As soon as the victory of Toro, in March, 1476, gave promise of settled government, the idea of reviving the Hermandades occurred to Alfonso de Quintanilla, Contador Mayor, or Chief Auditor, of Ferdinand and Isabella. With their approval he broached the subject to leading citizens of the principal towns in Leon and Old Castile; deputies were sent to meet at Dueñas and the project was debated. So many obstacles presented themselves that it would have been abandoned but for an eloquent argument by Quintanilla. His plan was adopted, but so fearful were the deputies that the taxes necessary for its maintenance might become permanent that they limited its duration to three years. Under the impulse of the sovereigns it rapidly took shape and was organized with the Duke of Villahermosa, natural brother of Ferdinand, at its head.[83] No time was lost in extending it throughout the kingdoms, in spite of resistance on the part of those who regarded with well-founded apprehension not only its efficiency as a means of coercing malefactors but as a dangerous development of the royal power. Seville, for instance, recalcitrated and only yielded to a peremptory command from Isabella in June, 1477.[84] One of the reasons assigned, in 1507, by Ferdinand for assenting to the demoralizing arrangement under which the Archbishop of Compostella resigned his see in favor of his natural son, was that he had received the royal judges and the Hermandad throughout his province, in opposition to the will of the nobles and gentry.[85] When, in 1479, Alonso Carrillo and the Marquis of Villena made a final attempt to urge the King of Portugal to another invasion of Castile, one of the arguments advanced was the hatred entertained for Ferdinand and Isabella in consequence of the taxes levied to support the three thousand horsemen of the Hermandad.[86] In some provinces the resistance was obstinate. In 1479 we find Isabella writing to the authorities of Biscay, expressing surprise at the neglect of the royal orders and threatening condign punishment for further delay, notwithstanding which repeated commands were requisite, and it was not till 1488 that the stubborn Biscayans submitted, while soon afterward complaints came from Guipuzcoa that the local courts neutralized it by admitting appeals from its sentences.[87] It was in the same year that Ferdinand obtained from the Córtes of Saragossa assent to the introduction of the Hermandad in his kingdom of Aragon, but the Aragonese, always jealous of the royal power, chafed under it for, in December, 1493, Isabella, writing from Saragossa, expresses a fear that the Córtes may suppress it, though it is the only means of enforcing justice there, and in the Córtes of Monçon, in 1510, Ferdinand was obliged to approve a _fuero_ abolishing it and forbidding for the future anything of the kind to be established.[88] In 1490 the independent kingdom of Navarre adopted the system and co-operated with its neighbors by allowing malefactors to be followed across the border and extraditing them when caught--even absconding debtors being thus tracked and surrendered.[89] The institution thus founded was watched with Isabella's customary care. In 1483 complaints arose of bribery and extortion, when she summoned a convention at Pinto of representatives from all the provinces, where the guilty were punished and abuses were reformed.[90]