Spain and Its World, 1500-1700

Author: John Huxtable Elliott
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300048636
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
It used to be said that the sun never set on the empire of the King of Spain. It was therefore appropriate that Emperor Charles V should have commissioned from Battista Agnese in 1543 a world map as a birthday present for his sixteen-year-old son, the future Philip II. This was the world as Charles V and his successors of the House of Austria knew it, a world crossed by the golden path of the treasure fleets that linked Spain to the riches of the Indies. It is this world, with Spain at its center, that forms the subject of this book. J.H. Elliott, the pre-eminent historian of early modern Spain and its world, originally published these essays in a variety of books and journals. They have here been grouped into four sections, each with an introduction outlining the circumstances in which they were written and offering additional reflections. The first section, on the American world, explores the links between Spain and its American possessions. The second section, "The European World," extends beyond the Castilian center of the Iberian peninsula and its Catalan periphery to embrace sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe as a whole. In "The World of the Court," the author looks at the character of the court of the Spanish Habsburgs and the perennially uneasy relationship between the world of political power and the world of arts and letters. The final section is devoted to the great historical question of the decline of Spain, a question that continues to resonate in the Anglo-American world of today.

History in the Making

Author: J. H. Elliott
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300187017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
From the vantage point of nearly sixty years devoted to research and the writing of history, J. H. Elliott steps back from his work to consider the progress of historical scholarship. From his own experiences as a historian of Spain, Europe, and the Americas, he provides a deft and sharp analysis of the work that historians do and how the field has changed since the 1950s.The author begins by explaining the roots of his interest in Spain and its past, then analyzes the challenges of writing the history of a country other than one's own. In succeeding chapters he offers acute observations on such topics as the history of national and imperial decline, political history, biography, and art and cultural history. Elliott concludes with an assessment of changes in the approach to history over the past half-century, including the impact of digital technology, and argues that a comprehensive vision of the past remains essential. Professional historians, students of history, and those who read history for pleasure will find in Elliott's delightful book a new appreciation of what goes into the shaping of historical works and how those works in turn can shape the world of thought and action.

Empires of the Atlantic World

Author: J. H. Elliott
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300133553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 588

Book Description
This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus's arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America. Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires' processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into aspects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.

Philip III and the Pax Hispanica, 1598-1621

Author: Paul C. Allen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300076820
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
Impoverished and exhausted after fifty years of incessant warfare, the great Spanish Empire at the turn of the sixteenth century negotiated treaties with its three most powerful enemies: England, France, and the Netherlands. This intriguing book examines the strategies that led King Philip III to extend the laurel branch to his foes. Paul Allen argues that, contrary to widespread belief, the king's gestures of peace were in fact part of a grand strategy to enable Spain to regain military and economic strength while its opponents were falsely lulled away from their military pursuits. From the outset, Allen contends, Philip and his advisers intended the Pax Hispanica to continue only until Spain was able to resume its battles--and defeat its enemies. Drawing on primary sources from the four countries involved, the book begins with a discussion of how Spanish foreign policy was formulated and implemented to achieve political and religious aims. The author investigates the development of Philip's "peace" strategy, the Twelve Years' Truce, and the decision to end the truce and engage in war with the Dutch, and then with the English and French. Renewed warfare was no failure of peace policy, Allen shows, but a conscious decision to pursue a consistent strategy. Nevertheless the negotiation for peace did represent a new diplomatic method with significant implications for both the future of the Spanish Empire and the practices of European diplomacy.

Sword of Empire

Author: Donald E. Chipman
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1933337907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Book Description
Sword of Empire: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas from Columbus to Cortés, 1492–1529 is, by design, an approachable and accessible history of some of the most life-altering events in the story of man. Chipman examines the contributions of Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortes in creating the foundations of the Spanish Empire in North America. Chipman has produced a readable and accurate narrative for students and the reading public, although some information presented on Cortes cannot be found elsewhere in print and is therefore of interest to specialists in the history of Spain in America. Exclusive material from Professor France V. Scholes and the author share insights into the multi layered complexities of a man born in 1484 and named at birth Fernando Cortes. As for Columbus, born in Genoa on the Italian peninsula in 1451 and given the name Cristobal de Colon, he is a more transformative man than Cortes in bringing Western Civilization to the major Caribbean islands in the Spanish West Indies and beyond. Historians strive to present a “usable past” and the post-Columbian world is, of course, the modern world. Columbus's discoveries, those of other mariners who followed to the south in America, and still other eastward to the Asia placed the world on the path of global interdependence-both good and ill-for peoples of the world. There are no footnotes in Sword of Empire—this is narrative at its finest—but there are extensive bibliographies for each chapter that will prove useful for readers of every background.

Rivers of Gold

Author: Hugh Thomas
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0804152144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 722

Book Description
From one of the greatest historians of the Spanish world, here is a fresh and fascinating account of Spain’s early conquests in the Americas. Hugh Thomas’s magisterial narrative of Spain in the New World has all the characteristics of great historical literature: amazing discoveries, ambition, greed, religious fanaticism, court intrigue, and a battle for the soul of humankind. Hugh Thomas shows Spain at the dawn of the sixteenth century as a world power on the brink of greatness. Her monarchs, Fernando and Isabel, had retaken Granada from Islam, thereby completing restoration of the entire Iberian peninsula to Catholic rule. Flush with success, they agreed to sponsor an obscure Genoese sailor’s plan to sail west to the Indies, where, legend purported, gold and spices flowed as if they were rivers. For Spain and for the world, this decision to send Christopher Columbus west was epochal—the dividing line between the medieval and the modern. Spain’s colonial adventures began inauspiciously: Columbus’s meagerly funded expedition cost less than a Spanish princess’s recent wedding. In spite of its small scale, it was a mission of astounding scope: to claim for Spain all the wealth of the Indies. The gold alone, thought Columbus, would fund a grand Crusade to reunite Christendom with its holy city, Jerusalem. The lofty aspirations of the first explorers died hard, as the pursuit of wealth and glory competed with the pursuit of pious impulses. The adventurers from Spain were also, of course, curious about geographical mysteries, and they had a remarkable loyalty to their country. But rather than bridging earth and heaven, Spain’s many conquests bore a bitter fruit. In their search for gold, Spaniards enslaved “Indians” from the Bahamas and the South American mainland. The eloquent protests of Bartolomé de las Casas, here much discussed, began almost immediately. Columbus and other Spanish explorers—Cortés, Ponce de León, and Magellan among them—created an empire for Spain of unsurpassed size and scope. But the door was soon open for other powers, enemies of Spain, to stake their claims. Great men and women dominate these pages: cardinals and bishops, priors and sailors, landowners and warriors, princes and priests, noblemen and their determined wives. Rivers of Gold is a great story brilliantly told. More significant, it is an engrossing history with many profound—often disturbing—echoes in the present.

World Without End

Author: Hugh Thomas
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 081299812X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Book Description
Following Rivers of Gold and The Golden Empire and building on five centuries of scholarship, World Without End is the epic conclusion of an unprecedented three-volume history of the Spanish Empire from “one of the most productive and wide-ranging historians of modern times” (The New York Times Book Review). The legacy of imperial Spain was shaped by many hands. But the dramatic human story of the extraordinary projection of Spanish might in the second half of the sixteenth century has never been fully told—until now. In World Without End, Hugh Thomas chronicles the lives, loves, conflicts, and conquests of the complex men and women who carved up the Americas for the glory of Spain. Chief among them is the towering figure of King Philip II, the cultivated Spanish monarch whom a contemporary once called “the arbiter of the world.” Cheerful and pious, he inherited vast authority from his father, Emperor Charles V, but nevertheless felt himself unworthy to wield it. His forty-two-year reign changed the face of the globe forever. Alongside Philip we find the entitled descendants of New Spain’s original explorers—men who, like their king, came into possession of land they never conquered and wielded supremacy they never sought. Here too are the Roman Catholic religious leaders of the Americas, whose internecine struggles created possibilities that the emerging Jesuit order was well-positioned to fill. With the sublime stories of arms and armadas, kings and conquistadors come tales of the ridiculous: the opulent parties of New Spain’s wealthy hedonists and the unexpected movement to encourage Philip II to conquer China. Finally, Hugh Thomas unearths the first indictments of imperial Spain’s labor rights abuses in the Americas—and the early attempts by its more enlightened rulers and planters to address them. Written in the brisk, flowing narrative style that has come to define Hugh Thomas’s work, the final volume of this acclaimed trilogy stands alone as a history of an empire making the transition from conquest to inheritance—a history that Thomas reveals through the fascinating lives of the people who made it. Praise for World Without End “Readers will not find a more reliable guide to the maturing Spanish Empire. . . . World Without End reminds us that the far-flung Spanish Empire was the work of many minds and hands, and by the end their myriad stories carry a cumulative charge.”—The New York Times Book Review “A sweeping, encyclopedic history of the arrogance, ambition, and ideology that fueled the quest for empire.”—Kirkus Reviews “Literary power is a vital part of a great historian’s armoury. As in his earlier books, Thomas demonstrates here that he has this in abundance.”—Financial Times “A vivid climax to Hugh Thomas’s three-volume history of imperial Spain.”—The Telegraph “Thomas clearly excels in the Spanish history of religion, politics, and culture, [and] successfully shows that Spain’s global ambition knew no bounds.”—Publishers Weekly

Spain

Author: Robert Goodwin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620403617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 711

Book Description
The Golden Age of the Spanish Empire would establish five centuries of Western supremacy across the globe and usher in an era of transatlantic exploration that eventually gave rise to the modern world. It was a time of discovery and adventure, of great political and social change-it was a time when Spain learned to rule the world. Assembling a spectacular cast of legendary characters like the Duke of Alba, El Greco, Miguel de Cervantes, and Diego Velázquez, Robert Goodwin brings the Spanish Golden Age to life with the vivid clarity and gripping narrative of an epic novel. From scholars and playwrights, to poets and soldiers, Goodwin is in complete command of the history of this tumultuous and exciting period. But the superstars alone will not tell the whole tale-Goodwin delves deep to find previously unrecorded sources and accounts of how Spain's Golden Age would unfold, and ultimately, unravel. Spain is a sweeping and revealing portrait of Spain at the height of its power and a world at the dawn of the modern age.

Blood and Faith

Author: Matthew Carr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1787384357
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Book Description
In 1609, the entire Muslim population of Spain was given three days to leave Spanish territory or else be killed. In a brutal and traumatic exodus, entire families were forced to abandon the homes and villages where they had lived for generations. In just five years, Muslim Spain had effectively ceased to exist: an estimated 300,000 Muslims had been removed from Spanish territory making it what was then the largest act of ethnic cleansing in European history. Blood and Faith is a riveting chronicle of this virtually unknown episode, set against the vivid historical backdrop of Muslim Spain. It offers a remarkable window onto a little-known period in modern Europe - a rich and complex tale of competing faiths and beliefs, of cultural oppression and resistance against overwhelming odds.

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Author: Matthew Restall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199839751
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Book Description
Here is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which the history of the Spanish Conquest has been misread and passed down to become popular knowledge of these events. The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro. Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each myth. This vividly written and authoritative book shows, for instance, that native Americans did not take the conquistadors for gods and that small numbers of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. We discover that Columbus was correctly seen in his lifetime--and for decades after--as a briefly fortunate but unexceptional participant in efforts involving many southern Europeans. It was only much later that Columbus was portrayed as a great man who fought against the ignorance of his age to discover the new world. Another popular misconception--that the Conquistadors worked alone--is shattered by the revelation that vast numbers of black and native allies joined them in a conflict that pitted native Americans against each other. This and other factors, not the supposed superiority of the Spaniards, made conquests possible. The Conquest, Restall shows, was more complex--and more fascinating--than conventional histories have portrayed it. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest offers a richer and more nuanced account of a key event in the history of the Americas.