he
had come to aid. Don Pedro galloped excitedly over the plain seeking his
rival, and, chancing to meet Lopez de Orozco, one of his former friends,
now the prisoner of a Gascon knight, he stabbed him to the heart, despite
the efforts of the Gascon in his defence. The report of this murder filled
the Black Prince with indignation, which was heightened when Don Pedro
offered to ransom all the Castilian prisoners, plainly indicating that he
intended to murder them. Prince Edward sternly refused, only consenting to
deliver up certain nobles who had been declared traitors before the
revolution. These Don Pedro immediately had beheaded before his tent.

The breach between the allies rapidly widened, Don Pedro, as soon as he
fairly got possession of the throne, breaking all his engagements with the
Black Prince, while he was unable, from the empty state of his treasury,
to pay the allied troops. Four months Prince Edward waited, with growing
indignation, for redress, while disease was rapidly carrying off his men,
and then marched in anger from Spain with scarcely a fifth of the proud
array with which he had won the battle of Najera.

The restored king soon justified his title of Peter the Cruel by a series
of sanguinary executions, murdering all of the adherents of his rival on
whom he could lay his hands. In this thirst for revenge not even women
escaped, and at length he committed an act which aroused the indignation
of the whole kingdom. Don Alfonso de Guzman had refused to follow the king
into exile. He now kept out of his reach, but his mother, Dona Urraca de
Osorio, fell into the hands of the monster, and was punished for being the
mother of a rebel by being burned alive on the ramparts of Seville.

These excesses of cruelty roused a rebellious sentiment throughout
Castile, of which Henry, who had escaped to Aragon from the field of
Najera, took advantage. Supplied with money by the king of France, he
purchased arms and recruited soldiers, many of the French and Castilians
who had been taken prisoners at Najera and been released on parole joining
him in hopes of winning the means of paying their ransoms. Crossing the
Ebro, he marched upon Calahorra, in which the year before he had been
proclaimed king. Here numerous volunteers joined him, and at the head of a
considerable force he marched upon Burgos, which surrendered after a faint
show of resistance.

During the winter the campaign continued, Leon, Madrid, and othe