The age of the conquistadores was already over when Philip II ascended the throne of Spain and the Indies. The leaders of the great entradas were nearly all dead. Some died prematurely of their wounds and their exertions, some by the knives of jealous rivals. A few—Cortés was one of them—spent their middle age in bored and litigious retirement. Not one was long allowed to administer for the crown the provinces he had conquered. Already by 1558 an administrative service, civil and ecclesiastical, had been created and was rapidly growing in numbers, efficiency and cost. The conquistadores had no successors in their own violent mould. Miguel López de Legazpi, who in 1561 undertook the conquest of the Philippines, had been an official in Mexico; his highly successful entrada was notable for diplomacy and organising ability rather than for skill in war and was, indeed, almost bloodless. Francisco de Ibarra, conqueror of Durango, and Francisco de Urdiñola, who founded Saltillo and settled Coahuila, were typical of the later generation of conquistadores, no strangers to violence on occasion, but entrepreneurs in silver-mining and cattle-ranching, organisers of settlements, rather than conquerors of semi-barbarous empires. There were, in fact, no empires left to conquer. In North America, Coronado's expedition of 1540 had revealed nothing but arid hills and apparently boundless prairies, occupied by great herds of ‘wild cattle’ and a scattering of equally wild Indians; no place for men who lived by their swords or by their wits.