Page:The Book of Orders of Knighthood and Decorations of Honour of All Nations.djvu/655

304 moderate income was probably owing to the circumstance that it had ceded a part of its conquests to the Orders of Alcantara and Aviz. The Order of Calatrava possessed only sixteen Priories and-fifty six Commanderies, the largest of which yielded no more thak 10,500 ducats of revenue, and the others of no more than 7000 to 9000. Notwithstanding, however, these scanty resources, the Grand Masters, whose incomes amounted to about 40,000 gold thalers, became very powerful and influential, chiefly owing to their having been elected from the highest Spanish families, by which means they exercised great influence on the public affairs of the country, though they frequently paid for it with their lives. Two of them died on the scaffold, accused of high treason, while after the death of the thirtieth Grand Master Garcia Lopez de Padilla, when the Chapter was about to elect a successor in 1489, Ferdinand and Isabella, produced a Bull of Pope Innocent VIII, by which he transferred for ever the administration of the Order to the King and his heirs, alleging that he was led to the measure by the conviction that the Order was, in its existing constitution, entirely incompatible with the power and unity of the State, and that it continually acted in opposition to the will and intention of the monarch, retarding thereby the growing welfare of the nation at large, and lending support and encouragement to the usurping and ambitious aristocracy. Ferdinand accordingly reserved to the Crown the right of appointing a Grand Master, and became himself the manager of the property of the Order, with the view—as the Jesuit Mariana said—to apply the revenues of the Commanderies to the honourable support of brave soldiers in their old age.

Afterwards, when the Emperor Charles V., as Administrator of the Order, held in 1523, the first general Chapter of the Order, Pope Hadrian VI. he vested for ever in the Spanish