The history of the popes, from the close of the middle ages : drawn ...

TP{E ORDERS IN SPAIN. 249
obstinate resistance, that he succeeded in reuniting them with
the Observants.^
Immediately after his election Pius V. displayed special
anxiet}^ in the case of the Spanish Orders. This was the result
of representations laid before him by Philip II. Even before
the Council of Trent had issued its decrees on religious com-
munities, the Spanish king had had their reform under con-
sideration. His particular object was to make the Orders in
his kingdom independent of superiors residing abroad. The
reasons which prompted this desire had their root in a genuine
zeal for religion. In the case of the Order of Calatrava, for
example, the superior was appointed by the Cistercian abbot
of Morimond, and his choice almost always fell upon a Frenchman,
who did not know Spanish, did not understand the
conditions of his subjects, and who therefore could not remove
the evils which had crept in. The French monasteries,
moreover, were decadent in various ways, and in some cases
were even infected with the ideas of the new religion, to such
an extent that Philip very reasonably could not look for any
good results from this close union with France. It must be
admitted, however, that considerations of quite another kind
also influenced the king. Some of the monasteries in Navarre
and Aragon had to make contributions to the mother houses
in France, which gave the French king an excuse for inter-
ference in Spanish affairs. ^
In 1560 the king obtained from Pius IV. for the Order of
Calatrava its independence from Morimond. He had similar
plans for the Cistercians in Navarre and Aragon, and later,
in 1564, for the Trinitarians, and in the same year for the
Carmelites, who were all to be only nominally dependent upon
their Generals in Italy. It was also the king's wish that the
Grand Master of the Mercedarii should always be a Spaniard,
though he was never to hold his office for life. When in 1563
1 Laderchi, 1568 n. 34. BASCAPfe, i, 2, c. 5, p. 36. loanni de
Stronconio O. Min. on the reform of the Clareni, August i, 1567,
in Wadding, XX., 445.
* Serrano in Corresp. dipL, IV., xxix.