonly supposed), a place situated on the borders of Lake Maggiore in Italy. (Mazzuchel- li, Scrittori d' Italia, (Brescia, 1753 -63,) torn. ii. ■yoce Anghiera.) He was of noble Milanese extraction. In 1477, at twenty-two years of age, he was sent to complete his education at Rome, where he continued ten years, and formed an intimacy with the most distin- guished literary characters of that cultivated capital. In 1487, he was persuaded by the Castilian ambassador, the count of Tendilla, to accompany him to Spain, where he was received with marked dis- tinction by the queen, who would have at once engaged him in the tuition of the young nobility of the court, but, Martyr having express- ed a preference of a military life, she, with her usual delicacy, de- clined to press him on the point. He was present, as we have seen, at the siege of Baza, and continued with the army during the subse- quent campaigns of the Moorish war. Many passages of his cor- respondence, at this period, show a whimsical mixture of self-compla- cency with a consciousness of the ludicrous figure which he made in " exchanging the Muses for Mars." At the close of the war, he en- tered the ecclesiastical profession, for which he had been originally destined, and was persuaded to re- sume his literary vocation. He opened his school at Valladolid, Saragossa, Barcelona, Alcala de Henares, and other places ; and it was thronged with the principal young nobility from all parts of Spain, who, as he boasts in one of his letters, drew their literary nourishment from him. " Suxe- runt mea literalia ubera Caslellae principes fere omnes." His im- portant services were fully esti- mated by the queen, and, after her death, by J'erdinand and Charles v., and he was recompensed with high ecclesiastical preferment as well as civil dignities. He died about the year 1525, at the age of seventy, and his remains were in- terred beneath a monument in the cathedral church of Granada, of which he was prior. Among Martyr's principal works is a ireatise ' ' De Legatione Baby- lonica," being an account of a visit to the sultan of Egypt, in 1501, for the purpose of deprecating the re- taliation with which he had men- aced the Christian residents in Palestine, for the injuries inflicted on the Spanish Moslems. Peter Martyr conducted his negotiation with such address, that he not only