Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. III.djvu/514

486 486 FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. PART II. composing the crown of Castile, to the exclusion of Granada, Navarre, and the Aragonese dominions. '^^ It was taken, moreover, before the nation had time to recruit from the long and exhausting struggle of the Moorish war, and twentj-five years before the close of the reign, when the population, under cir- cumstances peculiarly favorable, must have swelled to a much larger amount. Thus circumscribed, however, it was probably considerably in advance of that of England at the same period. '^^ How have the destinies of the two countries since been reversed ! 143 I am acquainted with no suf- ficient and authentic data for com- puting the population, at this time, of the crown of Aragon, always greatly below that of the sister kingdom. I find as little to be re- lied on, notwithstanding the nu- merous estimates, in one form or another, vouchsafed by historians and travellers, of the population of Granada. Marineo enumerates fourteen cities and ninety-seven towns, (omitting, as he says, many places of less note,) at the time of the conquest ; a statement obvious- ly too vague for statistical pur- poses. (Cosas Memorables, fol. 179.) The capital, swelled by the influx from the country, contained, according to him, 200,000 souls at the same period. (Fol. 177.) In 1506, at the time of the forced con- versions, we find the numbers in the city dwindled to fifty, or at most, seventy thousand. (Comp. Bleda, Coronica, lib. 5, cap. 23, and Bernaldez, Reyes Catolicos, MS., cap. 159.) Loose as these esti- mates necessarily are, we have no better to guide us in calculating the total amount of the population of the Moorish kingdom, or of the losses sustained by the copious em- igrations during the first fifteen years after the conquest ; although there has been no lack of confident assertion, as to both, in later wri- ters. The desideratum, in regard to Granada, will now probably not be supplied ; the public offices in the kingdom of Aragon, if searched with the same industry as those in Castile, would doubtless afford the means for correcting the crude esti- mates, so current respecting that country. 144 Hallam, in his " Constitu- tional History of England," esti- mates the population of the realm, in 1485, at 3,000,000, (vol. i. p. 10.) The discrepancies, however, of the best historians on this sub- ject, prove the difficulty of arriving at even a probable result. Hume, on the authority of Sir Edward Coke, puts the population of Eng- land (including people of all sorts) a century later, in 1588, at only 900,000. The historian cites Lo- dovico Guicciardini, however, for another estimate, as high as 2,000,000, for the same reign of Queen Elizabeth. History of Eng- land, vol. vi. Append. 3.