[22] How different from the parental care with which Isabella watched over
the welfare of her soldiers in the long war of Granada! The queen appears
to have taken no part in the management of these wars, which,
notwithstanding the number of her own immediate subjects embarked in them,
she probably regarded, from the first, as appertaining to Aragon, as
exclusively as the conquests in the New World did to Castile. Indeed,
whatever degree of interest she may have felt in their success, the
declining state of her health at this period would not have allowed her to
take any part in the conduct of them.

Gonsalvo was not wanting to himself in this trying emergency, and his
noble spirit seemed to rise as all outward and visible resources failed.
He cheered his troops with promises of speedy relief, talking confidently
of the supplies of grain he expected from Sicily, and the men and money he
was to receive from Spain and Venice. He contrived, too, says Giovio, that
a report should get abroad, that a ponderous coffer lying in his apartment
was filled with gold, which he could draw upon in the last extremity. The
old campaigners, indeed, according to the same authority, shook their
heads at these and other agreeable fictions of their general, with a very
skeptical air. They derived some confirmation, however, from the arrival
soon after of a Sicilian bark, laden with corn, and another from Venice
with various serviceable stores and wearing apparel, which Gonsalvo bought
on his own credit and that of his principal officers, and distributed
gratuitously among his destitute soldiers. [23]

At this time he received the unwelcome tidings that a small force which
had been sent from Spain to his assistance, under Don Manuel de Benavides,
and which had effected a junction with one much larger from Sicily under
Hugo de Cardona, was surprised by D'Aubigny near Terranova, and totally
defeated. This disaster was followed by the reduction of all Calabria,