Outside the Church there was little learning or desire for knowledge, nor did any other means for recompensing scholars exist than by the bestowal of ecclesiastical benefices.  A prebend, a canonry, a professorship in the schools or university were the sole sources of income for a man of letters.  Peter Martyr was such, nor did any other road to the distinction he frankly desired, open before him.  Perhaps Archbishop Talavera made this point clear to him.  Disillusionised, if indeed he had ever entertained serious hope of success as a soldier, it cost him no effort to change from the military to the more congenial sacerdotal caste.

Granada, for all its charms, quickly palled, and his first enthusiasm subsiding, gave place to a sense of confinement, isolation, and unrest.  Not the companionship of his two attached friends could make life in a provincial town, remote from the Court, tolerable to one who had spent ten years of his life in the cultured world of Rome.  The monotonous routine of a canon’s duties meant stagnation to his keen, curious temperament, athirst for movement and novelty.  His place was amongst men, in the midst of events where he might observe, study, and philosophically comment.  Writing to Cardinal Mendoza, he frankly confessed his unrest, declaring that the delights and beauties of Nature, praised by the classical writers, ended by disgusting him and that he could never know contentment save in the society of great men.  His nature craved life on the mountain tops of distinction rather than existence in the valley of content.  He did not yearn for Tusculum.

To manage a graceful re-entry to the Court was not easy.  To Archbishop Talavera, genial and humane, had succeeded the austere Ximenes as confessor to Isabella.  The post was an important one, for the ascendancy of its occupant over the Queen was incontestable, but, while Peter Martyr’s perspicacity was quick to grasp the desirability of conciliating the new confessor, it equally divined the barriers forbidding access to the remote, detached Franciscan.  In one of his letters he compared the penetration of Ximenes to that of St. Augustine, his austerity to that of St. Jerome, and his zeal for the faith to that of St. Ambrose.  Cardinal Ximenes had admirers and detractors, but he had no friends.

In this dilemma Martyr felt himself alone, abandoned, and he was not a little troubled as to his future prospects, for he was without an advocate near the Queen.  He wrote to several personages, even to the young Prince, Don Juan, and evidently without result, for he observed with a tinge of bitterness:  “I see that King’s favours, the chief object of men’s efforts, are more shifting and empty than the wind.”  Fortune was kinder to him than she often shows herself to others who no less assiduously cultivate her favour, nor was his patience over-taxed by long waiting.  With the return of peace, Queen Isabella’s interest in her plan for encouraging a revival of learning amongst