At the time of our story, in the year 1525, this forcing process
was about over. Under the relentless measures of Ferdinand and
Isabella, with whose story all American children, at least,
should be familiar, the last Moorish stronghold had fallen, in
the very year in which Columbus discovered America, and Spain,
from the Pyrenees to the Straits of Gibraltar, acknowledged the
mastership of its Christian sovereigns.
But the centuries of warfare that had made the Spaniards a fierce
and warlike race, had also filled Spain with frowning castles and
embattled towns. And such an embattled town was this same city of
Avila, in which, in 1525, lived the stern and pious old grandee,
Don Alphonso Sanchez de Cepeda, his sentimental and
romance-loving wife, the Donna Beatrix, and their twelve sturdy
and healthy children.
Religious warfare, as it is the most bitter and relentless of
strifes, is also the most brutal. It turns the natures of men and
women into quite a different channel from the one in which the
truths they are fighting for would seek to lead them; and of all
relentless and brutal religious wars, few have been more bitter
than the one that for fully five hundred years had wasted the
land of Spain.
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