Page:The Book of Orders of Knighthood and Decorations of Honour of All Nations.djvu/650

Rh Commanderies, comprising more than two hundred _priories, fiefs, cloisters, hospitals, castles, boroughs, two towns, and one hundred and seventy-eight villages, exclusive of its possessions in Portugal. The extent, however, of such power and wealth (the revenue of the Grand Master alone amounted to 15,000 pistoles) naturally roused the envy and fear of the Kings, and more especially, when they (the Kings) considered the important part which the Order had played during the internal disturbances in Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as also in the disputes between the crowns of Leon and Castille. Nor was the reluctance evinced by the members to accommodate themselves to the new order of things, as introduced by the preponderate power of the monarchs into all the political and civil affairs of the State and society, more calculated to allay those fears and suspicions. The consequence was, that the Order had recourse to cabals and intrigues to maintain its own authority and power, especially after the Moors had been expelled from Spain, when its existence had become less necessary, and when its practical utility for the State was almost nugatory. At last, after the death of the forty-third Grand Master, Don Alfonzo de Cardenas, in 1493, Ferdinand and Isabella assumed the administration of the Order on the strength of a Bull of Pope Alexander VI.—which was but a prelude to that of Pope Hadrian VI., of the 12th May, 1522—in which the Grand Mastership was for ever vested in the crown of Spain.

In consequence of the latter Bull, the Emperor Charles V. established a council, composed of a President and six Knights, to manage and conduct all the affairs of the Order, and with full power to appoint ecclesiastical commissioners in all matters purely spiritual. The only appeal from the tribunal was to the Holy Chair at Rome.

The Order, having thus become dependent on, and subject to the arbitrary power of a secular sovereign, rapidly decreased in