“Vicars of God are the kings, each one in his kingdom, placed over the people to maintain them in justice and in truth.  They have been called the heart and soul of the people.  For as the soul lies in the heart of men, and by it the body lives and is maintained, so in the king lies justice, which is the life and maintenance of the people of his lordship....

“And let the king guard the thoughts of his heart in three manners:  firstly let him not desire nor greatly care to have superfluous and worthless honors.  Superfluous and worthless honors the king ought not to desire.  For that which is beyond necessity cannot last, and being lost, and come short of, turns to dishonor.  Moreover, the wise men have said that it is no less a virtue for a man to keep that which he has than to gain that which he has not; because keeping comes of judgment, but gain of good fortune.  And the king who keeps his honor in such a manner that every day and by all means it is increased, lacking nothing, and does not lose that which he has for that which he desires to have,—­he is held for a man of right judgment, who loves his own people, and desires to lead them to all good.  And God will keep him in this world from the dishonoring of men, and in the next from the dishonor of the wicked in hell.”

Besides the ‘Siete Partidas,’ the royal philosopher was the author, or compiler, of a ‘Book of Hunting’; a treatise on Chess; a system of law, the ‘Fuero Castellano’ (Spanish Code),—­an attempt to check the monstrous irregularities of municipal privilege; ’La Gran Conquista d’Ultramar (The Great Conquest Beyond the Sea), an account of the wars of the Crusades, which is the earliest known specimen of Castilian prose; and several smaller works, now collected under the general title of ‘Opuscules Legales’ (Minor Legal Writings).  It was long supposed that he wrote the ‘Tesoro’ (Thesaurus), a curious medley of ignorance and superstition, much of it silly, and all of it curiously inconsistent with the acknowledged character of the enlightened King.  Modern scholarship, however, discards this petty treatise from the list of his productions.

His ‘Tablas Alfonsinas’ (Alfonsine Tables), to which Chaucer refers in the ‘Frankeleine’s Tale,’ though curiously mystical, yet were really scientific, and rank among the most famous of mediaeval books.  Alfonso had the courage and the wisdom to recall to Toledo the heirs and successors of the great Arabian philosophers and the learned Rabbis, who had been banished by religious fanaticism, and there to establish a permanent council—­a mediaeval Academy of Sciences—­which devoted itself to the study of the heavens and the making of astronomical calculations.  “This was the first time,” says the Spanish historian, “that in barbarous times the Republic of Letters was invited to contemplate a great school of learning,—­men occupied through many years in rectifying the old planetary observations, in disputing about the most abstruse details of this science, in constructing new instruments, and observing, by means of them, the courses of the stars, their declensions, their ascensions, eclipses, longitudes, and latitudes.”  It was the vision of Roger Bacon fulfilled.