Spain

Geoffrey Parker looks at the moment when the representatives of certain provinces of the Netherlands met together to depose their lawful sovereign Philip II of Spain.

In the mid-seventeenth century Spain was at the apogee of artistic and cultural achievement under the patronage of her monarch, Philip IV - but, as R.A. Stradling shows here, she was fighting for survival as a great imperial power.

The loss to the Turks of Constantinople, the ancient capital of the Eastern Empire, in 1453 had been a terrible blow to Christendom. It was the crusading dream of Charles V, argues Sinclair Atkins, to reconquer the Byzantine city.

In 1580, Portugal was joined with Spain in a sixty-year long and unpopular union.