FOR no reason that we can very satisfactorily explain, we have read this odd book quite through ; and at the end we are in doubt whether Mr. Gayarré, who is of Spanish extraction, wrote the work in ...

You can say a lot of bad things about Philip II. And in the 42 years that he ruled Spain, from 1556 to 1598, a lot of bad things were indeed said about him, a good number by Elizabeth I of England and ...

The so-called Golden Age of Spain had many tarnished secrets, and King Philip II was behind the darkest of them. Cold, cruel, and inflexible in his ways, Philip viewed himself as the pious hero of ...

In the middle of the sixteenth century, in Mechelen, Jacob van Deventer began an enterprise of epic proportions: to draw maps of all the towns and cities in the Low Countries and bring them together ...

In 1561, King Philip II of Spain established Madrid as his capital, largely because its central location made it a handy base for his frequent tours of the realm. Nearly 500 years later, the country’s ...