Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/180

174, had but three degenerate ancestors among the twelve. In the same degree of kinship for his son Alfonso X., we find five among eighteen. For the next generation (Sancho IV.) the number is two in twelve. Ferdinand IV. (d. 1312), his son, had three in fifteen. So we see that this type of character, though common, was present in Spanish royalty in these early centuries only to the extent of about one in four or five, but in the ancestry of Alfonso XI., on account of a gathering of this cruel type, we find no less than eleven such among the fifteen who could furnish records of any sort. It is simply that about Alfonso XI. there happens to be brought together a number of strains from the four different countries, Aragon, Castile, Hungary and Portugal, each containing an average amount of the qualities in question. However, owing to strange jumping about, which so many characteristics show in the course of hereditary transmission, Alfonso himself shows none of them, but is himself the bridge over which they pass to appear in his son whose actions seemed more like that of a demon than a man the incarnation of cruelty itself.

A very close intermarriage was made by this Alfonso IX. of Castile. His wife was the daughter of Alfonso IV. of Portugal, a brilliant warrior, but withal a cruel tyrant and the one of all rulers in Portugal on whom rests the greatest odium.

Now let us see what proportion of the passionate and cruel would be found in five degrees of kinship for a child of Alfonso XI. by such a wedlock. Owing to the intermarriage we find but eleven different persons as several names appear twice. There are only three who are free from the characteristics in question, or eight in eleven show the passionate and cruel type. If we take all for six degrees removed we find the number even worse, eleven in fourteen. A son could scarcely escape the worst sort of inheritance, except by the greatest fortune. What did happen was this. Pedro, the only legitimate son of Alfonso XI., known in all history as 'Pedro the Cruel,' amused himself in some such ways as this. He imprisoned and foully treated his first wife, Blanche of Bourbon, and during the first part of his reign had many noblemen, among others Don Juan, his cousin, executed in his presence. Once, it is stated, in the presence of the ladies of the court he commanded a number of gentlemen to be butchered until the Queen, his mother, fell into a dead faint in company with most of the ladies present. "He then caused to be murdered his own aunt, Dona Leonora of Aragon, mother of the above Don Juan, for nothing except that Aragon would not make peace with him 'being compelled to get Moors to do the job, as no Castilian could be induced to undertake it,' says King Pedro IV. of Aragon in his memoirs. A certain priest coming before