, Aragon, and Granada,
which, after surviving as independent states for centuries, had been
first brought under one sceptre in the reign of his father, Charles the
Fifth. He was king of Naples and Sicily, and duke of Milan, which
important possessions enabled him to control, to a great extent, the
nicely balanced scales of Italian politics. He was lord of Franche
Comte, and of the Low Countries, comprehending the most flourishing and
populous provinces in Christendom, whose people had made the greatest
progress in commerce, husbandry, and the various mechanic arts. As
titular king of England, he eventually obtained an influence, which, as
we shall see, enabled him to direct the counsels of that country to his
own purposes. In Africa he possessed the Cape de Verd Islands and the
Canaries, as well as Tunis, Oran, and some other important places on the
Barbary coast. He owned the Philippines and the Spice Islands in Asia.
In America, besides his possessions in the West Indies, he was master of
the rich empires of Mexico and Peru, and claimed a right to a boundless
extent of country, that offered an inexhaustible field to the cupidity
and enterprise of the Spanish adventurer. Thus the dominions of Philip
stretched over every quarter of the globe. The flag of Castile was seen
in the remotest latitudes,--on the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the
far-off Indian seas,--passing from port to port, and uniting by
commercial intercourse the widely scattered members of her vast colonial
empire.

The Spanish army consisted of the most formidable infantry in Europe;
veterans who had been formed under the eye of Charles the Fifth and of
his generals, who had fought on the fields of Pavia and of Muhlberg, or
who, in the New World, had climbed the Andes with Almagro and Pizarro,
and helped these bold chiefs to overthrow the dynasty of the Incas. The
navy of Spain and Flanders combined far exceeded that of any other power
in the number and size of its vessels; and if its supremacy might be
contested by England on the "narrow seas," it rode the undisputed
mistress of the ocean. To supply the means for maintaining this costly
establishment, as well as the general machinery of government, Philip
had at his command the treasures of the New World; and if the incessant
enterprises of his father had drained the exchequer, it was soon
replenished by the silver streams that flowed in from the inexhaustible
mines of Zacatecas and Potosi.

All this va