On the one hand stood Popes and princes, founding their claims to absolute authority upon titles that had slight rational or national validity.

These potentates were ill-combined among themselves, and mutually jealous.

On the other side were ranged disruptive forces of the most heterogeneous kinds--remnants from antique party-warfare, fragments of obsolete domestic feuds, new strivings after freer life in mentally down-trodden populations, blending with crime and misery and want and profligacy to compose an opposition which exasperated despotism.

These anarchical conditions were due in large measure to the troubles caused by foreign campaigns of invasion.

They were also due to the Spanish type of manners imposed upon the ruling classes, which the native genius accepted with fraudulent intelligence, and to which it adapted itself by artifice.