The history of the world has its great people and its great periods which one can isolate for the purpose of more detailed study as representing turning-points in the march of civilization, epochs which seem to sum up all the movements and cultural forces of the preceding centuries, bringing them to a flowering bloom in a few brief years, and seemingly bequeathing a glorious inheritance to the fortunate age to follow. Such a period was the early European Renaissance. Such, especially, was the early Renaissance in Spain.

Calderón, in one of his autos, says that the study of history only serves to make men learn their lesson and take warning. He only saw in history the ruin of great enterprises, powerful and prosperous nations brought low by the folly of their rulers, and the human race given over to pleasures and lusts, heedless of the future. Writing as he did in the Spain of the seventeenth century, he voiced the disillusion and despair of the more enlightened and high-minded of his countrymen who saw no hope for humanity in a world eaten through and through with rottenness. Had he lived two hundred years earlier, in 1460, his feelings would have been identical. Passing from the court of Philip IV to that of Henry IV, he would have noticed little difference. He would have seen vice and corruption reigning in the court of Castile, anarchy in the country, the peasants bled white by grasping nobles who only served their country when they engaged in mutual extermination. The Middle Ages in Spain, as indeed in most countries, had sunk as low as this, to an agonizing death in anarchy and civil war.